Coordinates

The cells on the Hex board are referred to using coordinates of a letter and a number, e.g., a1 or c14. Upper- and lowercase letters are used interchangeably. The letter gives the column, with the a-column at the left side of the board, and the number gives the row, with row 1 at the top. A1 is an acute corner and its two adjacent cells are b1 and a2. It is assumed that the first player to move is vertical, i.e., must connect rows 1 and n on an n×n board.

In some other games, such as Go, it is customary to skip the letter "I" to avoid confusion with "J", presumably because people historically had terrible handwriting. However, since the advent of typesetting and standardized character sets, people no longer tend to confuse these letters, and are bound to be much more confused when letters are missing from the alphabet. Therefore, the Hex coordinate system uses all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, i.e., the 9th and 10th columns are labelled "I" and "J", respectively.

Although boards with more than 26 columns are rarely used in practice, some tools (such as HexWorld) allow them. In this case, alphabet numbers can be used. The next columns after "Z" are labelled "AA", "AB", "AC", ..., "AZ", "BA", "BB", and so on. This is the same system used to label columns in Excel spreadsheets.