How Hexball works

The court

A hexagon with four cushions and two lit goal mouths. The top mouth glows cyan and the bottom glows gold. Each mouth belongs to the colour that attacks it: a ball into the cyan goal scores for cyan and costs gold one bar.

You start beside the goal you defend, so scoring means crossing the court — and the defending mage is always the one who has to turn and chase.

The match

Three bars each. Lose a bar every time your goal is scored on, and get zapped — no control for under a second. Three minutes on the clock; if the bars are level at full time it is sudden death, and the next goal wins. Nobody scores in sudden death and it is a draw.

Controls

• WASD or arrow keys — move. A gamepad stick works too.
• Space, J or Enter — the one button. On the ground it hops; in the air it extends the hop and drops your bubble.
• On a touch screen: drag the left pad to move, tap the right button.

Why hopping matters

An airborne mage cannot strike the ball, and the ball cannot hit them — it passes underneath. So the hop is a dodge first and a setup second: hop over a shot you cannot return, then press in the air to leave a bubble hanging where the next one is coming.

Who decides the score

In an online match, the server. Your browser sends a direction and one boolean; the hub runs the match, decides every goal, and sends back the state to draw. Editing this page cannot change a result, and the result pays nothing — no credits, no XP, no items.

In practice, the same rules file runs locally against a CPU mage. It is the same game, not a simplified one.