I found a game called “Hexagon” on Reddit. I shouldn’t have clicked the link | Part 2

Part 1

We kept playing through the next rounds, sitting by the fire, slowly drinking beer. The game really was good, and the tasks, even when they were a little too dark at times, built an amazing horror atmosphere.

All of us sat there on edge before each new task.

There were scary stories and little creepy challenges. Sometimes deep questions or confessions that forced someone into a moment of real reflection.

Somewhere between the third and fourth round, I felt something brush against my leg.

It was Mia. While adjusting her chair, she had slid it closer to mine, and now our knees were touching.

That meant the plan was working.

The pieces moved unevenly. Josh and Mia were the closest to the finish, I was second, and Chloe was last.

And then Josh rolled red.

He reached for the red deck and drew a card. He read it silently for a long moment.

“You playing?” Mia asked.

I snatched the card out of his hand and started reading, while Mia leaned closer to me and read along.

Go outside. Move 10 feet away from the cabin. Then stand perfectly still for three minutes. Close your eyes and do not make a sound. Do not turn around, no matter what you hear or feel. If you scream, run, or move before the three minutes are up, you will never return to the cabin again.

Silence.

“It’s just a game. What freaked you out so much?” I asked.

“The game… how did it know we’re playing in a cabin?” Josh replied.

“Dude, probably just some kind of thematic touch or something.”

But even as I said it, I felt an icy pressure in my stomach. I hadn’t paid attention to the word cabin before.

The game could have been played in a regular house, an apartment, or even a hotel room. So why cabin?

Chloe let out a little laugh. “What, Josh, already losing your nerve?”

Josh stood up, shot me a hard look, grabbed his jacket from the hanger, and walked out onto the porch. He closed the door behind him.

We watched through the window. Josh stood on the porch step, shoved his hands into his pockets, and walked toward the woods. He stopped ten measured steps from the cabin, started a timer on his phone, and went completely still.

“This game is actually intense,” Mia said quietly, starting a timer on her phone almost at the same time Josh had.

“Yeah,” I nodded, unable to forget that our knees were still touching.

The first minute passed. Josh stood motionless.

Just like we expected, nothing unusual happened. Those warnings were just there to scare us and make the whole thing hit harder…

Thirty seconds into the second minute, I noticed movement at the edge of the woods. Something in the darkness moved incredibly fast between the trees, then ran right in front of Josh.

Mia grabbed my wrist hard under the table, and I froze.

I wanted to shout at my friend to come back inside, but I couldn’t. My throat tightened. I couldn’t even swallow, so the only sound that managed to come out was a weak little squeak followed by a cough.

The third minute ended, and Josh walked back into the cabin as if nothing had happened, closed the door, sat down, and reached for a beer.

“Three minutes,” he said. “And I’m freezing like I’d been out there forever.”

“Did you hear anything?” Chloe asked, staring at him in fear.

For a moment he didn’t answer, his eyes fixed on the bottle in his hand.

“The woods. The sound of branches. Nothing else,” he finally said.

I felt stupid for panicking so badly, but luckily the girls didn’t seem to notice.

“See? I told you. It’s just a game,” I said in a voice that sounded a little too confident as I leaned back and folded my arms behind my head.

I kept wondering what that shadow had been. Had we imagined it? Or maybe it really was just some animal.

Josh’s piece moved one space forward.

The next rounds kept thickening the atmosphere around the table. You could feel the fear and tension in the air, and the tasks were getting stranger and stranger.

Chloe rolled the die and got black. It was the first card from that deck, and none of us had any idea what to expect from it.

She read the card silently first, then out loud:

“With your left hand, hold your game piece. Put the drawn task card in your mouth. Then lie perfectly in the center of the living room and listen for 3 minutes and 33 seconds. Write down every sound you hear. Do not leave out a single one, or you will be disqualified. Note: the other players are allowed to interfere by making sounds.”

Chloe lay down on the floor and closed her eyes, while the rest of us sat perfectly still, trying not to make a single sound.

The game allowed interference, but we wanted to have fun and not ruin the atmosphere, so none of us did anything.

After 3 minutes and 33 seconds, when the timer went off, she got up and immediately started writing, still holding the card in her mouth and the piece in her hand.

