Welcome Our New Insect Overlords in the Bee-Based Board Game Apiary

You’re chasing multiple goals at once in Apiary, offering different paths to victory, although I don’t think you can ignore any of them entirely. You start with a hive board that’s mostly empty, so you can buy tiles of four different types (including those in the Carve action I mentioned above) that give you income, resource storage, one-time bonuses, or recurring powers. Covering your entire starting board is worth 8 points, and you can expand the board with four-tile pieces that get you 8 more points if you fill those too. Carve tiles can award you substantial victory point bonuses, while some other tiles give you 1-2 points in addition to their powers. There’s a deck of ‘research’ cards that give you single-use powers or that you can later ‘plant’ to get end-game points, although planting cards is, in my opinion, needlessly difficult to do as a regular action. Placing the most hibernation tokens in any one section of the comb gives you an area-control bonus. There’s also a track called the Queen’s Favor that gives you points for advancing along it. It’s a little point salad-y, but other than the research cards there’s enough synergy across the actions and points that the rest come together naturally.

The bump/strengthen mechanism also gives the game more interaction than the typical worker-placement game, many of which—even some I like—are essentially multiplayer solitaire, or maybe where the worst that happens is someone occupies an action space you want so you can’t use it. In Apiary, no space is ever blocked by another player’s bee, but bumping them also makes them stronger. If you want to use a space where someone has a strength 3 bee, you’d be giving them the upgrade to strength 4, which means the next time they use that bee, they get to do the most powerful actions on the board. You’re giving them a small but nonzero benefit, so maybe you’d rather hold off a turn or two before doing so.

Apiary promises a play time of 60-90 minutes, with up to five players able to play (the board has two sides, one for two to three players and solo, the other for four to five players with more spaces available), and I think that’s fair once everyone knows the game. Turns are very quick—you either move one bee from your little board to the main one, or you retrieve them all, and none of the actions takes that long to resolve, even ones with multiple parts. For example, certain Development tiles, one of the three types you can get from the Advance action (as in, advance your apian civilization), give you an immediate bonus action to resolve, so those turns might take twice as long. They’re still very quick, and the game-end condition is easy to get to once everyone starts their engines buzzing. (Sorry.)

I’ve played this more since first listing it on the top ten games of the year, and I’ve found that while I understand the game more and can play it better, I didn’t feel the compulsion to play again that I get with the best games. I think the main mechanic of bump-and-hibernate is clever and most of the game is well-designed (as is the Automa for solo play once you get the hang of it), other than that Research card bit, which feels like someone added an art deco room to a Victorian home. It also looks great—the worker bees are very impressively detailed, although the giant queen bee token you use on the Explore area is like the curly parsley on your dinner plate, “just for looks.”. Apiary’s a real honey of a game—and it makes me excited to try designer Connie Vogelmann’s newest one, Wyrmspan, a dragon-themed reboot of Wingspan that is about to go on sale as I write this review—but I just couldn’t connect with it like I thought I would after the first play.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.