Design Diary

September 12: Convert, Dancing, Honey Making, and My Favorite Mechanism

I’m ending my jaunt through Apiary’s actions with one of my favorite mechanisms (and a video about my favorite mechanisms!)

The Convert action is somewhat simple on the surface: It’s where you trade resources into other (or better) resources. Wax and honey are the special resources in Apiary, and you can’t get them from planetary exploration—you need to convert pollen, fiber, and water into them. You can do as many conversions as the strength of the worker placed on Convert.

It’s when you place a strength-4 worker for the first time on Convert that something really special happens: You create a dance! This is inspired by the famous “waggle dance” that bees do. In Apiary, the dances represent instructions to other bees. You’ll choose from a pile of tokens to determine how the conversion works, placing the tokens on dance tiles that were randomly set up at the beginning of the game. For example, you could create the Dance of (Pollen) and (Victory) for Remembrance (pay 1 pollen and 1 VP to gain 1 honey.

Of course, the other bees remember who created the dance, so whenever any player uses the new conversion, you gain a Queen’s Favor.

Before I get to my video, I wanted to mention that Apiary designer Connie Vogelmann, who is a beekeeper, sent us some honey last year!  It’s quite delicious. Connie’s knowledge of bees is baked into the game from start to finish.

Here’s the first of several videos I’m filming about Apiary (including one I’m filming with Connie today about games we recommend if you like Apiary, some of which directly inspired Apiary). You’ll also get plenty of videos from content creators on October 2.

September 11: Exploration, Queen’s Favor, and Player Interaction

As spacefaring bees, you aren’t just hanging out in orbit—you’re traveling the stars! With the Explore action, players move a shared QueenShip miniature (representing the entire Mellifera fleet) a number of spaces up to the strength of the placed worker (plus that of another worker on the action, if any).

All 15 planets start face-down, though they have face-up explore tokens on them so you know part of the benefit you can gain. If you move the QueenShip to an unexplored planet, you’ll gain the explore token (and its benefit), then reveal the planet tile.

This is when something beautifully thematic happens. Instead of exploiting the planet and leaving it worse than when you arrived, you pollinate it! You’ll choose a basic resource (pollen, fiber, or water) and place a token on the planet, where it acts like an icon on that planet for the rest of the game. Only then do you gain that planet’s benefits (printed and newly assigned). Not only does this improve the planet for its unseen inhabitants, but it’s also now enhanced for other players—or you—when they visit in the future. I LOVE this!

Some planets even have powerful benefits that you can gain if you placed a strength-4 worker on the Explore action—not every planet, but some of them.

You can probably start to see that there’s a wide variety of player interactions in Apiary. No, it’s not a game of space battles between beefy bees. But there are plenty other forms of interaction and tension in the game: bumping, exploring, gaining desirable hex and carve tiles, hibernation comb benefits/majority, and a special benefit I’ll describe tomorrow.

The Explore action is the primary way of gaining basic resources in Apiary, so it’s a frequently used action. In fact, at times you might find yourself gaining even more resources than you can fit onto your tiles, as your capacity is limited. Rather than losing out on those resources entirely, Connie added a mechanism called “Queen’s Favor”: At the end of your turn, any resource tokens that can’t fit onto your ship are donated to the Queen, which advances your token on the Queen’s Favor track, resulting in end-game VP. This isn’t a throwaway benefit—a legitimate strategy in Apiary is to consistently gain more resources than you can hold so you can earn as many as 25 VP from the Queen’s Favor track at the end of the game.

I’ll be back tomorrow for my other favorite action in Apiary!

September 10: Frames, Growth, and Research

In previous posts I’ve mentioned hibernation and hive expansion; today I’ll expand upon those topics, starting with the Grow action.

Each player can have up to 4 active workers at a time, so if you ever want another worker, you can place a worker on the Grow action. For each strength and pollen you spend, you can gain a 1-strength worker. You also have the option to spend 2 strength and any 2 basic resources to gain a frame. This is an extension to your hive mat, giving you 4 new hexes onto which you can later place tiles.

If you place a 4-strength worker on the Grow action, you get a special bonus: You get to flip over your faction mat to the upgraded side. Each faction is different, with their upgrades including instant, ongoing, and end-game benefits.

Close to the Grow action is the Research action. Placing a worker here lets you view seed cards from the deck equal to the strength of your worker, selecting 1 card to keep and discarding the rest.

