It Lives! It Lives! Rise now, my minion, and wreck terror upon the masses with your fearsome stinger… Wait. What do you mean that ‘Lives’ is a noun here?
Indeed, this is not a game regarding the resurrection of bees in a world where they long since have gone extinct, a la some Jurassic Park mad science. Instead, this is a game where you play as a hive of BEES!
I NEVER SAID WE’D BE SWARMING NICOLAS CAGE, BEES, COOL OFF!
OKAY, GOOD. Now we can begin.
Take heed before proceeding, this article is my impression based on demoing the game at GenCon. Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer will go on Kickstarter on September 10th. Changes to the rules and art are completely possible.
Some basic information first: The game is developed by Hit Em With A Shoe and it’s the companies first game. The game fits 1-4 players and should take about half an hour per player. This is a worker placement game; your workers are, of course, bees. Whoever has the most victory points at the end of the game while still having at least one bee, wins!
“One bee?” The cry goes out. “Do you mean we can lose our bees?” Why, yes, dear reader! There are quite a few ways of losing bees. But we aren’t there quite yet!
The basic game takes place over nine months: three of spring, summer, and fall each. At the beginning of the month, a card is drawn that modifies the month in some manner. It may increase the amount of resources gathered or cause hives to overheat, as some examples. Each turn, you will use any number of bees to do one action. Turns continue until all players have used up all of their bees. You will then have to feed your bees, deal with any disease. Then your hive might swarm or your hive might breed more bees. This continues for eight more months.
Now, what kind of bee hive doesn’t have a queen? And what kind of game wouldn’t take advantage of this fact to give the players options for special powers? Yes, indeed, there are four different kinds of queens in the game, but! Each player has access to all of the queen options all of the time and can make the choice that best fits their current strategy. The four queen bonuses are:
- Additional strength when attacking or defending
- Less Disease
- Better Breeding
- More Swarming
The actions available to players each turn are Forage, Scout, Requeen, Cool Hive, Defend, Rob, Clean Bees, and Build Wax.
Forage- Set one of your bees on a tile within range of their hive. This will let you collect resources based off of the tile and the season. There are four different tiles: Bloom, Wilt, Harvest, and Wet. The first three each corresponds to a season and wet provides water. Also, there are three resources: honey, pollen, and water. Honey is used to feed your bees, as well as build more wax. Pollen is used to breed create more bees. Water is used to cool off the hive. The season tile will give the most honey and pollen of any tile during its respective season. The pond tile is the only way to gain water. Note that you do not have to collect the maximum amount of resources. This is also the only action that places a bee anywhere that isn’t your player board. This also increases your disease track.
Scout – Draw a tile from the tile bag and places it on the board.
Requeen – Switch out your current queen.
Cool Hive – Spend a water to cool off five bees in the hive. This is only needed during the summer when the Overheat event takes place. You will need to cool off all of the bees that you own, otherwise you will not be able to breed this month.
Defend – Set any number of bees aside to increase he defense of the hive. This is the counter to the Rob action.
Rob – Set any number of bees aside to attack another hive. The number of bees used here determines the maximum amount of possible damage dealt. The attacking player rolls a dice and deals that much damage to the attacking hive, killing that many bees and stealing that much honey.
Clean Bees – Reduce the disease track by two.
Build Wax – Spend two honey to build another section of wax in your hive. Wax determines the amount of resources that you can hold at once, the maximum number of bees that you can have, and the threshold number of bees for swarming.
At the end of the month, feeding your bees costs you one honey for every two bees. Any bees that you can’t feed die of starvation. Next, remove the number of bees as indicated by your disease track. You gain disease whenever you send your bees out to forage or rob. Finally, check if you have more bees than the swarming threshold or if your inventory is full. If either of those is true, your hive SWARMS! When this happens, you lose half the bees and honey left in your hive, rounded down. This either creates a new wild hive up to three spaces away or lets you move your hive up to three spaces away, leaving a wild hive in your old spot. Swarming reduces your disease track and also grants victory points! As the seasons advances, the amount of victory points decreases. If you’re below the swarming threshold, then you can instead breed new bees, up to your maximum capacity, for one pollen a bee.
Wild hives have a strength equal to the number of bees that left when your hive swarmed. They follow a set of rules based on which season the game is currently in, but in general, it’s another hive to compete with.
Now, the thing that caught my attention the most (besides imagining releasing a swarm of bees upon my opponents/the world) was how the worker management is actually going to play out. There are several ways for you to lose workers but the biggest loss is also going to be the primary method of gaining points! Since the engines in worker placement games usually rely on having as many workers as possible, this means that you will have to plan the right moment of swarming to happen so you’ll be least impacted by the loss in bee power. But this also means that you’ll be putting other opponents on the board. The artwork on the board tiles is great and the design for the hive and bee spaces on the board is slick. The action spaces don’t look quite as good in comparison to the rest of the board.
One last impressive note is that the designer, Matt Shoemaker, took inspiration for this from his own experience as a beekeeper. Some of the first playtesters for this game were his fellow beekeepers and one of their comments was how this re-enacted the ways that bees do behave!