I have never been a big appreciator of board games. For instance, I think Scrabble puts too much emphasis on word positioning as opposed to word length or sophistication. Many other games have outcomes which sometimes combine the sin of being largely random with the sin of being tedious in the execution.
Hive is nothing like that. It’s fast, and neither random chance nor hidden information have any relevance. Once they become familiar with the simple and intuitive moves, chess players will readily begin finding intriguing similarities between the two games. Tempo is critical to both, and the game tree of both becomes enormous in the mid game.
You can play Hive online for free, with no chance of accidentally making an illegal move or going more than a few hours without an opponent. I usually play as ‘sindark’.
I am playing in my second Hive tournament on boardgamearena.com
There are two particularly strong players in the game: Pseudomonas and ringersoll, the author of Play Hive Like a Champion. I have played Mr. Ingersoll a few times online and never even managed to fight him to a draw, despite a couple of close calls in tricky endgames.
There are nine players in the tournament all told and the structure is very basic: we each play one another once.
I have finished three games so far, with two wins against some of the lower-ranked players in the tournament and a loss which turned into a tie when the other player missed that they had a winning move.
Five games remain ongoing.
(I may be wrong in guessing which players are strongest. I just noticed that Tramuntana (rank 380) won a game againt ringersoll (rank 918). Tramuntana has the lowest rank of anyone in the tournament, though on BGA there’s nothing to stop very strong players from creating weak new accounts.)
I came third in my first tournament.