You can play seed cards before or after your action on any of your turns, either gaining a powerful benefit from the card or simply gaining 1 of any basic resource (pollen, fiber, or water).

Another function of seed cards (instead of playing them for a resource or printed benefit) is to tuck them under your hive. You can place a strength-4 worker on the Research action to plant the seed (tuck it under your hive), leaving an end-game benefit revealed. Each hive can hold 2 planted seed cards by default; adding frames can expand that capacity to 2 more planted seed cards.

As much as I love the actions described so far, I’ve saved my favorites for Monday and Tuesday. Join me then to learn about Explore and Convert!

September 9: Ships, Tiles, and Rolling Realms promo

At the beginning of a game of Apiary, each player gains a combination of 1 of 5 hive mats and 1 of 20 faction tiles to create asymmetric pairings. Factions provide special abilities and determine your starting workers and resources, while hive mats show where you can build (you must always build adjacent to existing tiles on your hive mat).

To ease new players into the game, Connie selected 5 of the simpler—yet still competitive—factions as starter factions, denoted with a green star. You place the faction tile on a specific slot on your hive mat, building out from there with tiles during the game.

The hive mats were partially inspired by Ark Nova, which features zoo mats that feel quite different from each other in shape and types of benefits gained from covering specific hexes.

With so many combinations, it’s a lot to balance. We ran hundreds of playtests (local and blind) and analyzed the data. It also helps that the asymmetry is a nudge in a certain direction—a little boost to encourage different strategies—not a completely different way to play.

There are actually two actions in the game where players can gain tiles to place on their hive mat. The first is the Advance action, where you can gain 1 of 3 types of tiles. Connie describes some of the early inspirations for these tiles here:

“I also had three types of tiles that players could add to their hives – at the time, I just referred to them as “Immediate” (red), “Ongoing” (yellow), and “End-Game” (purple) tiles. (These were inspired by Glass Road, which I still think is a criminally underrated Uwe Rosenberg game.) These tiles ultimately became the “Development,” “Recruit,” and “Carving” tiles that that are present in the final version of the game.”

I’ll return to the Carving tiles in a moment, as they’re now linked to a different action. Instead, on the Advance action there are Farm tiles (for storage and income) in addition to Recruit tiles (engine-building) and Development tiles (powerful instant benefits).

The strength of the worker you place (and potentially other workers present) matters for which tiles you have access to at the Advance action. The greater the strength, the more options you have. Placing a 4-strength worker here also gives you a bonus of 3 VP (the simplest of all 4-strength bonuses).

We also included some Easter eggs on a few of the tiles (thank you, Kwanchai). The one on the right is particularly meaningful to me, as this we had to say goodbye to my sweet boy of 16+ years, Biddy–he’s in many of our games, and he’s perched on the hexagonal cargo crate here. He was as curious and inquisitive in real life as he looks here:

If you want to add an end-game scoring tile to your hive, you need to place a 4-strength worker on the Carve action. These are similar to the Monument tiles in Tzolk’in, as there’s a limited number of them preset face-up at the beginning of the game. You can build towards one or more of them, but make sure to get the tile you want before your opponents! Carve is the only action that requires a 4-strength worker; all other actions can be used by workers of any strength.

I love seeing how the asymmetric hives expand in various directions throughout the game. They can even expand beyond their initial boundaries thanks to Frame mats—I’ll talk about them tomorrow.

Before I sign off for today, I wanted to share that Karel reveals the Rolling Realms promo for Apiary on today’s episode of The Mill! (It isn’t quite live yet as I’m posting this, but it will be soon: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMillShow/videos)

September 8: Worker Placement

Apiary features a twist on one of my favorite mechanisms, worker placement. On most turns, you’ll choose a worker from your active pool, place it on 1 of the 6 actions on the board, pay a cost, and gain a benefit. The twist emerges from the values on the workers, and not just in isolation. Here’s Connie to talk about how this mechanism evolved during the early design process.

Connie:

I made my first prototype in March of 2019. The first few versions of Apiary had a map, which your bees explored to discover fields and collect bonuses. Players took the fields home with them, placing them into a private tableau (the theming was…loose). Fortunately, the map didn’t stick around for long. Unfortunately, the concept of “collecting” fields and placing them into a private tableau did. In fact, the question of “how to collect resources” was one of the last pieces of the game to be resolved, undergoing significant changes during development with Stonemaier.

