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The game begins with an empty board.
Hinge is played using two-colored tokens: one side is green and the other is blue. There are two players: Green and Blue.
Starting with Green, players take turns making one of the following moves:
- Place a token with their color face up.
- Swipe one of their tokens and flip an enemy group.
Tokens of the same color on adjacent cells form a group. A group containing only one token is a singleton.
Placement
A player may place a token with their color face up on any empty non-edge cell if it does not form a new singleton touching an enemy token.
A newly placed token may touch an enemy token if and only if it grows or merges existing friendly groups already on the board.
The diagram below shows examples of legal and illegal placement moves for the Green player:
- C4 is legal: the placement creates a singleton that does not touch any enemy token.
- H4 is illegal: the placement would create a singleton touching the Blue token on G3.
- C8 is illegal: it is at the edge of the board.
- H7 is legal: the placement merges the Green tokens on G6 and H8 into one group. It may touch the Blue token on I7 because it does not create a singleton.
Swiping
A player may swipe one of their tokens one or two steps around an adjacent friendly token according to the following rules:
- Each step moves the token one cell clockwise or counterclockwise around the adjacent friendly token. Both steps must go around the same adjacent friendly token, but the player may either move in the same direction twice or reverse direction on the second step and return the token to its original cell.
- The final cell must be empty, must not be at the edge of the board, must touch an enemy group and must leave the moved token adjacent to the friendly group it moved from.
- If the first step reaches such a cell, the swipe ends after that step.
- The intermediate cell of a two-step swipe may be empty, may be at the edge of the board or may contain a friendly token, but it may not contain an enemy token. A friendly token passed over remains unchanged.
- A swipe may not split a friendly group at any point. When the moving token leaves a cell, the rest of its group must remain connected. If the first step joins two or more friendly groups, they immediately form one group and the second step may not split that merged group.
- When the swipe ends, one enemy group touching the moved token is flipped. If several separate enemy groups are touching, the player chooses one. Multiple touching tokens belonging to the same group represent one choice.
The diagrams below show examples of legal and illegal swipe moves for the Green player:
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| The first diagram shows a one-step swipe. The second shows a two-step swipe continuing around the same adjacent Green token in the same direction. Both swipes finish next to a Blue group. |
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| The first diagram shows a reversing two-step swipe. The first step moves onto a marked edge cell and the second returns the token to its non-edge source cell. The second diagram shows a two-step swipe passing over a stationary friendly token. Both regular and reversing two-step swipes may pass over a friendly token. |
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| The first swipe is illegal because lifting the moving token immediately splits its original group, even though the proposed final position would reconnect it. In the second diagram, step 1 merges two Green groups and step 2 is illegal because lifting the moving token from the intermediate cell would split the newly merged group. |
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| The first diagram shows a Green token completing a two-step swipe next to two separate Blue groups, so the player must choose which group to flip. The second diagram shows every token in the selected group flipped to Green while the other group remains Blue. |
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Hinge is a two-player abstract board game played on a hexagonal board, invented by Corey L. Clark in 2024. It belongs to the exnihilation family, which includes games such as Oust and Hex Oust. These games begin on an empty board and end with the elimination of all of one player's tokens.
