The challenge in this one comes with trying to decide how and when to build the empty cells on your board. You need to rush towards making the ones you need for the Queen’s contests but you also need to balance out what will give you good choices in the market. I love the multi-step planning in this game which makes it a real challenge as you try to make the right decisions moving forward. There are quite a few different ways to gain victory points as you play this one, and I have seen players try different approaches well. Honey Buzz has a great table presence. Pastel-colored bees everywhere. Gummy-like pieces of honey. Cute woodland creatures adorn the board and many of the cards. You’d be forgiven for thinking you are about to play some light family game and not entering the dog-eat-dog world of bee economics. Maybe it should be a bee-sting-bee world? Either way, the point is this: things aren’t as nice and cute as you might expect. The game scales very well. I have played at a two and four player count, and have found myself having enough downtime between turns without being bored. There is also a solo variant to the game, which has different levels of difficulty, increasing the replayability. Decree: This is a wild and allows you to do any of the other actions, however, you have to pay to take decree tile from the Hive Board. Did you know that honey bees are the only insect that produces food eaten by humans? They also pollinate over 80 percent of our cultivated crops. And in turn, we’ve decimated the honey bee population in the last 50 years. It seems like they’ve had enough.

When you take a production action, you place your fan marker and then generate honey on any nectar it touches The bees have discovered economics. The queens believe that if they sell honey to the bears, badgers, and woodland creatures, they will find peace and prosperity. Spring has arrived and it’s time to build the hive, find nectar, make honey, and, for the first time ever, set up shop. The bees have discovered economics. The queens believe that if they sell honey to the bears, badgers, and woodland creatures, they will find peace and prosperity. Spring has arrived and it's time to build the hive, find nectar, make honey, and, for the first time ever, set up shop. When a player recalls their bees, they may also “scout for nectar”. This gives players one free movement with their foraging bee, but unlike in with the Forage action, they don’t get to take pollen or nectar.Totally agreed! Especially once you take into account that the structure of the cell also determines what sort of nectar it will gather, and therefor honey it will eventually produce. In Honey Buzz, players play the role of one of an accountant bee, charged by the Queen to help set up some economics to produce and sell honey to the creatures who keep trying to steal not for themselves. Your job is to help expand the hive, make nectar to help produce honey and sell those to the bear market. Only the top architect will fly to the top and be the head of this new economic empire in the woods of Sweetwater Grove!

Of course, completing a cell isn’t just about what nectar you are getting but also taking the actions around the cell. Keeping in mine each 2-hex tile has the action on only one of the hexes and the other is blank. If you position the action-side adjacent to the empty cell, you’ll get to perform that action. But in doing so your future completed cells will offer fewer actions. So it’s important to have the right actions at the right time, not necessarily just having as many as possible. That’s often a misleading metric. When there are various difficulty levels broken up into easy, standard, and hard categories, I typically start at the bottom and work my way up. It takes time, yet there are some cases where the easiest level feels more like a tutorial. There isn’t much of a challenge, yet I imagine that’s always different for everyone! Fall Flavors is an expansion that introduces five new modules for Honey Buzz. You can mix and match to add these modules to the game in any combination!_x000D_Forage– Move your bee token in the field and, if possible, collect the nectar token and place it in your hive. When deploying their bees, players have 6 tile-types to choose, which will allow them to do different actions when creating a cell. These actions are:

Bees are woven into our history. The worker bee is a symbol of industry in Manchester. The bee is also the topic of some of our finest art and literature, such as Billie Piper’s 1999 classic hit “Honey to the Bee.” There are also several bee-related board games, such as Hive, Beez and Queenz. The big question is… where does Honey Buzz rank amongst them? Imagine All The Beeple…Whereas acacia honey can only be held in a cell meticulously formed from 5 tiles in this arrangement: Constructing more complex cells like this not only let you make more valuable honey, but they also let you take more actions simultaneously when the cell is complete. But the tradeoff is they take longer to construct.

Out in the woodlands, players’ forage tokens will move around from flower to flower, gathering nectar and pollen. Pollen is a side currency that can be sold on the market. Nectar can only be added to your hive if you have an open cell that is structured properly to hold it. For example, wild honey can be held in a cell constructed from 3 tiles, like so: Sweetwater Grove is all a buzz, with honey on the lips and minds of all the woodland creatures. Thanks to the hard work of accountants like you, the Queen’s honey stand is up and running. But now fall has arrived, and winter is coming! Her Majesty has given Her workers new responsibilities: harvest and sell fruit from the fall crop, decorate the hive with colorful autumn leaves, cap and store nectar for winter, and send retiring workers to be honored at the harvest festival before the sun sets on Sweetwater Grove. So strike up the waggle dance, it’s time for business!_x000D_ Produce. Here you will place your fan token on any space in your hive and all nectar tiles that it touches will produce one honey token. The honey stays on that spot, so until you are able to spend the honey those nectar tiles will not produce more. The gameplay in Honey Buzz revolves around your personal hive which you create from hexagonal tiles. Each tile has two hexagons and every player starts the game with the same tiles arranged in the same shape. There is also a field where different types of nectar are laid out in a grid. Each player has one bee token that can move around and collect nectar throughout the game. I feel the exact same way. The production is through the roof, but I’m not sure if the deluxe version is really worth it in this case, which is kinda rare for me (collector brain being what it is). But I’ll add an even stronger caveat to your caveats and say I think Honey Buzz is basically a 2-player game for me. But at that player count I do think it’s a fun series of interconnected mechanisms and I enjoyed engaging the puzzle of its gameplay.

Decree. This acts as wild allowing you to take one of the other 5 actions already mentioned. It costs five coins to take it but gives you some flexibility in gameplay options. Final Score: 3.5 Stars – Well produced euro game with an unexpectedly important spatial puzzle. The delayed gratification of triggering actions later is interesting, even if it leads to some longer turns throughout the game.