Do you know the game Hex? Do you use $$\LaTeX$$? Chris Sangwin & I wrote a package for drawing Hex boards and games called hexboard. It makes lovely diagrams like this.

The basic diagram is a hexpicture environment, then a command like \hexboard{11} will render a blank 11x11 game board.

You place pieces with \hexcounter{row}{column}{player} e.g. \hexcounter{b}{1}{A}.

We also made an environment to run through a game, with or without numbered pieces showing the order of play. Here the envionment is hexgame or hexgamelabels and moves are \hexmove{row}{column} (the player colour alternates).

Do you have hexboard installed? You might. To see, make a LaTeX file with \usepackage{hexboard} in the preamble and see if it runs. If you use MiKTeX, it should be that compiling a document that uses the hexboard package will install it for you. If you use TeXLive, you may need to update packages (e.g. tlmgr install hexboard).

There are a bunch of bells and whistles like drawing lines, highlighting cells, writing labels, changing the colours, etc. etc. There's loads of detail in the documentation which can be found on the CTAN page: ctan.org/pkg/hexboard

· · Web · · ·

I wrote a blog post giving some background why we made this and some detail about how to use it here: aperiodical.com/2022/02/introd

The social network of the future: No ads, no corporate surveillance, ethical design, and decentralization! Own your data with Mastodon!