Elf Creek Games | Honey Buzz | Board Game | Ages 10+ | 1-4 Players | 45-90 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

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. 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. What it definitely isn’t is a cute little game about adorable bees making delicious honey. I mean, it is, except for, you know, the cutthroat capitalism. Nectar Caps Module – Put caps on your nectar cells to prepare for winter. Nectar caps are worth lots of points and might even earn you a trophy, but they slow down your economy because capped nectar tiles cannot produce honey!_x000D_ The start of the game is a little slow, as you only have one worker bee. If you are the third player in a 3-4 player game, it immediately limits your options. If you want to place a bee to claim the same hive tile as someone else, you must place one extra beeple in a “beeline”. The game really does build up in pace as you start to recall workers and in turn give birth to more worker bees.

Each player begins with a player aid, board, 4 starting hive tokens, 10 beeples, a forage and fan token. Beeples and coins are assigned based on starting player. 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! 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:

Honey Buzz Deluxe Components

Forage: move your foraging bee up to one space to collect nectar or pollen. If you want to move farther you must pay a coin for each additional space. To collect nectar, you must have the correct completed cell for that type of nectar. Depending on how you place tiles, different nectar cells will be formed. There are some games that generate some real hype and excitement when they start to make their way around the community of gamers. One such game has had a lot of discussion recently and has risen to the top of some lists in 2020. I guess you could say, there is some real “buzz” around this one! Let’s take a look and see if we feel the same way about it! What there is though is a lot of strategy. And most of that comes from the interaction between your tiles and the actions you can take. The bulk of the game is centered around creating empty cells and filling them with nectar, but there is a lot to consider when doing so as the tiles you choose will dictate your actions later in the game. First off, the pattern around the outside of the cell will change which game of nectar you can place there. Each tile is orange between the hexes and white on the ends. Acaia nectar requires the most white as part of the pattern and therefore requires the most tiles to complete. But it is the most valuable to begin the game. Wildflower is enclosed entirely around orange outlines so it can be completed with just three tiles. But it has the lowest value. New Bee: Add a bee from the bank to the nursery. The next time you recall your bees, this new one is added to your supply.

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. 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.

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: 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_ 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!