Inspired by the Voyages of Marco Polo, I also assigned costs to actions based on worker strength. For some reason, this was in the form of money, so players were gaining and spending coins throughout the game (my friends affectionately called these “bee bucks”). This also meant that for a brief period of time, your bees were collecting fields that (you guessed it) generated money. Again, the theming was loose.

Fortunately for all of us, “bee bucks” were short lived. Within a month or two of designing, I had gotten rid of the money and the map, and settled into worker placement as the core mechanism, focused around managing your workers and building a beehive.

Two other early elements cycled in and out of the game quickly:

• Early versions of the game used d6 dice – meaning a bee would need to be used 6 times before it died. Simply put, this was too slow. If an average euro game is around 20 or 25 turns, taking six turns to age and “kill” a single worker took too long to making this mechanism a core part of the game. So fairly quickly, I started using 4-sided workers, which accelerated the pace of the game significantly.
• Early versions of the game were also more heavily inspired by real-life bees. In a beehive, bees largely differentiate their tasks by age, with younger bees rearing new bees, middle-aged bees taking care of hive management, and older bees foraging. So in Apiary, I tried to set up a similar structure, with low-numbered bees being better at breeding, and high-numbered bees being better at foraging. This ultimately didn’t translate very well into gameplay, as it ended up feeling far too prescriptive. It didn’t take too long until I scrapped that idea, and made it so that higher-numbered bees were just universally stronger.

Jamey:

This is the first aspect of the workers gaining strength over time: The strength of the worker you place matters in terms of the strength of the benefit, whether it’s the range of the QueenShip, the tile you can choose from, the number of cards you draw, etc. Some actions have spaces for multiple workers, so your newly placed worker’s strength might add to the strength of another worker already on that action (I use this a little in Euphoria). It’s also for this reason that we made the board double sided to scale for different player counts (1-3 on one side and 4-5 players on the other).

During the development process, one area I encouraged Connie to explore is for each action to have a particularly powerful benefit if you placed a 4-strength worker there. I’ll discuss these when I go through each action in future posts, but I can say that these special benefits became one of my favorite mechanisms in the game.

Connie:

One of the aspects of Apiary that took the most time was figuring out how to manage the worker placement element of the game – with the “bee” theme thoroughly entrenched into the game’s design, I never really considered having worker placement spots “block” other players. Bees don’t block each other from a field, so why should workers block each other here? In addition, I wanted there to be some form of positive player interaction, and some tactical element in deciding when and how to place your workers. With these concepts in mind, I went through a lot of trial and error in figuring out how the bees should interact; in several versions of the game, bees went into a common pool at the end of each turn. I eventually settled into a “bump” mechanism, inspired in large part by Charterstone.

Jamey:

This bumping mechanism thrives in Apiary, as it touches upon some wonderful areas of player interaction. Do you choose to bump an opponent’s worker, saving them a retrieve turn (and increasing their workers strength…which also pushes that worker closer to hibernation)? Do you bump your own worker? Do you place your worker somewhere that it’s likely to be bumped?

On top of this, when a strength 4 worker is bumped or retrieved, it’s time for them to hibernate for the rest of the game! You’ll set aside the 4-sided miniature, representing the hibernating worker with a cardboard token that you place in the Hibernation Comb. There you’ll gain an instant benefit and position yourself for end-game majority scoring in that portion of the Comb.

On the production side of things, we worked with 3D modeler Heriberto Martinez to create the worker miniatures. Just to make sure it’s 100% clear: These aren’t dice. They’re never rolled. Rather, these are 4-sided workers that gain strength when they’re retrieved or bumped.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out which way the workers should rotate and which orientation should have the 1 on top…I’m happy with the final result, and I’m curious what you think. The most noticeable aspect of these workers is also the most expensive: We discovered that the numbers weren’t entirely clear from different angles or seating positions, and clarity of the numbers on the workers is incredibly important. So we inked all of them, adding that clarity along with a gritty, Battlestar Galactica feel to them. I also ran a variety of combinations of colors (and brightness levels) through the ColorblindPal app. Most elements in the game are dual coded (unique color and shape), but the workers are all the same, but I think I found a good combination for some types of colorblindness.

