Hexalated
A near-circular field of gem hexagons that you erase one color at a time, chasing a perfect clear — with a shared daily puzzle, a leaderboard, and twelve solvers racing your layout — one of which searches it out to par.
Hexalated is the one experiment in this set that grew into a real game. The field is dealt with its center already open, and from there every turn is the same move: pick a color, and every matching hexagon touching the cleared region dissolves with it, chaining outward. The whole board is the target; the score is how economical you were getting there.
It looks like a color-matching toy, but the interesting part is underneath: it is a flood-fill problem wearing a coat of paint. Every move is a bet about which color unlocks the largest connected mass next, and good play is a few moves of lookahead about how the cleared frontier will grow.
I kept the mechanics faithful to the 2012 original and rebuilt the execution from scratch — a hexagonal arena carved into rock over a starfield, hover to preview exactly what a color will take (and what stays walled off), a cascade finale when the ending becomes forced, and game logic separated from rendering so it can be lifted out into its own project later.
The original ran on the now-defunct KineticJS canvas library and rendered textured hexes; its AI experiments (random, greedy, most-remaining, centered, cluster strategies) lived in commented-out code. This rebuild preserves the exact flood mechanic and 300-minus-ten-per-move scoring, and grows the rest: a near-circular arena, six stark gem colors, seeded daily puzzles with a shared leaderboard, and the old AI ideas revived as a twelve-strategy race.
A turn-based tank duel on terrain you erase pixel by pixel — undermine the hill, drown the tank.