Hex War

Two colors and a board of hexagons. On your turn you pick one of your pieces and choose a cell within two of it.

Choose the cell next door and your piece is copied — you keep the one you had and gain another. Choose a cell two away and the piece moves there instead, leaving its old cell empty. Either way, every enemy piece touching the cell you land on turns your color.

That is the whole game. The board fills up, and whoever holds more of it takes the round.

TWO PLAYERS, OR ONE

Pass the phone to someone sitting next to you, or play the computer at Easy, Medium or Hard. Easy grabs what it can see. Hard guards its edges and punishes a loose piece. The sides take turns opening a round, so it is worth playing both.

Rounds won are kept on each player's card, so a game can be one round or a whole evening of them.

NINE BOARDS

Standard and Small are plain hexagons. The other seven take cells out — Pillar, Windows, Ring, Wide ring, Star, Narrows and Islands — and every hole changes what you can reach and what you can hold. Islands leaves patches you have to jump between. Narrows leaves a strip down the middle that neither side can walk to.

MAKE IT YOURS

Ten piece colors and six board surfaces. Tap a player's card to change their name and their color; take the color the other player is using and the two of you swap rather than being told no.

The whole page washes toward whoever is to move, so whose turn it is is something you see rather than something you read.

A LIGHT THEME AND A DARK ONE

Not one inverted into the other — two designs, each drawn for the light it is in. The switch is in the header.

NO CATCHES

No ads. Nothing to buy. No account, and no sign-in. The app asks for no permission but the one that lets it buzz when a piece lands, and it has no internet access at all, so it works on a plane and nothing you do in it leaves the phone.

Take back a move with the undo button. Sound and vibration can each be turned off. Your game, your colors and your score are still there when you come back.