A Hex on Polygon
Written: Oct 11 '05 (Updated Oct 11 '05)
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Pros: Looks very cool.
Cons: Plays you for a fool.
The Bottom Line: Not much math, not much strategy, not much fun. A disappointment from any angle.
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| theeye's Full Review: Jax Polygon Game |
There's something you need to understand about our household: it's full of math geeks.
My husband and I are both engineers by education and software developers by vocation. He reads professional math journals for fun; I develop advanced mathematical modeling techniques for a living. Our game-loving son, who inherited the quantitative gene in spades, told his kindergarten teacher on the first day of school that I am very good at number math.
We are indisputably the target market for Jax's Polygon board game.
Polly Wanna Math Game?
When I went looking online earlier this year for some some interesting, fun and educational board games for our increasingly game-crazed preschooler, Polygon caught my eye immediately. With its hexagonal board and stackable hexagonal plastic tile pieces, Polygon, billed breathlessly by the manufacturer as the first of its kind strategy game, looks like Upwords for math geeks. No reading necessary; a strategy game involving geometry and arithmetic; suggested age range seven and up: I was sold faster than you can say parallelogram. Even if it proved to be a little advanced for our then-four-year-old, I reasoned, he'd probably be ready for it by the time he hit kindergarten and it looked like a game Mommy and Daddy might enjoy, too.
I ought not to have been so quick to buy the marketing hype.
How Does It Stack Up?
There were after, all subtle clues that All Was Not Well in Polygon Land. Consider the board and those alluring plastic tiles, for example. It's true that they're all polygon-shaped. But, more to the point, they're all hexagonally shaped. Every last one of them. Not a non-hexagonal polygon to be seen. A true math geek would never have named this game Polygon: a true math geek would have intuitively sensed that the word polygon implies a far broader frame of reference than is in play here.
No, Polygon was named by (shudder) A Marketing Type.
Now, I could live with that -- if only it weren't quite so obvious that Polygon was also designed by a marketing type. A marketing type who thought that geometric shapes, combined with numbers and arithmetic, would make A Math Game that would appeal to Math Types.
I'm guessing that the designer of this game doesn't much like math. He or she is certainly not a mathematician or a game theorist. Otherwise, the designer would be working at ThinkFun or Looney Labs instead of Jax. The designers at ThinkFun and Looney Labs know how to design games for math geeks. The designers at ThinkFun and Looney Labs obviously like games for math geeks.
The designers at Jax, on the other hand, seem to think that games for math geeks are Good For You, if unavoidably tedious.
Reviewing All The Angles
I suppose you could just stop reading now and move on to some of the games I do recommend, which are listed in the footnote below. But as long as we've got the box out and since I do, after all, have one or two grudging compliments to pay, let's take a closer look at the game.
One thing that Jax does do well is manufacturing game equipment. The forty-nine hexagonal plastic tiles (see footnote for image link) are high quality, durable and easily stackable and they come with colorful numbered stickers firmly preattached: no assembly is necessary. Each tile is divided into three diamond-shaped, colored zones, with each zone claiming two of the hexagon's six edges: a blue zone featuring a circular icon, a red zone with a diamond icon and a yellow zone with a star-shaped icon.
Color-blind players are not disadvantaged, as the shapes and colors are always matched; as my son has been diagnosed with red-green deficiency, I try to be aware of such potential pitfalls.
Each icon contains a number from one through five or a Wild indicator. What may not be immediately obvious from a cursory glance is that the three zones on a particular tile always feature the same value; this is a key point, which we'll come back to in a bit. A few of the tiles feature score-multipliers (the rules refer to them as X-tiles) at their centers: an X-2 indicates that a score should be doubled, while an X-3 triples a score.
The hexagonal board folds compactly to fit into the square game box and features a hexagonally tessellated play area. Most of the play positions are designed to look like blank tiles, with star, diamond and circle zones indicated, but no values listed; a few scattered positions close to the periphery of the board are printed as fully-colored tiles with values and, occasionally, score-multipliers.
Finally, the game includes a single die, factory-printed with the three colored icon shapes.
Reading the Rules
The rules are not only poorly designed; they're poorly written. A link to the official rules is provided below, but I'll spare you a headache by summarizing them here:
After a single randomly chosen tile is placed on the center position, play proceeds by turns. Each player in turn rolls the die, selects two random tiles and places each of them on the board, in positions which must abut previously placed tiles. To score, a player must create a new grouping of three mutually adjacent tiles; the adjoining sides must match the color of the die roll. Tiles may be stacked arbitrarily high and the group of three tiles need not all be at the same height.