That’s worker placement in Apiary! I’ll be back tomorrow with more stories and reveals.

September 7: Apiary’s Origin Story

I love learning the origin stories for ideas and the early stages of projects, and fortunately Apiary designer Connie Vogelmann has documented some of those anecdotes for us. Today I’ll share a few parts of the story that Connie shared with me, including by how Apiary came to be a Stonemaier game.

Connie:

I first had the idea for Apiary in early 2019. The initial concept for the game – what if you had workers that aged and died – came about virtually simultaneously with bee theming (the game wasn’t moved into outer space until much later).

A few friends and I were discussing the concept of getting new workers in worker placement games, and how it’s often a less interesting decision than it should be.

Take the “Recruit Lieutenant” Quest in Lords of Waterdeep: if you complete the quest, you gain an extra worker for the remainder of the game. But the Quest is expensive – it costs 8 resources and gives you no points. If you get the quest in Round 1, then it’s almost a no-brainer to complete. If you get the quest toward the middle or end of the game, it’s not even worth considering. The interesting decision point – where you have to really think about whether to get another worker – really only exists for a short moment in time.

I kept thinking: what if deciding when and whether to get a new worker was an ongoing decision, not a “one-and-done” choice? What if the primary focus of the game was on managing the inflow and outflow of a pool of workers, and not of gaining them as a static resource? Village and Teotihuacan had already  incorporated this concept to an extent, but neither were quite as dynamic as what I was envisioning.

During the same time, I was preparing to keep bees – my grandpa had kept bees for most of his life, and I had fond memories of “helping” him harvest honey when I was young, spinning the honey extractor, bottling honey, and sticking his “from the Apiary of H.W. Vogelmann” labels on the jars. My partner David and I were looking into buying our first house: soon I would finally have a yard in which to keep bees, so I had been gradually preparing for that endeavor.

From there the two concepts clicked almost instantly: in a beehive, each individual worker (yes, they’re called workers!) lives only a few short weeks. Somehow, each individual bee acts for the good of the hive, sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the communal “organism.” The queen continues to breed new bees, and as the new bees emerge, they instantly and miraculously assign themselves to different tasks, seemingly knowing what the hive needs at any given time.

At this point, I had virtually no game design experience – David and I had tried a (very) brief foray into co-design a few months prior, in which we learned: (1) David does not want to be a game designer; (2) I love designing games; and (3) we absolutely cannot design games together. But – being either wise or naïve – I set out to make a midweight euro game as my first design.

I had been planning to bring Apiary to Stonemaier’s Design Day in 2020, which was ultimately postponed until 2021. As 2021 dawned and the world gradually opened up again, I began preparing in earnest for Design Day. I set Design Day as my benchmark: come hell or highwater, I was going to get Apiary into the best place I possibly could before that event (I really do work best on a deadline). I was planning to use Design Day as a “test” – if the game was received well, then I was going to start pitching it to publishers. If the game fell flat, I was going to shelve my design aspirations (at least for the time being), and go back to being a “regular” board game enthusiast. At this point in time, I should also take a moment to thank David, who helped me do approximately a million playtests leading up to Design Day, as well as manage the accompanying anxiety and self-doubt.

A few weeks before Design Day, I consulted local designer Elizabeth Hargrave for guidance, then summoned my courage and emailed Jamey, asking if there was any way he would be willing to take a look at the game during Design Day – I had been a Lead Playtester for Stonemaier for the last couple of years, so was hoping that I wasn’t a complete stranger. Jamey said he would try to look at the game during Design Day, and also encouraged me to submit it through the Stonemaier submission form.

Design Day itself was a blur – but I remember the day feeling scary, and fun. Apiary was well received by playtesters. They had lots of (great!) constructive criticism, but overall seemed to be enjoying themselves playing the game, and thought it had promise. It was exhilarating, exhausting, and exciting: I had made a game that folks were actually enjoying. For months leading up to Design Day, I had largely been playing the game over and over again with the same group – seeing new faces experiencing and discovering the game for the first time was a delight.

I came away from Design Day feeling energized – I was ready to finally start putting myself out there, and pitch Apiary to publishers! After Design Day, I got an email from Jamey – he hadn’t been able to see much of the game, but it sounded intriguing. The biggest problem though, was that a few bee games had come out in recent years, and the theme had become a bit crowded. Would I consider moving the game to outer space?

