Bridges is a connection game — the same family as the classic game Hex — but played on a board you get to choose. Instead of one fixed grid of hexagons, you can play on squares, triangles, kagome lattices, pentagons, organic hand-drawn-looking cells, and more, with two or three players, all rendered as a lit, tactile 3D board you can rotate and zoom.
The rule you already half-know if you've played Hex: claim cells one at a time, try to build an unbroken chain between your two sides of the board, and stop your opponent from doing the same first. Nobody captures anything. Nobody ever takes a piece back. It's a race to connect, not a fight to survive.
Hex was invented independently by Piet Hein in 1942 and by John Nash (yes, that Nash) in 1948. It's one of the most elegant games ever designed: the rules fit in two sentences, there are no draws — the board always ends up connected for exactly one player — and yet it takes a lifetime to play well.
Hex is normally locked to one specific board shape: a rhombus of hexagonal cells. Bridges asks a simple question — what actually makes Hex work, and does it require hexagons? It turns out the honest answer is "no." Hex is really a game about a network of cells and a boundary split into sides belonging to each player. Hexagons are just one convenient way to build that network. Bridges keeps the underlying idea and lets you swap out the tiling and the shape of the board.
Along the way, changing the tiling introduces a wrinkle: on some patterns (like plain squares), two diagonal connections can cross at a single point, which never happens on a hexagon grid. Bridges solves this the way Gale's old game Bridg-It did — literally, with a bridge. When two claims would cross, the earlier one arches gracefully over the later one, which is severed at that point. This isn't just a rule footnote — it's rendered as an actual little arched overpass on the board, with the cut-off path visibly broken underneath it. It's the single most satisfying visual moment in the game, and it's a direct, honest translation of the rule into something you can see happen.
- Same soul, endless variety. Every tiling changes the character of play — hexagons feel classical and clean, squares feel sharp and full of ambushes, kagome and pentagonal boards feel genuinely alien even after you know the rules. It's one game engine producing dozens of distinct strategic experiences.
- Two and three player modes. A four-sided board splits naturally between two players; a six-sided board splits between three, each owning a pair of opposite edges. Three-player games introduce their own drama — including the possibility that the player who's clearly losing gets to decide who wins, which the game has several optional rules to soften.
- It's genuinely pretty. The board is real 3D geometry — cells rise and settle with a little bounce when claimed, a ripple runs outward across neighbours, claimed cells get a glossy enamel finish, and a winning chain lights up end to end while the camera slowly orbits. None of this is decoration bolted on afterward — it grows directly out of the rules themselves.
- It plays fair, on purpose. Like Hex, there's a "pie rule" option letting the second player swap sides after the first move, which removes the first-player's inherent advantage without changing the game itself.
- Accessible by design. Colour is never the only way to tell players apart (there are patterns too), the whole board can be played by keyboard or announced aloud for screen readers, and there's a plain-text mode for playing without any graphics at all.
- Fans of Hex, Bridg-It, Y, or Havannah looking for new territory built on familiar, elegant foundations.
- Board game and abstract strategy enthusiasts curious about tiling theory, who'd enjoy seeing how mathematical ideas about tessellations translate directly into playable, competitive games.
- People who want a two-player tabletop-style game to play casually online with a friend, with a low barrier to learning but real strategic depth.
- Anyone who appreciates elegant, well-crafted web-based 3D — the entire game runs in a browser with no installation, and a full match can be shared and replayed from a single link.
- Teachers or hobbyists interested in geometry and graph theory, since the game makes ideas like planar graphs, tiling duality, and vertex degree visible and tangible instead of abstract.
Open the game in a browser, pick a tiling and board shape from the setup
panel (with live previews so you can see what you're choosing), pick your
number of players, and start claiming cells. There's no installation, no
account, and no build step — it's a single web page. When the game ends,
you get a link that replays the exact match from the first move, which is
also how you'd share an interesting position with a friend.
Any seat can be handed to a bot (easy, medium or hard — the difference is
how long it is allowed to think, not a handicap), and games can be played
on a Fischer clock (main time plus an increment per move; untimed by
default). Drag to orbit the board, right‑drag or shift‑drag to pan, and
scroll or pinch to zoom; R resets the view and T looks straight down.
Set the goal to go in the settings and the same board becomes a Go
board: place stones, capture groups that run out of liberties (liberties run
along shared edges, so the crossing rule doesn't apply), no suicide, simple
ko. Pass with the Pass button (or P); once everyone has passed in turn
the board is scored by area — your stones plus the empty cells only you
surround — and the largest area wins. Dead stones aren't removed, so play
them out. It works with two or three colours, with the pie rule for balance,
with clocks, and every bot level knows how to play it.