Hive Tools

Hive is a classic modern board(less) game that I first encountered in 2009. I learned to play in the long-lost, controversial iOS app Hanto, which taught Hive using animals instead of insects. (You might call it a clone, but there was no official app to clone at the time.)

I started playing again in 2025 during an online abstract gaming phase. Now there are plenty of places to play Hive online, and the official expansions have both multiplied and become the standard game setup.

Hive in Five

One recent development is a popular solo mode, Hive in Five, which is a bit of a throwback to the original Hive’s five distinct pieces (though you can also incorporate the expansions). I wrote a randomizer for it, mostly because it’s hard to find a full Hive set to play with these days (unless you’re in Britain and can grab Hive Ultimate), and it’s not so easy to shuffle virtual Hive tiles. You can read more about my randomizer and Hive in Five here.

Hive Notation

Perhaps the most surprising thing in the modern Hive ecosystem was the opaque positional notation system universally used for recording games and discussing strategy. (Puzzles tend to be presented pictorially instead.) My brain shuts down whenever I see it.

So I read up on the many proposed Hive notation systems, along the way discovering that most debates about Hive notation begin and end with the unsubstantiated assertion that grid-based systems are too hard for humans to use with a boardless game. So I came up with my own grid-based, chess-like notational system, which I’ll be writing it up soon (as well as adding some tools for it, of course).