The only number combinations that score are three-of-a-kind and three-straights:
1-1-1 = 10 points 1-2-3 = 15 points
2-2-2 = 20 points 2-3-4 = 25 points
3-3-3 = 30 points 3-4-5 = 35 points
4-4-4 = 40 points
5-5-5 = 50 points Wild-Wild-Wild = 100 points
Wild values can substitute for any number and do not change the scoring except that a three-straight Wild scores a whopping 100 points.
In the initial few turns, it is generally necessary to use both tiles to form a single score; once the first few tiles have been placed, it becomes possible to place the two tiles separately to form two scores.
If any of the three tiles of a scoring group, whether pre-existing or newly placed, has an X-multiplier, the score is multiplied accordingly; however, only one multiplier can be applied to a given scoring group.
Angling for a Win
For all that it sounds promising, there are a number of factors that conspire to flatten the strategic depth of this game. Strategy generally implies attention to both offense and defense: the best Scrabble players, for example, consider not only how to make the highest scoring words, but also how to avoid providing opportunities for opponents.
In Polygon, this sort of defensive strategy is very nearly moot. As noted above, the tiles do not feature arbitrary combinations of three values; each zone of a given tile features the same value as the other two. Thus, the strategic consideration of what values are left open on the periphery is tightly bound to the decision of which value to score with; this generally means that defensive strategy is subordinate to the brute goal of maximizing one's own score.
Even more baffling is the decision to limit each player to drawing, and then immediately playing, only two tiles. This limits a player's strategic choices to selecting where to play his tiles; one never has to consider which tiles to use and which to reserve for future use. I suspect the game could be significantly improved by a Scrabble-style mode of play, in which each player maintained a secret stock of, say, four tiles from which to select two to play. Too large a stock would admittedly make it too easy to score near the maximum each time, but the rules as stated, it seems to me, constrain the choices too much.
I've also occasionally wondered whether assigning each player a color to use for the duration of the game (and retiring the die entirely) might not help bring some defensive strategy to the fore. Particularly in a three-player game, knowing which color the leading scorer needs to use might encourage the other two players to avoid placing tiles that create opportunities for him.
Perhaps, however, the fundamental problem -- the reason that the strategic flavor of this game is so disappointing -- is simply that the scoring possibilities in Polygon, as compared to similar word games, are, by their nature, so much more localized and self-evident. It's simply not a great challenge in Polygon to scan the possible scoring locations and spot the highest possible score because the domain space of solutions is so narrow. In Upwords, spotting an opportunity to convert a five-letter word to a six-letter word by, say, revising two letters in the middle and adding one to the beginning is satisfying because it's so challenging. Converting a 4-4-4 grouping to a 3-4-5 grouping by stacking a three and five on top of two of the existing tiles just doesn't have the same effect.
And doing that over and over again (the game can take a good thirty minutes or more to play) gets -- dare I say it? -- tedious even for a mathemaniac tyke and his math geek parents. The game just plain isn't fun. (This explains, by the way, why I can only speculate on the effect of my proposed rule changes: we've all but given up on playing this particular game in my household and it's difficult to conduct empirical experiments in solitaire mode.)
But Is It Good For You?
You might decide that, tedious or not, a game that involves as much arithmetic as this one might be A Good Educational Experience For The Kids. It's true that there's a lot of scoring to be done, requiring both addition and, occasionally, multiplication. When we've played this game, we use a children's abacus to keep score. One unique feature of Polygon is that it's the only game we have in which scores do routinely hit 100,000 or more, thus reaching the limit of our son's abacus; hitting a hundred grand is the one occasion for genuine excitement this game has ever provided. It takes a long time to get there, however, and you'll likely find that your young mathematician-in-training will get bored long before you hit that one payoff moment.
Frankly, I'd put my play money on (believe it or not) that old standby, Monopoly, for a far richer arithmetic workout, combined with a lot more genuine fun. Polygon, in comparison, is dead broke and out of, um, shape.
Deep-six it, I say. Ahem.
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Further information and resources:
Manufacturer's product information: http://www.jaxgames.com/poly.htm
Rules and closeup image of the tiles: http://www.jaxgames.com/poly2.htm
Some better strategy games for the gifted (but pre-literate) gamester: King's Table, Aquarius, Roadside Rescue, Rush Hour, Jr., DuelMasters, Four Card Games, Monopoly: yes, Monopoly
Another Jax math game I've reviewed: The Game of Chips
A bonus gift idea for the grown-up math geek in your life
Great web site for junior math geeks: http://www.coolmath-games.com
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 16
Type of Toy: Board Game
Age Range of Child: Whole Family
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Epinions.com ID:
theeye
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Location: New York, NY (it's a hell of a town!)
Reviews written: 66
Trusted by: 165 members
About Me:
Company president, math geek, first time mom at 39, epinion addict. Sleep? Not lately.
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