Honeybees Progress Update July 2026
What a busy June, good heavens! This month been quietly productive on the Honeybees front. I completed a first (and instantly obsoleted) draft of Queen Bee Ambitions and Temperaments at the beginning of the month in order to snap a baseline of the twelve tendencies that I originally proposed in What Makes a Honeybee Queen. I then sat back down and worked through my core game loop from scratch and had some friends review what I called "V3" of the game procedure. Their feedback helped me flush out some bad design assumptions that I had taken for granted and I am putting finishing touches on "V4", which I hope to bring to either physical or virtual playtest this summer.
As a quick design history -
V1 - Original Bad Bee-Hiviour Framework
The first playtests in April were basically untouched from the original game framework I proposed last November. This was a hex crawl with players trying to manage a few competing inventory minigames, picking up playing cards from the map and underbaked basebuilding and worker placement mechanics.
V2 - Introduction of a Radial Map
I did some solo playtesting with the ideas that came out of some hypomanic episodes in May - this is where we introduced a true radial map and started to look more critically at how bees navigate in real life. After the solo playtests, I did some rubber ducking with my neighbor and found myself unsatisfied, which led to the next rebuild exercise.
V3 - Introduction of Deckbuilding and Trick Taking
This version still had distinct "worker placement" and "basebuilding" steps, but changed the Waggle Dance concept from "scoring hands" (poker and then cribbage) to a blind trick taking game which also incorporates a voting mechanic. The foraging steps also changed significantly and began to incorporate elements of deckbuilding. It should be noted that this extensive overhaul came about because I had started reading Dr. Thomas Seeley's Honeybee Democracy, an incredibly book about swarm decisionmaking. More on this later!
V3 felt very promising, but the worker placement and basebuilding steps were beginning to feel vestigial and incongruous with the other mechanics at play. The idea behind them felt sound, but I couldn't reach a point where they felt like they added more than they distracted from the game experience. Back to the mines!
V4 - Objectives and Stakes
I was recommending Mindstorm Press's Quick Stakes for Tense Situations post to a friend when I realized that it might thread the needle for my basebuilding and worker placement problems. Each season (especially once I separated spring into an early and late season), the hive faces slightly different environmental pressures as it grows, reproduces, and prepares for winter. I could either try to incentivize that in a heavy handed way with the engine design, or I could directly codify it as seasonal challenges. This is the version of the game I am working to complete and playtest this summer. The major overhauls to the game engine will also require another pass at the Ambition mechanics, but I'm excited to buckle up for that development process.
You can see here that the idea of surplus honey and growing the population go from sort of mechanically divorced "worker placement" and "basebuilding" steps to competing objectives that the hive must direct resources to and from in response to environmental and internal pressures. This feels truer to the real feedback loops present in hive decisionmaking.
Zoom Out
This game has changed a lot since November! What started as an insect-sized Mythic Bastionland has really become its own beast, but I'm glad that the core concept of the game has persisted.
Outside the Game
I finished Honeybee Democracy last night and I know that I will be chewing on it for the foreseeable future. I initially started to read it to clarify some of my game development woes - while it certainly helped me there, it also inspired several other game concepts that I specifically do not want to pursue within the scope of Honeybees.
One idea I'd like to explore is more of a LARP to act as a deeper investigation of group decisionmaking. Dr. Seeley argues that a honeybee swarm functions analogously to a primate brain, and I think it would be fun to apply the constraints and principles of Schwarmbienen auf wohnungssuche, or swarm bees out househunting, to a group of people in the woods.
Another idea that would compete with the ludological space of the Queen Bee Ambitions is specifically role playing as a hive that is being researched and tested by an aspiring scientist, so you have an asymmetric game wherein some number of players design experiment scenarios and some other number of players role play as the beehive under scrutiny. This feels like a more strictly educational game that could have some legs but I would need to think harder about what implementation looks like.
That's all for today! I'll keep plugging away at V4, then work through a revision pass on the Queen Ambitions, and then probably consolidate my random tables into a more playtest-ready tool to share out for a better ashcan document. Unfortunately, last night in my insomnia I also had a horrible brainwave about a new framework for the surveying game so I may need to put pen to paper on that. Thanks for reading!