The Clue System

Every question in HexQuiz carries three clues, and none of them is free. They cost points from the score that question is still worth, so taking one is a judgement about whether help is worth more than what it costs.

Three tiers

The tiers do not all appear at once. Each becomes available on its own countdown, so help arrives gradually while you are thinking — and the cheapest, vaguest one is offered first, when it is still most likely to be all you need.

At higher difficulty they are not optional

At Beginner and Intermediate a clue is a convenience. At Expert and Genius it is the mechanism by which the question becomes answerable at all: those levels assume a specialist, and if you are not one, the clue is what stands in for the specialism.

That turns the upper rounds of the ladder into a budgeting problem as much as a knowledge one. You cannot buy every clue on every question and still clear the round, so the real skill is recognising which question is the one worth paying for.

Buying one is deliberate

A clue is taken with a press and hold. A ring fills around the hexagon while you hold it, and the clue is only bought once the ring completes; letting go early costs nothing. It is a small piece of friction on purpose — spending 150 points should not be something your thumb does by accident.

What each tier gives you

The clues are written for the format rather than bolted onto it, so what a tier does depends on the kind of question it is attached to.

On a multiple-choice question

• Violet gives facts about the subject that hold regardless of which answer is right — context, era, scale, the rule in play. It narrows your thinking without pointing.
• Blue gives you a line about the options themselves, so you can start arguing with the list rather than guessing at it.
• Red strikes a wrong answer off the board outright.

On an estimation question

There are no options to eliminate, so the clues work differently. Each question carries a pool of five numeric anchors — comparisons and bounds that give you something to measure against. The first tier reveals one, the second another. The third is not text at all: it shades out a region of the axis, telling you where the answer is not.

On the sorting, grouping and matching boards

Here the clues are built from material authored per item — what a thing is, which group it belongs to and why, where the trap has been set. On a board holding eight or sixteen pieces, one anchored item is often enough to unlock the rest, which is what makes these clues worth their price.

Clues and keys

Clues are opened with keys, which are earned by watching ads or made unlimited by a subscription. The free-to-play page explains how that works.

Afterwards, everything is explained

Whether or not you bought a clue, the reveal between questions argues every answer rather than only the right one. On a category board each item carries its own explanation; on an estimation question the real figure arrives with something to scale it against.