When she finished, she placed the paper on the table and pulled the card out of her mouth.

“I know the rules said you could interfere, but that was a little too much. If you were trying to scare me, it didn’t work.”

She was clearly angry.

I picked up the paper and read it out loud:

“Floorboard creak, fire in the fireplace, wind outside the window, knocking on the door, the sound of the door opening, and footsteps.”

The three of us looked at each other, unease written all over our faces.

“Chloe, we didn’t move at all. Are you messing with us? If you are, stop. This is already scary enough,” Mia said.

Chloe looked at her in confusion.

“Me? You’re the ones messing with me right now, and you need to stop immediately. This is pathetic.”

If that was acting, then she deserved an Oscar. Chloe genuinely looked offended.

“Whatever…” Mia muttered.

Josh grabbed the die and rolled again. Another black card. He stared at it for a long moment, then threw it to me without saying a word.

I looked at him, confused, took it, and started reading out loud:

Go to the bedroom with the north-facing window. Stand in front of the window, facing the glass. Stare at the glass for exactly 72 seconds. If the face of a man appears in the window, you must not break eye contact. If you do, he will take your body, and you will spend eternity in his place…

I felt a bead of sweat run down my temple. I handed him the card back.

Josh stared at it for a moment, then looked up at me. There was something in his expression I had never seen before. It wasn’t even anger anymore. It was pure fury.

“How does the card know,” he said slowly, trying badly to stay calm, “that the bedroom has a north-facing window?”

“I have no idea, man,” I replied, and a strange jolt ran through my whole body.

“You found the rental listing for the cabin, didn’t you?” Josh asked, his voice rising.

I slowly leaned back in my chair.

“Dude, what the hell are you talking about?”

“You set us up? Admit it. You think this is funny?” he said, fury boiling in his voice.

“Dude,” I cut in, “seriously? How the hell would I even do that?”

Josh planted his elbows on the table.

I had never seen him like this. Usually he was calm, steady, sometimes irritated, sure, but I had never seen him this angry.

Now there was pure hatred and aggression coming off him.

“There are too many coincidences,” he said, practically foaming at the mouth. “The game knows we’re in a cabin. It knows there’s a bedroom with a north-facing window. Next thing you know, it’ll know our names. You brought it. I’ve never seen a game packaged like this, and I own hundreds of them. Some of them are limited editions that cost a fortune. None of them were packed this well. And on top of that, there’s not even a title or company name on the box.”

I could feel myself getting hot.

“I didn’t know what the cabin looked like, which way the windows faced, or how many bedrooms there were. I found this game on Reddit, clicked the link in the post, and just ordered it. If I wanted to scare you guys, do you seriously think I’d spend hundreds of dollars making a custom game? And besides that, I wouldn’t even have had time to do something like that after finding out about the trip. If I wanted to scare you, I’d make up some ghost story, not build an entire game.”

I said it while breathing hard, feeling my face go red. Josh was my best friend, but in that moment, I wanted to hit him.

Josh straightened up.

“Then show us the site and the order confirmation.”

“Gladly.”

I said it as I grabbed my phone. I opened my email and started looking for the order confirmation.

It wasn’t there. It should have been right at the top, but it was gone.

“Dude, it’s not here. It was there the day before yesterday. Something must’ve deleted it,” I said, searching through spam, trash, and the rest of the inbox.

“Then show us that mysterious post or the site,” he said, taking a sip of beer.

That should have been easy. My phone had browsing history synced with my laptop.

I pulled up the history and went back to the day before yesterday. There were around five hundred links from all kinds of board game sites and forums, but there was no sign of the post or that weird website.

I went straight to Reddit. The post was gone too.

I stared at the phone in disbelief.

“Josh, seriously, man. I swear to you, I ordered that game. I’m not screwing with you. I just can’t find the links.”

“Josh,” Chloe said quietly. “Please stop. I’m scared.”

Josh kept staring at me for a moment longer. Then he shifted his eyes to Chloe, shrugged, and stood up.

“You could at least admit it. I’m going into that bedroom.”

He went.

The three of us sat there with Mia and Chloe. No one said anything. We were all frozen in shock over what had just happened. Chloe stared at the board. Mia stared at me.

“You didn’t do this, right?” she asked quietly.

