Hexaera, a hex civilisation builder balanced by a playtest bot
A 3D turn-based hex city builder vibecoded with Claude Code, whose headless playtest bot found deadlocks and took the win rate from 0% to about 67%.
The full story
Hexaera is a turn-based hex city builder, designed to also work as a physical board game, in which you start with a campfire and push through seven eras to a Smart City landmark. It has a voxel 3D board in React Three Fiber, roads and railways on hex edges, power, pollution, a market with moving prices, and procedural chiptune sound with no audio files.
The poster described what they wanted and played it; Claude Code wrote the design document, rules engine, 3D board, UI and mobile layout, and handled deploys. The most useful trick was a playtest bot that played hundreds of games headless: it found a steel and power deadlock, a starvation spiral and a pacing problem, and over eight balancing rounds the win rate went from 0% to about 67%.
How it was done
Tools
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: My experiment vibecoding a 3D game with Claude Code: Hexaera, a hex civilization builder from campfi
The maker's post on r/ClaudeCode.
The poster has deleted it, but the original is still readable (it can take a few seconds to load): archived copy of Reddit: My experiment vibecoding a 3D game with Claude Code: Hexaera, a hex civilization builder from campfi (opens in a new tab)
- The project: hexaera.vercel.app
Play the game.