A Tale of Two Hives: Wax Marches Play Reports!
I had the great privilege of facilitating a few games of The Wax Marches this week! Thank you to the playtesters, whose blogs will be linked below.
As a bottom line up front, what a pleasure to finally get to stretch this game's legs a little bit - this has been a monumentally fun project and the four months from initial playtest to draft release to today has been a total whirlwind. I feel much more confidence in the chitinous bones of this game - my players really took to it incredibly well - and I think the next steps are both manageable and exciting.
Final board state after our Thursday playtest
Wednesday Playtest:
We worked through the game procedures by the book. We started with a Colony II, meaning that the initial hive population was only 2 but we got to start in early spring. We met Queen Hestia, a Competitive and Phlegmatic young queen who excitedly developed plans and schemes to parasitize other beehives in the region.
Our scouts were:
- Bonnie, who relies on her sense of smell
- Peridot, who misses the days of being a Nurse Bee
- Alistair, who secretly thinks that she would be the best swarm scout
- Julian, who is worried that the next generation of bees doesn't have the mettle for foraging
We worked through a guided meditation about this new queen and her new ideas about growing the hive and the change of season. The bees agreed that their priorities were to avoid parasite infestation and subsistence, then with any leftover resources they could try to create some surplus honey and thermoregulate the hive.
During the scouting day, we had an extremely windy Dawn and a mellow Dusk. During the Dawn, a rival beehive and Drone Congregation Area were discovered in the forest to the Southeast. The Dusk was much milder and less eventful!
The Scouts gave their Waggle Dance reports, and eventually decided to actively forage for pollen in a richly populated Valley area with signs of bear activity and an abandoned greenhouse area with slim pickings for pollen, perfect as a trojan horse to try to parasitize the newly-discovered rival hive. Unfortunately, neither area was particularly safe to forage so the hive ended up with a meager 4 Action Points to try to handle the challenges of the season.
The hive attempted to sneak a 2 of hearts into the rival hive and rolled a 1, tragically failing and wasting both the Pollen and the Action Point. Two more Action Points were spent creating Honeycomb and the last Action Point was spent to try to thermoregulate the hive, reducing the difficulty to 6-in-8. With another low roll, the hive failed to stay warm [Note - I applied this rule incorrectly, this should have directly decremented the hive population, I instead used the rule for failing to cool the hive, which hinders all other tasks for the season]. The hive then failed to feed itself, failed to create surplus honey, and only managed to avoid a parasite infestation because the population collapsed. Nature is a cruel mistress!
Thursday Playtest:
We begin again in early spring, meeting Queen SCF (Security Check Fail, because Alex's bee name generator did not function properly), a Conservationist and Melancholic young queen in a hive in the crossroads of forest, foothills, grasslands, and mountains - we used the map I generated with the playtest's generation procedure. Unfortunately, due to a nasty Complication roll, she begins her reign ill with an unknown malady, and the Nurse bees worry that she will not survive the year in her condition.
Pictured: Queen Security Check Fail, long may she reign
Her intrepid scouts are:
- Sandwich, who loves the smell of human food
- Bingo, who believes in the honesty of her hive's drones
- Julian, who worries that the next generation isn't ready to forage or scout (thanks again to gulash for reprising his role)
- Aster II, an avid fan of the rainy foothills
- And Tee Dee, a mysterious bee who is believed to hail from another hive
The scouts are worried for their queen - they know it's a hard row to hoe nursing her to health, but they are committed to the effort and willing to put aside other priorities to support her.
The weather during the scouting day was routinely mild and the scouts ranged fairly far and wide over the course of the day, discovering two separate rival hives (note: need to explicitly state in the rule document when to initially roll for rival hive population) and several Drone Congregation Areas. Aster II also found a lovely meadow north of the hive, in the grasslands, that can be used for simplified navigation going forward.
As the scouting day transitioned into the Waggle Dance, political coalitions began to form among the worker bees. Some, led by Julian, believe that the activity of the humans is what is making the Queen ill. Others, led by Tee Dee, believe that humans can be a source of resource wealth and even medicine. The hive eventually decided to forage the Meadow and a corner of town with some accessible Pine Resin, a valuable construction material.
A note on rules - we discussed that it wasn't entirely clear what purpose distinguished the Waggle Dance from the worker placement function of the Hive Management phase, and the group agreed that it was reasonable for a free action to be taken in an area being actively foraged (aka, the winning flower patch in the Waggle Dance). That was consonant with my design principles, so I agreed and will definitely roll that back into the core rules. I wonder how differently our experience on Wednesday would have gone with these free actions! The hive may have survived, but it would not have affected the failed parasitism attempt so the hive would have probably limped forward to late spring.
Our hive generated 6 Action Points, which were invested in Honeycomb, Brood Comb, preventing parasite infestation, and a whopping three points were invested in nursing the Queen back to health. Tee Dee discovered an amateur beekeeper and pitched to the group that we could steal medicine from the domesticated hive. Brilliant use of time and resources!
As the season ends, the hive stays warm, feeds itself, grows some new larvae, prevents an infestation, and sets its young Queen on a path to recovery! The hive did not manage to create enough honeycomb to attempt the creation of surplus honey, but this was still a successful early Spring!
Since a few players encountered Drone Congregation Areas, they got to share rumors of what the honest (but dim) drones heard on the grapevine; Julian has heard that "MEN ARE BAD FOR BEES" and Bingo has heard that "MOTHS TRY TO TALK TO BEES WITH WINGS". Finally, Queen SCF found that the hive was incredibly judicious with their resources and was quite satisfied with the first season of her reign, bringing her overall disposition up to +1.
Reflections
It's been a real joy to have this at the table. I feel like the Waggle Dance phase captured the exact feeling that I want - players each got a chance to hold court and improvise a nature scene, showing why their sisters should dedicate time and energy to foraging their flowerpatch, and they leaned hard into the concept of coopetition. Hive management seems like it is progressing in the right direction, but both tests today took place with small hive populations and new players so the question of scalability is definitely still on my mind.
Julian's player has asked a fair question - he noted that it was fun to discover details about map regions during the scouting phase, but whose job is it to store that data and how should it shape future seasons? This raised to me a related question - Sandwich discovered a beehive in the outskirts of a town, which she described as "shrinking"; it seems like that area should maybe decay into Piedmont over time? It would be interesting to see the map boundaries around towns change, but the game takes place on the scale of seasons and years so it doesn't seem like climate change would necessarily come into play.
It could be interesting for some biome descriptor results to automatically trigger clocks that affect the surrounding area, but would that be too much overhead? Is that even interesting if the players don't have tools to exercise their own agency on the environment?
I think the game still has some tuning and tweaking around the edges, but it feels like the right core design decisions have coalesced into place. My players are still providing feedback that I will hopefully roll into the next draft release - I definitely have missing procedural steps that need to be reviewed and cleaned up, but this game is definitely playable! And it's fun! What's better than that!
Thanks for reading, and I hope to start hearing more stories about people getting The Wax Marches to the table!