I vividly remember getting that email and thinking about the question for a grand total of 5 seconds – of course I would move it to space. I’m a huge sci-fi fan, and moving the game to space solved a lot of conceptual problems about the game (it would certainly help explain why bees were building technology tiles and elaborate monuments out of honey). I then spent the rest of the evening sitting around, trying to figure out how long I should wait to respond, so that it seemed like I had given the question suitably serious consideration.

Over the next month or two, Jamey and I emailed back and forth about the game, trying to troubleshoot various problems and rough patches still present in the game. During this time, I added a second refined resource to the game (wax), and, with Jamey’s guidance, streamlined out a number of clunkier elements present in the version I brought to Design Day. After a few more iterations, the game was ready for formal Stonemaier submission, and I prepared the nicest prototype I could muster, to mail off to St. Louis. (Pepper-kitty was “helping.”) The rest, as they say, is history!

Jamey:

I’m going to rejoin the story here to add a few details of my own:

• At Design Day 2021, Apiary was one of the top-rated games. I spoke with a friend who played it there, and he spoke highly of it.
• As Connie mentioned, I was a little concerned about just focusing on bees, especially due to the existence of another bee-themed, worker-placement, hive building game I love, Honey Buzz, which was designed by local friend Paul Salomon. I felt that the game could benefit from a twist on the theme, and I had recently read the excellent novel Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which imagines a planet populated by large, highly intelligent, sentient spiders instead of humans.
• Connie really impressed me during our early correspondence about the game, but I knew she was the real deal—or, at least, someone who would be awesome to work with—when I received the submission prototype from her. It was, hands down, the most thoughtful submission prototype we’ve ever played. By that I mean that Connie did an incredible job at making everything super easy to find and figure out: Components were separated into labeled bags, the rules were impeccably written, and the components served their function perfectly. Nothing was flashy—it was just incredibly functional, which is so important for a submission prototype. Plus, we had a great time playing it.

We didn’t delve into gameplay today, but the rules are still available for you to skim through if you can’t wait until tomorrow when I’ll talk about the core worker-placement mechanism in Apiary.

September 6: Teaser Trailer, the Box, and Launch Signups

After nearly 2 years since we first saw the Apiary prototype, I’m so excited to reveal this new game from designer Connie Vogelmann!

Apiary is a 1-5 player, medium weight, competitive worker-placement game that plays in around 60-90 minutes. Each player represents a group of highly advanced, spacefaring honeybees who expand their ships with hex-shaped tiles by taking actions like Explore, Carve, Advance, Grow, Convert, and Research.

I’ll discuss these actions and the evolution of the game over the next 8 days, but if you want to “spoil” how the game works, the full rulebook is available right now.

In addition to the rulebook, we put particular care into the accessibility and onboarding for Apiary. In addition to the rulebook (which was heavily proofread, including in late stages by people who had no context for the game, and augmented by a table of contents on first page and a reference key on the last page), we included icon guides and game aids for each player, a 1-page teaching guide, a Dized interactive tutorial, and an upcoming Watch It Played video. Even the insert and tray are designed to make setup quick and simple (and yes, the insert fits sleeved cards).

Today we’re also revealing the box, which—along with all components in Apiary—is illustrated by Kwanchai Moriya. The box shows the story of the honeybees evolving from their humble roots on Earth to the keenly intelligent, tech-savvy Mellifera. Every first-printing copy of the Apiary box is individually numbered, and the size is 296x296x75mm.

Apiary is set to launch on our webstore on October 4, shipping to customers throughout October. We’ll also have limited copies at Essen Spiel. For every launch notification request we receive via this signup form, Stonemaier Games will donate $1 to Pollinator.org, the Center for Native Pollinator Conservation, or Heifer International (honeybee gift).

Localization partners for Apiary include Maldito (Spanish), Ghenos (Italian), and Matagot (French); if you want this game in another language, please contact your local publisher of choice to express your interest.

Today is also the debut of the teaser trailer for Apiary, featuring a voiceover by Megan Selke, video editing by JC Trombley, and music by Joel Winbigler. Feel free to watch it and share it with your favorite bee-loving, game-playing friend!

Also, big thanks to photographer Netinho da Costa, whose photos you’ll see throughout these design diaries.

Addendum: Here’s today’s Facebook livecast, in which I talk a lot about Apiary: