/blog/what-is-cullsWhat is CULLS?
CULLS is a two-player abstract strategy game played on a hexagonal board of circular cells. You and your opponent take turns placing coloured chips. The board fills up. You bracket. You cull. You connect five in a row. That's the game.
And yet — like every good abstract — those few rules generate a surprising amount of play. The cull is the thing that makes CULLS different from every other connect-five-style game on the shelf, and it's the thing we want to walk you through here.
What's in front of you
The board is a hexagon with 80 cells — eleven rows running 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 across. Each cell is a circle, packed in a hexagonal grid. There are three natural axes through the board: a horizontal one, and two diagonals. Five-in-a-row counts on any of them.
Each player gets a colour — Blue or Red — and a stack of chips. On your turn, you place one chip on any empty cell. There are no captures from movement, no dice, no cards. The whole game lives in the geometry of where those chips sit.
The cull, in one sentence
If you place a chip such that the four cells in a straight line read YOU · OPP · OPP · YOU, the two opponent chips between are culled — flipped to their CULLS-mark side, and swept off the board after one full opponent turn.
That second beat — the flipped chip lingering for a turn — is deliberate. It gives both players a clear visual record of what just happened, and it gives the opponent a moment to see the cost before the chips disappear. We tried it without the lingering frame in early playtests and the captures felt invisible. The flip-and-pause makes the moment land.
Why play CULLS
The game we wanted to make sat at a specific intersection: as easy to teach as Connect Four, as deep as Othello, and quick enough to play three rounds over coffee. The cull mechanic is what gets you there. It's a single rule that turns every chip placement into both a threat and a vulnerability — and it's why the centre of the board is so much more dangerous than the edges.
If you're new, the fastest way in is to play a quick game against the bot and let the rules teach themselves. If you'd rather see them written down first, head to the How to Play page for an animated walkthrough of every mechanic.
Up next
- How culling works — the bracket pattern, the multi-cull, and the edge cases that surprise new players.
- CULLS strategy guide — centre control, threat balance, axis awareness, and tempo.