Sectors, Vectors, and Sorties, Oh My!
Last week I pushed out Goodbye Hexes and enjoyed a weekend of relatively free time. Unfortunately, that free time only let the bee madness fester - I was happy with the concept of navigating by sun direction or by landmark, but I was still not satisfied with the idea of unit steps. I went back to basics and read a few articles about how honeybee scouts actually explore their environment, and this paper in particular helped me to articulate the friction I was feeling.
The frustration I'd identified was that there was not really a distance scale that squared the flying speed of a honeybee against the idea of bumbling a mile at a time in an hour. I spent a day or two chewing on this friction with a few friends and one asked me to articulate what this granular time tracking was doing for the game. This question helped me to zoom out from this step-by-step procedure and brought me to what I tested today at my kitchen table. I'll give a quick primer on my thought process and then provide a play report.
Sectors, Vectors, and Sorties
I think the structural breakthrough that got me out of my funk was changing the Sundial from a prop to a map feature. This came out of a very fun proposal from a friend in the MCDM discord who pitched:
no! I want this to be a thing where you tape the map to a sheet of cardboard and put a pushpin in it at the edge of the map for Sun Location, then tie a string around it, and you either travel up or down the string or swing it around
I loved this idea even if I didn't expect it to be the final direction for the game. I superimposed four sun orientations onto the map itself, conveniently dividing the map into sectors and radii. The savvy reader will note that this firmly places us in polar coordinate territory.
The other breakthrough came from this friend asking if I'd considered whether all of the players have to explore on the same day. This freed up the mental real estate to think about exploration turns more holistically, as entire flight plans, sorties that start and end at the hive.
An initial sketch of the idea of flight plans of varying difficulty that helped me think through how the bees might ever get out to the edge of the map
It also opened up design space for these turns to include sort of a gamble, or a push-your-luck element. When exploration centered unit steps, the water management subsystem was sort of a dull step in the procedure. If players want to make a more aggressive sortie than their current water store supports, then they can essentially bet on whether they will forage enough resource on their path to make it home in one non-desiccated piece.
Elements of a Flight Plan
Scout Bees get four sorties per season to explore the environment and bring information back to their sisters. These sorties happen at Dawn, Morning, Afternoon, and Dusk. Flight plans consist of Beelines, Bumbles. and Loiters.
- A Beeline is rapid movement from point to point on the map; it can be be taken toward the sun, away from the sun, or transverse to the sun. A Beeline can also be taken toward a Landmark, along a Flyway, or back to the Hive. A Beeline costs 1 Water.
- A Bumble is a slow, arcing transit during which the scout forages for Resource Cards in the area in which they are bumbling. A single Bumble transits about 60 degrees relative to the Hive and costs 1 Water per mile away from the hive.
I am still fiddling with the water economy on this operation. The challenge with polar sectors is that the area and arc increases as you get further from the center of your map, and I feel like that should be reflected in the resource cost to explore it. On the other hand I don't think it should be so doubly or triply punishing to explore far from the hive when this also carries a resource tax for the Waggle Dance phase. To be resolved!
- A Loiter is a part of the flight plan spent resting in an area. If the area is safe and the weather is not hazardous, a scout bee can observe details of an area and commit Resource Cards to memory without spending Water by Loitering.
I want to have an action that rewards players returning to spots where they have previously bumbled but I worry that this might be too free; on the other hand it still uses action/exploration economy in the grand scheme of the season. Maybe it still triggers an encounter based on the remaining cards in a space? To be resolved!
As we can see, this sortie-based approach changes the core pacing mechanic of exploration from time/hours to water management and action economy management.
The other idea that emerged was making Honey a part of the resource economy to support this design. Previously honey was treated solely as currency for the Hive.
One vision is Honey as a consumable resource that provides a one-sortie boost to players' water reserves. The other vision is as a permanent buff that increases their starting water for the season or that replenishes water between Sorties. Both could have interesting gamefeel - I think making it a consumable resource keeps it consistent and compatible with the idea of it also being a hive-scale barter currency.
So Let's Test It!
I decided to take the West Virginia map that I drafted for the last post and play out a Spring season with a fresh hive. I grabbed a blank sector map, some poker chips, a d6, a d8, and a deck of cards. Note that I had not (and have not) thoroughly formalized the exploration rules, so there may be some inconsistent or inconsistently-applied procedure steps between seasons. I played for about 90 minutes and was building the plane while I flew it.
Spring in the Dolly Sods
The first things I needed to do were create a Queen and see what was going on in the Monongahela Forest. Our hive is managed by Queen Dolly the Sanguine, and her ambition is Diversity, which focuses on the relationship of the hive to Drone Congregation Areas. As a spring hive event, I drew a Jack of Spades, so local humans are running an ad campaign to support local pollinators. I interpret this to mean that if we find any populated areas, they will be more nourishing for bees.