“Of course I didn’t. If I’d made something like this, I would’ve bragged about it after the first round,” I said.

Time passed, and Josh came back to the table on shaky legs. He was pale. He grabbed a bottle and chugged three quarters of it in one go, then opened another.

None of us said a word. We all stared at him in disbelief.

“Everything okay?” I asked carefully.

“There was a face,” he said quietly, staring into the bottle. “In the reflection of the window, I saw the face of a man with an unnaturally wide smile and bulging eyes. He was saying something to me, but I couldn’t hear what. I wanted to run, but the card said clearly that I wasn’t allowed to look away, so I kept staring at him. I’m scared. Something is seriously wrong here.”

Josh picked up his piece and moved it forward one space without even looking at the board.

“Some kind of revenge prank? I’m telling you, I didn’t set you guys up with this game,” I said angrily, but his reaction seemed genuine.

Josh had never drunk beer like that before. He always drank slowly, calmly, with control. By the time I finished three beers, he’d barely be done with his first.

But a man’s face in the glass? That was impossible. This was just a normal game.

We’d already completed more than a dozen tasks, and nothing strange had actually happened.

Then my phone rang.

All of us jumped, and I almost dropped it.

The screen said: Mom.

It was after one in the morning. My mom had never called me at that hour. Something had happened.

I answered.

“Hey, Mom, is everything alright?”

“Sweetheart…” Her voice sounded different, sad. I could hear that she’d been crying. “Grandma. About an hour ago, we got a call from the hospital saying she passed away. We’re going to pick up her things. Please come home tomorrow.”

My stomach tightened so hard that for a moment, nothing got through to me except that one word, passed.

Grandma was sixty-five years old. The last time I talked to her was at Christmas.

“What happened?” I asked, feeling tears welling up in my eyes.

My mom answered in a breaking voice,

“She felt faint and fell down the stairs. They tried to save her at the hospital, but they couldn’t. Please come home tomorrow. We need to start planning the funeral.”

“Okay.”

I hung up.

I sat there holding my phone.

“What happened?” Mia asked.

“Grandma,” I said, trying not to break down. “She died.”

For a moment, I completely forgot about the game, the argument, and everything Josh had said just before.

Then I remembered the card.

“Recite from memory the first and last names of three people who died in your hometown. If you fail to do so, those three people will become your loved ones.”

I said it out loud, and all three of them looked at me in horror.

Chloe stood up from the table.

“I’ve had enough. I’m packing my stuff and getting the hell out of here.”

The moment she finished speaking, she dropped to the floor, completely still.

Josh dropped to his knees beside her and turned her onto her back. He tried to wake her up, spoke to her, patted her face.

Mia screamed and started crying.

I was still barely aware of what was happening, but I tried calling emergency services. None of the numbers worked. My phone suddenly lost all signal.

“She just stood up,” Josh said in a numb voice. “She stood up and said she was going to pack. Why did she suddenly collapse? Why can’t I wake her up?”

“Rule one. Once the game begins, it must be played to the end. Leaving the table, skipping a turn, or abandoning the game means eternal darkness,” I read out loud in a hoarse voice.

“That’s impossible. It’s just a game. You said so yourself,” Josh said, looking in my direction.

I put a hand on his shoulder.

“Please. Sit down. We don’t know what might happen.”

He shoved my hand away.

“Jesus Christ, man. Chloe is dead. Does that even register with you?”

“Oh, believe me, it does. This fucked-up game took my grandma and now it’s playing with us. It pretended to be a normal board game, and now it’s taking us apart piece by piece, revealing more and more and giving us worse and worse tasks, and now we can’t even stop,” I said, tears in my eyes.

Mia sobbed and said,

“Rule five. There is only one finish space. The game ends when the first player completes the circle. The remaining players end together with the game. What does that mean, end together with the game?”

Josh, who had already been pale, now looked white as chalk. He stood up from Chloe’s body and sat at the table, staring at me with huge, terrified eyes as he spoke.

“It means only one of us gets out of this alive. Only the first person to reach the finish wins. The rest lose and end up like Chloe.”

“No physical violence against other players,” Mia continued. “They knew that once people figured out what was happening, that would be the first thing they’d think of.”

