Hexa Word
About Hexa Word
Hexa Word is our own word-association puzzle. You get a screen of words and a set of groups, and every word belongs to exactly one group. The catch is that several of them look like they belong to two. Sorting is easy once you spot the theme, and the whole game is the moment you spot it.
How to play
Read the words and work out which group each one belongs to. Swap pairs of words until every one sits in the right cluster, and the board clears. Each word has exactly one right answer, even when it looks like it fits somewhere else, and the ones currently in the wrong place are printed in red.
Rules of Hexa Word
- Opening a pack from the menu shows eight numbered levels. Only the first one is unlocked when you arrive.
- Each group on the board is a coloured centre hex carrying the group name, ringed by the white hexes that hold the words.
- A word sitting in the wrong group is printed in red. The board tells you what is broken, never where the word should go.
- Words move by tapping two of them, which trades their places on the board.
- Two helpers sit under the honeycomb, Hint and Scan, and each one shows how many charges it has left.
- A gem counter sits in the top left, next to a plus button.
- The first level opens with a card explaining the swap, and a Got It button clears it out of the way.
Controls
- Tap a word to select it, then tap a second word to trade their places
- Tap Hint or Scan under the board to spend one of their charges
- Tap Got It to clear the tutorial card off the first level
What makes it worth playing
- Eight themed packs: Everyday, Cosmos, Wild World, Kitchen and Food, Travel and Places, Mystery and Crime, Fantasy and Myth, and Sports and Games
- Forty-eight categories and close to three hundred words, all written in-house
- Six groups in every pack, each one a coloured centre hex ringed by six word hexes
- Deliberate near-misses, where a word plausibly fits two groups but only one is correct
- Hint makes one correct swap for you, and Scan lights up every word still sitting in the wrong group
- Both helpers carry their own charges, shown on the button, and fall back to gems once those run out
Screenshots
Captured from this build on 2026-08-26.
Tips from playing it
- Place the words you are certain about first. Every word you remove narrows the choices for the ones you are not sure about.
- When two groups both seem to fit a word, look at what is left over. The answer is usually whichever group would otherwise come up short.
- Count as you go. Each group takes exactly six, so a cluster with seven candidates means one of them belongs elsewhere.
- Save Hint for the last group. It hands you a finished swap, and early on you still have information to work with.
Notes from building it
The whole design rests on one thing that is much harder to author than it looks: the near-misses. Within every pack a handful of words read as though they could sit in two different groups, but each one has exactly one correct home. That ambiguity is what turns sorting into a puzzle. Without it you are just reading labels. With too much of it the game feels arbitrary and the player stops trusting the answer key. Getting the balance right meant writing all two hundred and eighty-eight words ourselves rather than pulling category lists from anywhere, because a borrowed list has no ambiguity in it by design. The counting rule is the safety net: every cluster holds exactly six words, so a player who is genuinely stuck can always solve the last group by elimination instead of guessing. Printing a misplaced word in red is the other half of that. It tells you something is wrong without telling you where it goes, which keeps the deduction intact while removing the tedium of rechecking a group you already got right.
More from the studio: why difficulty needs a rhythm and how we test a game.
Hexa Word is also on Android. Get it on Google Play. That is the only place we link installs from.
- Category
- Word
- Plays in
- Your browser, no download
- Orientation
- Portrait
- Players
- One player.
- Difficulty
- Relaxed, more vocabulary than pressure
- Typical session
- 3 to 6 minutes a pack
- Last tested by us
- 2026-08-26
- Studio
- Our own game
