The game is played on a vertically oriented regular hexagonal board with sides 6 cells long, which has 91 hex cells having three colours (light, dark, and mid-tone), with the middle cell (or "hex") usually mid-tone. Gliński's book Rules of Hexagonal Chess was published in 1973. At one point there were more than half a million players, and more than 130,000 board sets were sold. The game was popular in Eastern Europe, especially in Gliński's native Poland.
Gliński's hexagonal chess, invented by Władysław Gliński in 1936 and first launched in Britain in 1949, is "probably the most widely played of the hexagonal chess games". Hexagon-celled gameboards have grown in use for strategy games generally for example, they are popularly used in modern wargaming. More chess-like games for hexagon-based boards started appearing regularly at the beginning of the 20th century. The first applications of chess on hexagonal boards probably occurred mid-19th century, but two early examples did not include checkmate as the winning objective. If a variant's gameboard has cell vertices facing the players, pawns typically have two oblique-forward move directions.) The six-sidedness of the symmetric hexagon gameboard has also resulted in a number of three-player variants. (E.g., when the sides of hexagonal cells face the players, pawns typically have one straightforward move direction. The nature of the game is also affected by the 30° orientation of the board's cells the board can be horizontally (Wellisch's, de Vasa's, Brusky's) or vertically (Gliński's, Shafran's, McCooey's) oriented. Many different shapes and sizes of hexagon-based boards are used by variants. (E.g., a rook has six natural directions for movement instead of four.) Three colours are typically used so that no two neighboring cells are the same colour, and a colour-restricted game piece such as the orthodox chess bishop usually comes in sets of three per player in order to maintain the game's balance. Since each hexagonal cell not on a board edge has six neighbor cells, there is increased mobility for pieces compared to a standard orthogonal chessboard. The best known is Gliński's variant, played on a symmetric 91-cell hexagonal board.
Hexagonal chess refers to a group of chess variants played on boards composed of hexagon cells. Three cell colours and three bishops per side are the norm for hexagonal variants. Gliński's hexagonal chess, launched in 1949, became popular in Eastern Europe, reaching half a million fans.