Whirlyburly: The Hexagon Battle
Lesson 1

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This is lesson 1 of the series I will be writing about Whirlyburly. I’m not sure how helpful it will be, but I’m pretty good at the game and would like to help others. We won’t go over all the basics in this series. For that, we have James Earthwalker’s introductory guide.

The Goal of Whirlyburly

Your goal is to get the highest score (which is displayed in the upper right corner). You can acquire points in three ways:

1. By making as many hexagons your color as possible (1 point for each)
2. By capuring chests (10 points for each)
3. By capturing your opponent’s pawns (3 points for each)

The Hexagon Battle

In this lesson, we will only discus the first point. In other words, we’ll look at the hexagons and ways to quickly gain more.

In the example below, I’m Blue. For each square that’s blue, I gain one point. When an opponent steps on one of my blue hexagons, it will change to their color. Consequently, they will gain one point and I will lose one point.

The picture below is from the last round. You can see that in the upper right corner. I’m Blue. Since I have 81 points, I win! Some of you might notice that there aren’t 81 blue hexagons on the field. That’s something we’ll discuss in lesson 2!

 

The Cards in Your Hand

You start your round with 5 cards. You will assign one card to each of your three pawns. You can discard the ones that are left over (by right-clicking on them) or keep them, depending on whether you think they’re good cards or not.

In the example below, I start off with a pretty bad hand. I like cards that move forward a lot, because that way, you can capture more hexagons. However, of these cards, three are only moving two hexagons. With a hand like this, I’d assign the third and fourth card to my pawns and then one of the “bad” ones.

Short arrows aren’t always a bad thing. If I’m near a chest, one of them could be the perfect card. However, as a start hand, this is pretty bad. I would think that you’ve probably figured out the game up to here yourself already, even without reading the rules in the game.

 

How Can You Gain Points More Quickly

Now here’s the interesting part: there’s the possibility to gain points quickly! In the example below, some of my cards have a letter on them: S, H and C. This is an example of a pretty good hand, though it depends of course on the pawns’ position on the field.

Your pawns are called Scrapper, Hunter and Charger for a reason. Something magical happens when you assign these pawns the card specifically assigned to them.

When a Scrapper gets assigned a card with an S on it, he will follow the route that’s displayed on the card. In addition, when he gets to the last hexagon of that route, all the hexagons around him will turn his color. That means a whole bunch of extra points!

In the above example, our Scrapper has moved two hexagons ahead. Because the card we assigned to him had an “S” on it, all the surrounding hexagons turn blue as well. That means our Scrapper gives us five extra points, marked with a black dot in the image above! You can totally use an S card on your Hunter if that’s all you have in your hand, but usually it’s good to give each their own card. Sometimes it’s a good idea to save a letter card for the next round.

You can see fairly easily where your card is going to end up, as the the following example with my Hunter.

 

 

Move on to lesson number 2: Get the Chests!

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