I’m a fan of games with a solid grounding in nature, such as Undergrove or EcoLogic: Europe, though they can sometimes be rather slow and fiddly to play, with a lot of gameplay being taken up in repetitive, but biologically plausible ‘maintenance’ actions. The attractive and interesting Zoo Tycoon is probably the best (or worst?) example of mechanics rendering play too long and slow for me to ever get the game to the table.
By contrast, Apis Mellifera: The Bee Game appears to be a much lighter-weight offering which still remains true to its biological inspiration. This is designers Henry Greenberg and Drew Johnson’s first game. Drew is a full-time bee-keeper, so he’s been responsible for grounding the game. The Apis Mellifera campaign recently launched on Kickstarter.
Gameplay Overview
In 2–4 player Apis Mellifera, you play as a beehive (not a keeper, not a bee or swarm of bees, but as a hive), striving to survive a year, dealing with pests, weather, inquisitive animals such as hungry bears, as well as attacks from other players—I mean, other hives. At the same time, you have to gather nectar and pollen, make honey, and feed and nurture your bees.
This is a worker (worker bee?) placement game where you send your beeples (yes, that’s what they’re calling the bee meeples) out to hexagonal locations on a shared main board (centre of the image above) or within your hive (the player boards at the corners of the image) to perform a range of actions. The actions on the main board tend to be things like gathering resources from different types of plant or engaging the services of a friendly bee-keeper to, e.g., grow the hive or gain protection from pests. I think it’s amusing (but also realistic) that you can send your bees to a particular plant with guaranteed resources, or you can send them to more risky places like a picnic or trash can (ugh!), where the reward to cost ratio can be much higher, but your actual gain depends on a die roll, so you might not get all that you want.
On the other hand, the internal actions are more related to hive maintenance, such as making honey or creating wax frames. These wax panels are significant for two reasons: first, they’re where you store gathered resources, so if you don’t have enough, you can’t gather everything you need; second, you’re penalised at the end for empty spaces in the hive, i.e., spaces where there’s no wax, or worse, no base wooden frame. (There are so many neat features of this game: it’s a bee-keeper action to acquire a wooden frame, but the bees themselves are responsible for covering it in wax.) One rather cute internal action is the waggle dance, which lets you perform an action from an outside hex, even if it’s already been activated during that round already.
Each hex space costs one or more bees to activate, and sometimes other resources, and players take turns deploying their beeples until there are insufficient left to take any further actions. At this point, end of round Objectives (four to begin with, but others will be added during the game), such as having gathered a certain amount of nectar or laying a certain number of eggs, may be scored if players have achieved them, then bees are returned to the hive—and have to be fed… If you don’t have enough resources, sadly some of your bees expire. This is also when eggs hatch, resulting in more bees for the next round.
At the start of the next round, a new Objective card is revealed, along with a pair of Challenge cards, which can be positive or negative. Each round represents a season, and the Challenge cards correspond to those seasons. They either affect play during that season (e.g., a cold snap in spring meaning you can send fewer bees far outside the hive) or occur at the end (such as, take a penalty as the result of pests, unless you can defend against them). Because the Challenges are visible, players can take actions during the round to mitigate end of season penalties. Incidentally, there’s quite a stack of Challenge cards, and only a very few will come out during a game, leading to a fair degree of replayability, though it’s not clear at this stage how much variability there is in the Challenges. Besides the season-specific Challenges, the tiles on the main board are also populated with seasonal plants and resource availability, etc., offering rewards at a level appropriate to that time of year. On round start, players additionally gain a new Hive card to add to their hand (they may gain others via specific actions during a turn) and can play them during their turns—one example is an attempt to steal resources from another hive (which, I gather, is something that happens in real life). Fortunately, there’s also a bee-keeper protection Hive card, which can be played to counter that!
The game lasts three seasons, and highest point score wins.
There’s an interesting asymmetric play aspect to Apis Mellifera in which different bee species have different strengths and weaknesses as well as population sizes. Multiple copies of the honey bee species cards, the simplest to play, are available for people’s initial games.
I mentioned seasonal variability in the cards and tiles, but while it looks like the game comes with formidable stacks of both, it’s not clear how much variety there is. How different are the options on the components? Given the limited types of resource, they can’t really do more than offer different combinations of each, can they? They might have different names and flavour text (but sadly, none of the pretty artwork that’s common in nature games), though that’s not going to affect gameplay much, so I have concerns about replayability.
The Campaign
The campaign page is by no means the worst I’ve seen (I won’t give any examples here, but pop along to my crowdfunding catchup article if you want a few pointers), but it is sadly lacking. There’s almost nothing about gameplay, and no rulebook—although the game does look fairly easy to play, this is a significant omission with less than a month (at time of writing) before the campaign finishes. The material in the previous section was gleaned from preview and playthrough videos on the page, so at least there’s that.
The page lists a couple of stretch goals, which appear to be an unspecified number of extra cards and tiles, but it’s impossible to tell if they’re hugely different from existing ones. I also feel that the funding levels for these goals are rather ambitious, despite the game reaching its campaign target (only just) within 4 days.
The reward structure is simple: buy the game, or buy multiple copies of the game! There’s also the common hedge-your-bets $1 pledge to gain future access to the full pledge manager without committing yet. A significant discount was available for day one pledges, but that’s over now, so tough—however, given the lack of detail on gameplay and card variability, I feel it would have been a bit too much of a gamble to jump on the project within the first day anyway.
One other minor issue is the lack of a statement on environmental accountability: this seems to be common on crowdfunding projects these days, especially nature-based ones, but the creators are saying nothing here.
Wrap Up
Apis Mellifera does look pretty, but aside from the wooden beeples, some of the components seem to be of lower quality than I would expect for the high cost of the game—the cards and tiles look rather thin in the videos. However, this could be prototype material (this is called out in the preview video), and it would be nice to have final components completely confirmed.
I really like that the game is anchored in science, and all the actions and events have some biological backing—it’s a nicely educational and informative game. It’s also, as far as I can see, significantly easier to play than the games I mentioned at the head. However, without more details about the variety of cards and tiles, it’s difficult to estimate whether this is a game I’d want to play more than once.
Even given that, is it worth buying? If you’ve read some of my other crowdfunding articles, you’ll know I’m very risk averse when it comes to gambling on Kickstarter projects. I’m afraid this one falls into the category of too risky for me: the red flags are sparse details and lack of rulebooks, as well as first-time campaign and first-time game. The game’s also fairly expensive for what it is (and remember, the prices on the campaign page are before shipping and VAT). This is exactly the sort of game I’d leave until it hit retail; however, while there is a retail pledge level, it’s only for US stores (I guess that’s some admin/compliance thing), so Apis Mellifera is most likely a game that’ll pass me by until/if it hits retail or there’s a reprint campaign.
About the Author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
