One of the only disappointments I had in my first year of owning an iPad was the absence of board games. If you remember, people were anticipating how great tablets were going to be for board gaming because of their larger screen real estate and integration with other devices. Almost two years later, we're seeing somewhat of a renaissance of boardgames on iPad, at least if you know where to look. Neuroshima Hex is a great example of a tabletop game ported to tablet with all design elements intact. You play on a hex-shaped board, made up of hex-shaped tiles, recreated here with full support for touch controls like swiping to move around the play-space. Each individual tile and the typography is nicely designed, and Neuroshima Hex contains a full gallery of tiles you can explore, to read more about the effects and abilities of each one. The musical setting is almost too minimal, but it's fair to say that it doesn't get in your way or distract from the gameplay.

The U.I. is also minimal, sometimes to a fault. One of the hardest things to grasp in a game with lots of components is the role of each game piece. Neuroshima Hex includes the in-game glossary, but having to page through the thing detracts from the natural flow of a game. We wished for a more intuitive, overlay-style interface that would display information about pieces in real time, whether in your hand or on the board. The benefit of a printed manual is that it can sit next to you while you play the game, or get passed around. On a platform like this, navigating away to read up on game pieces breaks the momentum. Otherwise, the animations during battle, and the controls built into the U.I. were easy to understand and use, so the game overall felt very easy to pick up and understand.

Especially when we like a game, it feels cathartic to get our gripes on the table early, and move quickly into the good stuff. Neuroshima Hex suffers from a lack of online multiplayer, pure and simple. This feature is really the only thing holding the game back from greater glory.

The "world at war" theme never goes out of date, but Neuroshima Hex is an example of how an unoriginal idea can spur some real creativity. In this game, you're thrust into a future society where mankind is the minority, battling against opponents that run the gamut from mechanical to beastly to disgusting mutation. Each army competes for supremacy, forging ahead against opponents while protecting home turf. Looking down on the hexagonal playing board in Neuroshima Hex, you can quickly understand the objective: Protect your base at all costs, and try to take down your opponent's base. There are two ways to play, one being a Quick Game where you are placed into battle against a random opponent controlled by A.I. The other is a Custom Game, where you can play against up to three human opponents in a pass-around style, or some combination of human and A.I. opponents.

The greatest aspect of Neuroshima Hex is that it is relatively simple to learn, but very hard to master. Placing tiles on a board doesn't seem that complicated, even when you start thinking about the different attack styles of each tile. What makes the gameplay of Neuroshima Hex interesting is how it incorporates time into the equation. Much like the "active time battles" we've seen introduced into RPGs in recent years, the tiles you place on the board attack in a specific sequence. Each turn in the game cycles through a series of four phases, so the best strategy is to place your units strategically, and take advantage of not only their abilities but the time it will take them to attack. Combine this with game pieces that have ranged attacks and instant-effect tiles that can quickly change the balance of power, and you've got a formula for real fun. Since the board in Neuroshima Hex is built by you as you play, no two games ever play out in quite the same fashion, but you'll start to learn some strategies along the way. There are two expansion armies for the game, providing you with four "out of the box," and a total of six you can master.

There's a brief, but helpful tutorial that helps you get started in Neuroshima Hex. It explains the basics of gameplay and strategy, but remember we said this was easy to learn and hard to master? Going to back to one of our gripes, we hated having to consult the glossary each time we played a piece, for about the first 3-5 games. If you only play one army, it helps with the learning curve, but some armies require a more strategic approach. Each army includes about 35 tiles, that can't be remixed or mashed up. Maybe this feature will be added in a future expansion? You'll find the Borgo army to be heavy on melee units, plus a few with extra toughness. In contrast, the Moloch mechanical units are a diverse group that have tough resistance, thanks to their metal armor. Human units from The Outpost tend to favor special abilities and ranged attacks to offset their relatively weak units. Each base unit also bestows special abilities on surrounding units, making it important for both offense and defense. When the tiles run out, the base with more hit points remaining is the winner. Neuroshima Hex makes survival relatively easy by giving each player powerful units that can be used strategically to hold off almost any other army. Where games are won or lost is in the incremental change to a base's health points. Whether you favor stealth raids, strategic pincer attacks, or strong-arm tactics, taking the other guy's base down a notch or two can help you claim ultimate victory. What at first seems like totally random placement of tiles becomes very clear the more you play. The perspective you have during the first game or two has totally changed by your 10th game. Luckily, Neuroshima Hex doesn't take a long time to play; the average game can be played out in 30 minutes or less, so you don't have to wait days or weeks to go through the full learning curve.

We mentioned our wish list for gathering intel during the game, helpful mostly for newbies, but here's a bit about the actual experience of playing. Each turn, you're given three tiles drawn from a dwindling supply. You have to discard at least one tile, then place the remaining tile(s) on the board. All this happens with a touch and swipe, and you can rotate tiles on the board easily. The rotation is probably the coolest mechanic, what with this being essentially a turn-based strategy game built on hex logic. Being attacked on any one of six sides sounds overwhelming, but you learn to read each tile and learn how to leverage each piece's strength. In addition to the "character" tiles, you have a base in play, and a bunch of immediate action tiles. One of the more interesting mechanics in Neuroshima Hex is the fact that actual battles don't happen each turn. You play pieces to the board until one of two things happens: Some player draws and plays a "Battle" tile, or the board fills up completely. This was probably our favorite aspect of the game. More like Chess than Checkers, Neuroshima Hex is about delayed gratification, forcing you to plan waaay ahead and think strategically about how moves you make now may work for or against you 10 turns later.

The stock armies are fine, but there are some add-on armies you can purchase through the game, when you feel you've mastered the basics and want more challenge. As it stands, Neuroshima Hex is certainly one of the best turn-based strategy games we've found for iPad, not to mention how it ranks among other board game adaptations. If the devs behind this can bring online multiplayer to the virtual table, there's no telling how far Neuroshima Hex can go. In a space with plenty of me-too RTS games and Tower Defense clones, this game really stands out.