Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Pursuit of Good Trivia
Trivial Pursuit has been the gold standard for family trivia game nights. I bet most of you reading this right now have a copy sitting in the back of your closet. Or maybe you own Wits & Wagers, Linktofood, or Everything Ever to scratch that trivia itch. Aficionados rely on phone apps, Jeopardy!, and Wednesday night bar trivia, but tabletop options are scarce.
Enter Hexaquest, a new challenger that adds a dash of strategy with push-your-luck elements to all that useless knowledge buried in your memory. Originally Kickstarted in 2021, Tumbling Heads attempts to break the mundane and bring a fresh flavor to this age-old classic.
Let’s Make It a True Daily Double
Hexaquest starts with sixty-five beautiful acrylic hexagonal tiles placed in any order. These are double-sided, showing the point value on one side (ranging from one to five) and the question category on the other. Mixed in are five question mark tiles that act as the Daily Double, doubling the points on the face-down side.
Players draft any tile that is accessible Hive-style (meaning the tile can be pulled out without being blocked), choosing based on either the point value or the category. The player to their left then reads the corresponding question. Answer correctly and earn another shot at more points (up to three tiles per turn). Answer incorrectly and lose all the points accumulated that turn. High risk, high reward!
The double-point bonus tiles work the same way, but the player can choose the category—though I found it more fun if the other players chose for them! Categories range from movies to the outdoors, food, geography, history and Wiseman (general knowledge). The game ends when all tiles have been drafted, and the highest score determines the trivia master.
Are You More of a Wiseman or a Treehugger?
In the first few rounds, the low-point tiles were the first to go. “Let’s test the waters and see how tough these questions are,” boasted one player. The one- and two-point questions were a cakewalk, and I was a tad worried that the game would be too easy. I was quickly humbled by the upper-echelon questions, which asked things like, “Which bird has the Latin name Puffinus puffinus?” or “___ is a microorganism that lives in rocks.”
Do you know the answers? If you guessed “Manx shearwater” and “lithophile,” you’re correct!
Luckily, all the questions are multiple-choice, so there’s always a chance to guess your way to victory. We often found ourselves showing the question card (while covering the answer) to the guesser due to our awful butchering of French and Latin words. Je suis désolé!
Final Jeopardy
Overall, the game is solid. The push-your-luck strategic element adds a fun amount of risk and makes for plenty of position jockeying. With over 1,500 questions spread across 300 cards and six categories, there’s enough variety to keep the game fresh for numerous trivia nights.
The game did feel a little long since the tiles don’t scale with player count—all tiles are used in every game—so lower player counts could drag. However, the game is designed to be fully customizable, allowing players to remove tiles, categories, or point values to adjust the experience. At the time of this writing, there are even six expansion packs that can be mixed in.
As a big trivia guy, Hexaquest is my new go-to for nights when I want to show off my random, useless knowledge—and when I want to be quickly humbled after losing all my points on a tough question.
Hexaquest: The Strategic Trivia Game details
- Designer: N/A
- Artists: N/A
- Publishers: Tumbling Heads
- Release Date: 2021
- Player count : 2 - 10
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 10 - 120 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Hexagon Grid, Variable Set-up
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.2 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Hexaquest: The Strategic Trivia Game.
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