Welcome to the arena, contender.
There is a new box on our shelf with a logo that says INFINITY HexaDome LEGENDS, and if you have been in this hobby a few years you are already squinting at it. You have seen that art style before. You have seen those characters before. You are not wrong.
Let us clear that up first, because it is the question everyone asks.
Yes, This Is Aristeia!
HexaDome Legends is a version two of Aristeia!, Corvus Belli's arena game, which went out of production a couple of years back. It is the same core idea, remade, and rebranded to line up with the upcoming video game HexaDome Tactics.
So if you owned Aristeia! and missed it: it is back. If you never played it and kept seeing people online being weirdly passionate about it: this is your turn.
One nice detail: the rebrand did not retire the old name in the fiction. The rulebook's own introduction still calls the sport itself Aristeia!, the Human Sphere's favourite extreme contact sport. HexaDome Legends is the game; Aristeia! is what the characters are competing in.
One note before you get excited about proxies. The miniatures come preassembled on premoulded 30mm bases, and Infinity uses 25mm bases for infantry. The old Aristeia! packs shipped both. These do not. You cannot cross these into your Infinity force, and it is better to know that now than after you have paid.
The Fastest Way to Understand It
Think League of Legends. Think Dota.
That is not us reaching for a comparison, that is genuinely the design. Two teams of four star athletes, called aristos, fight in a broadcast arena called the HexaDome. There is a scoring zone. Your job is to hold it. Your opponent's job is to stop you and hold it themselves. Knocked-out characters go to the infirmary rather than dying, because this is a sport, not a war.
Everything else follows from that. The characters have roles you will recognise instantly: a tank who stands in the way, a controller who ruins your plans, an attacker who deletes things, a support who keeps everyone standing. If you have ever played a hero shooter or a MOBA, you already understand the shape of a HexaDome team before you read a single rule.
And this is the part that separates it from a wargame: there is no army list to build over eighteen months. There is a board, eight characters, and an evening.
How a Game Actually Runs
A game runs over five rounds, and each round has four phases.
- Planning phase. You place your character initiative cards face down on your control panel. Their positions decide who activates when. Your opponent is doing the same thing, in secret, at the same time.
- Turns phase. Four turns. Each one reveals an initiative card, and whoever has the higher value chooses the order of activations for that turn.
- Objectives phase. Score victory points according to the scenario, then hand the Underdog token to whoever has fewer points.
- Recovery phase. Reset, and go again.
That secret ordering is the whole game in miniature. You are not just deciding what your characters do, you are guessing when your opponent's will move and trying to be a half-second earlier. It is a game of cat and mouse played with face-down cards, and it is why the same eight characters produce a different evening every time.
The Underdog token deserves a mention because it is a genuinely elegant piece of design. It starts with whichever team has the lowest combined initiative, so the side that will generally act later gets a consolation, and from then on it moves each round to whoever is behind on points. Falling behind hands you a tiebreaker. The game leans against runaway leads rather than letting one good round decide everything.
The Dice Are Not Normal Dice
HexaDome Legends rolls six colours of custom dice, and the colour is the power level. Every face shows one of three things: a success, a block, or a special. Successes decide whether the roll works, blocks cancel your opponent's successes, and specials are the currency you spend on switches.
The neat bit is what the rulebook does next. You may never roll more than one red die or one green die, and never more than three of any other colour, no matter what effects would otherwise add dice to the roll.
When a game writes a hard cap on how much of its own best thing you can bring, and makes that cap immune to its own bonuses, it is telling you the design is about choices rather than accumulation. That is worth more than any amount of marketing copy.
Abilities are colour-coded too. Red ones attack. Blue ones do something that is not an attack. Orange ones are passives that just happen. And then there are switches, which let you spend particular symbols you rolled to trigger an extra effect on top of the normal result. That is where the decisions live: take the damage, or take the effect?
What Comes in the Box
Here is the number that matters. The Core Box contains eight characters, which is enough for two people to play the full game.
Not a demo. Not a starter with a cut-down rulebook. Both sides, in one $90 box.
Inside: eight preassembled miniatures, a double-sided hex game board on properly thick cardboard, character cards, initiative cards, a deck of tactics cards, the custom dice, tokens, player dashboards, a learn-to-play book, a full reference guide with scenarios and a glossary, and an organiser insert that means the whole game stores in its own box.
Four of the eight are returning Aristeia! faces: Gata, Maximus, Miyamoto Mushashi and hEXx3r. Four are new: Tangerine, Obake, BeatBox and Afara.
For $90, you and a friend own a complete game. We stock a lot of miniatures products and very few of them can say that.
Where to Go After the Core Box
Two things, and only two, which is a refreshing sentence to write.
Cold Blood, the Valkyrie and Nadir expansion set, $36. Expansions widen the pool of characters you can draft, and they bring more tactics cards with them, so buying models literally increases your deck-building options. It requires the core box, which is the normal arrangement for this kind of game.
The Frost Dice Set, $15. Fourteen dice with a frost finish. The honest reason to own them is not collecting, it is that two players stop passing the same handful back and forth across the table.
That is the entire line. Three products. You can own all of HexaDome Legends for $141, which is less than one army's worth of most things we sell.
Should You Play It?
Yes if: you want a game you can learn and finish in an evening, you like the idea of four distinct characters rather than forty identical troopers, and the words "MOBA on a table" made you sit up.
Probably not if: what you actually want is a wargame with list-building, terrain and a campaign. That is a different shelf, and we will happily point you at it.
A fair warning: this is a new line, it is small, and restocks come from the publisher. If you want it, do not sit on it for three months.
So: are you a tank, a controller, or the one who deletes things? Tell us who you are drafting first.
Enjoy the show, and try not to end up in the infirmary.