“You don’t know that. It says they end together with the game. We don’t know exactly what that means,” I said, raising my voice.

At that moment, all three of us doubled over in our chairs with expressions of unbearable pain.

A brutal spasm shot through my chest. It felt like some immense weight was crushing me from the inside. I couldn’t breathe. I started panicking, but I couldn’t move. I felt myself slipping away.

Then suddenly, the pain stopped completely.

“What the hell was that?” I gasped, standing up and fighting for air.

Mia started shaking and making strange, high-pitched sounds. It wasn’t normal crying. It was pure panic.

“We’re going to die here,” she stammered.

The pieces on the board trembled, and another stab of pain shot through me. This one was shorter, maybe only a second, but it was enough to make me drop to one knee.

Josh said nothing. He stared at the board, and all that was left on his face was fear and hopelessness.

Grabbing the table, I said,

“The game wants us to keep playing. If we don’t start again, that’ll happen again. Or something worse.” I looked at Josh. “Your turn.”

Josh raised his eyes to me.

“Play? What’s the point? We’re done. Probably only one of us gets out of here, and even that’s not guaranteed.”

Deep down, I knew he was right. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, there was no other way to read that rule.

“Josh, we keep playing, and in the meantime, we try to figure something out. We have to try.”

He picked up the die and rolled it.

Black.

Damn it, why were only black and red coming up now? This made no sense.

Josh put his hands over his face, wiping away sweat and tears. With a trembling hand, he reached for the card and read:

“Go outside. Find something that does not belong in this place. Bring it back and place it on the table. You have one minute to complete the task. If you return empty-handed, your hands will vanish forever.”

We looked at each other, and then Josh ran outside, turning on his phone flashlight.

We waited. Mia kept wiping her eyes and sniffling.

Time crawled by mercilessly. As soon as Josh left, we started a timer. Thirty seconds had already passed.

I stared out the window, trying to spot him. There was no sign of him anywhere.

I hoped he hadn’t run. After what he’d seen, he wouldn’t do that. Josh wasn’t stupid, but fear like this could mess with anyone’s head.

Forty-nine seconds.

Please let him make it.

Fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven…

Mia closed her eyes and covered her ears. I didn’t blame her. I didn’t want to watch either.

Please, man…

Fifty-eight…

Josh burst inside with a slam and lunged toward the table, dropping something that looked like a small rag doll onto it.

“I made it,” he said, out of breath.

For a moment, no one said anything else. It was like we were waiting for confirmation from the game, like we needed to know for sure.

Thirty seconds passed. We were safe.

“Dude, what is this?” I asked, picking up the ugly little rag doll.

“A doll,” Josh answered.

I looked at it more closely.

It was cloth, about the size of a hand, sewn from gray fabric. It wore something that might once have been a dress, but now it was nothing but faded, filthy scraps. Where a face should have been, there was only smooth, scorched cloth.

“Where did you find it?” Mia asked, horrified.

“By the back door,” Josh said, still breathing hard. “On the forest side. It was lying right by the threshold.”

That doll was unbelievably hideous and disturbing. It looked like a toy from the seventies, both in the way it had been made and in how old and ruined it looked.

Mia picked up the die and rolled. Red.

She didn’t want to read the card herself. She handed it to me.

“Go into the room alone, sit in the middle, close your eyes, and stay perfectly still for five minutes. When you return, tell the remaining players what you heard. Do not turn on the light. Do not open your eyes. Do not answer them. Do not leave before the time is up. If you break any of these rules, they will stay with you forever.”

Mia stood up and covered her mouth with both hands.

“Who are they?” she asked, and tears started running down her face again.

“Listen, Mia, you have to do it. If you follow every instruction exactly, nothing will happen to you. Just like with Josh and the face in the window, remember?”

She nodded, wiping her eyes.

She went into the room and shut the door behind her.

We waited on edge. In silence. None of us had the strength or the desire to talk.

I was scared for Mia. Three minutes passed. Two more to go.

After five minutes, the timer buzzed and the bedroom door opened.

Mia stood in the doorway, looking at me. She was pale, and her eyes were bloodshot and red.

She stood perfectly still, staring at me. Then she slowly started walking toward the table without taking her eyes off me. I felt fear rising inside me.