on little golem it is clear that people from poland are overrepresented among hex players. what made hex so popular in poland?

No idea, AFAIK there is no Hex club in Poland (although there was a tournament in Wrocław few years ago and I had a plan of organizing another one, maybe some time in the future it will be possible…). The game is not known in Poland, and it might be even harder for Polish people to know the game, because there is a very popular game Neuroshima Hex and at least two board game pubs with name Hex, so googling for any information is quite hard. Probably never officialy released in Poland.

So I guess it's just a random coincidence.

I don't think it's a coincidence. Hex was (is?) featured on the popular Polish online game server Kurnik, where I think many of the top Polish Hex players started out.

That might be the reason, although there are some games on Kurnik which seems not to be popular in Poland. I don't remember when the PlayOK (same server, but in English version) started, but it seems that most games are played by players from other countries (e.g. a lot of players playing Xiangqi or Makruk), and when it comes to shogi, before 81dojo was created, PlayOK / Kurnik was the main place for people to meet from all over the world, not necessarily from Poland.

Do you Polish players possibly know each other because you go to the same university?

:)

I don't know any Polish Hex player, but maybe some of the other players knows each other :)

Neither do I. But in my case kurnik is the answer. In my childhood, hex was there the most interesting logical board game.

And in kurnik Hex community littlegolem was said to be the place for pro players. :) That's why I know littlegolem.

Yeah it all started in Kurnik around 2002-2003, when the game was taking place on 10x10 board. I think at least some of the early Polish players had chance to meet during the first live tournament in Wroclaw in 2006.

Worth mentioning is the fact that Hex on board with 10x10 size was played on Kurnik.

then it is a good sign for hex that it is implemented on boardgamearena and ludoteka which are active abstract game playing sites

This topic comes along every now and then and I'm sure the answer was kurnik/playok.

It just takes a succesful board game platform to draw peoples attention to a game.

In fact I dont have faith in traditional games popularity anymore. But if a platform implemented modern games AND also Hex then I think it could be very successful in gaining new colleagues for us :)

> I don’t know any Polish Hex player

Galdian, I'm not Polish and don't play Hex but you could count me still :)