Honeybees - Playtest

The Stat Sheet

The Snapshot

• Continued play from session 1 playtest
• Discovered paper wasps south of the hive
• Found another deer carcass southwest
• In the middle of the mountains, we found a meadow

The Party

• Scott – Scott?
• Zak - Blue
• Kati – Derpia

Here is an image of our Hive as it was set up by the first group of players. To me, the game thrives off different characters playing constantly. It requires good notes between sessions by players and loosely simulates ways in which a real hive would function.

The System

Honeybees is a game where players are all honeybees from the same hive. It’s currently played in Seasons, and there are 3 phases of play. They are the following:

• Scouting (Resource collection)
• Waggle Dance (Worker placement)
• Honey Crop (Base building)

At first, I was a little overwhelmed, but that’s sometimes the nature of playtests. Our GM set everything up in Owlbear Rodeo in a very clean and systematic way. I’ll give a quick overview of each of the phases and then get into The Brief.

Scouting

This is the bulkiest phase in the game and requires the greatest amount of cooperation and strategy among players. Players spend water to travel through a hexcrawl, either together or separately, which draw 3 cards form a 52-card deck as potential resources to gain. Players put it either in their Memory (to be used as a playing hand for workers) or in their Pollen Basket (to be used for base building). Once a card is selected for pollen, a player can only put that suit of cards into it. Memory, however, can be any number of cards.

The current Season also dictates the number of hours, or travel points, a bee can travel. A weather die is rolled to augment the travel. Ours was mostly blustery wind which meant we flew low to the ground. I did love the graphic used for deciding the weather. I am unsure if that was custom made or inspired by another game, but I am tempted to use it n my own hexcrawl games!

This phase has great opportunities for impactful encounters that we didn’t have much time to explore. I am curious to see how more freeform play will be added.

Waggle Dance

Once we bees have scouted, we report to the hive and tell the workers (our hive population) what to do. For our session, we had 3 and sent them to build relations with a neighboring hive, harvest fur from a deer carcass, and gather honey. Each action had a distance from the hive and a difficulty which determined how many points it cost us to do. Each play formed a cribbage hand from our Memory to determine points the group had to use.

Honey Crop

With resources gathered and workers placed, it was time to build the hive. From our pollen cards, the points earned are used to build new cells (Honey, Pollen, Brood) that expand the hive population, fed the hive, and store honey. This section still felt like it was the first draft, and I can see a bunch of different ways it can be expanded like where you build the cell matters or has more benefit. Again, it all depends on if the designer focus is board game or rpg.

We were a bit rushed due to some holiday time constraints, so I am eager to play this again, especially with more tinkering. :D

The Brief

At the start of Summer, we heard that some bees have been flying out of the hive at night which is unheard of. We don’t know if that’s happening within our hive or another one. We do know that there is a rival hive in 0007. All blue dots on the map were explored in Session 1. We decide to explore 0006 together as a group before deciding to split up. There’s a river which appears to feed into the wetlands. We see signs of paper wasps, but we can tell it’s an abandoned nest. Wasps share the forest with us. How dare they! We all gather pollen and split up to explore more areas.

Scott and I followed a river southwest 0006 due to the blustering weather and have run into the colony of paper wasps we had signals about earlier. They don’t appear to notice us, and we continue our way into 0004. A dead deer in a glen greets our senses. We split off at this point, and I’m finally on my own in 0003. I’m hanging out under the biggest tree in the forest but having uncovered so many resources, I think it’s best to circle back the way I came to meet up with Blue wherein we trade some resources to better suit ourselves.

The Takeaways

I see a lot of opportunities in this, depending on if it’s a board game or rpg. It’s very cool how much it could go either way. As I played it today, it was very board game focused with little to no rpg elements. One of the players, Zak, expressed wanting to have more engagement with our bees and collaborative play. I wholeheartedly agreed with that. A small part of my brain sees this being a very cozy and educational video game too.

Star – Gameplay loop is very solid and fits extremely well into cooperative board games Wish – A bit more engagement in hexes beyond collecting resources like narrative events that require a choice by the player

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