We will be piloting a sole scout bee for this session. Her name is Bessie and her favorite flower is mountain laurel.
Dawn
Like the first round of playtests, I started Bessie off with 3 Water in her Honey Crop.
Weather: Cool and drizzly (no severe weather)
Bessie the Bee's inaugural flight is a gentle swooping arc toward the rising sun, obscured in clouds. After a mile of bumbling out of the swamp into the forest, she sees a grand old coniferous tree on her horizon and breaks north. She decides to collect some pollen on this trip (10 of Hearts). This short trip costs 1 water and, while pollenating she collects 2 water (leaving her with 4).
Morning
Weather: Warm and Drizzly (no severe weather)
As dawn gives way to morning, Bessie sees that the drones in her hive are mainly streaming westward, likely toward a Drone Congregation area. The ambitions of her Queen ring in her mind, so she decides to investigate. She spends 1 Water to beeline with her drones to find the DCA, spying the inverted funnel of buzzing life from nearly a mile away as the swamp gives way to rolling grassy hill lands.
She decides to bumble toward the south until she is about perpendicular to the morning sun. Her bumbling takes her through an abandoned campsite in the swamp. She makes a mental note of possible food and abandoned sweets for her sisters (Jack of Diamonds) and she crosses into the Piedmont. Her bumbling reveals a tall, artificial wart rising from the hills further to the West. She also smells the musk of a ground mammal, ripe in the spring rain: she sees signs of a snoozing raccoon. She commits this to memory as well (5 of clubs) but feels herself getting fatigued, so she beelines home to her hive. She has exhausted her water supply (bumbling twice 1 mile away from home consumed 2 water, her beeline home consumed her last water).
Afternoon
Weather: Muggy and overcast (no severe weather)
Bessie is fatigued from her morning flights. She knows that her home swamp is lush with resources in the spring, so she feels confident taking a scouting flight toward the sun, bumbling hungrily. She is in luck, finding another rich patch of mountain laurel (8 of hearts) and lapping up 4 water. She is startled as, pollen drunk, she bumbles over a delightfully stinking peat bog and sees a large, pale face staring up at her. She hovers for a moment and swears that she sees the features of the face change at her presence, but she decides to leave it be and hurries back to her home to prepare for her final flight of the day. This short trip costs 1 water, so she has 3 water remaining.
Dusk
Weather: Hot and clear (no severe weather)
As evening settles, the skies finally clear and Bessie is single-mindedly interested in retrieving more information about the comings and goings of the Drone Congregation Area. She knows that these are important to her queen, Dolly, and she knows that there are resources left there to recover. She beelines to the DCA (1 water) and loiters around, watching the ebb and flow of the drones as the day ends.
She sees two more distinct flyways resolve in her vision; 1 stream of drones is clearly headed toward the setting sun and another stream of drones is clearly headed in the southerly direction that she bumbled in this morning. Since she is not actively bumbling for more resources and it is not unseasonably cold, she does not expend any water to hang around. She collects the two Aces in this area as memories and returns home along the original flyway (1 water to beeline, ends the day with 1 net water).
Resource Expedition Summary
- Bessie collected 18 pollen and her final memory was Jack of Diamonds, 5 of Clubs, Ace of Diamonds, and Ace of Hearts. The common card was a Jack of Spades, so her Waggle Dance score is 8
- Bessie left a 10 of Clubs, 2 of Diamonds, 2 of Spades, 8 of Spades, and 8 of Clubs stranded in the region. If she does not remove these cards from the map, the Keeper can use them to form a cribbage hand.
- Bessie discovered a Drone Congregation Area, but as it was the nearest to the hive Dolly is not very impressed with her.
"If the drones could find it, I bloody well hope you could find it!"
Queen Dolly is still generally upbeat but she could become frustrated and erratic if her scouts are not pursuing her ambition.
4. Bessie has some leads on where other hives could be, which could be an indicator of more Drone Congregation areas, but she will need to range further to find them. She knows this will require Honey, so she plans her Waggle Dance and Hive Expansion around this.
Waggle Dance Phase
- Bessie has 8 points and 1 adult population to work with. Removing a resource card from the map and converting it to Honey requires the rank value of the card in WD points, plus its distance from the hive. Since a lot of her exploration was adjacent to the hive, she does not have to waste any instructional points on distance and could either remove the 2 of Diamonds from the Forest or one of the black 8s from the Swamp. She figures it is worth removing a higher-value card and instructs her worker sisters to Forage in the southern Swamp, removing an 8 of Spades and creating 1 Honey. This means that she needs to build a Honey cell for her hive or else the Honey will spoil.
- Removing the 8 of Spades from the map really spoiled the Keeper's score. There are only 2 points left on the board, so the Spring is fairly stagnant for the other hives in the area. They will grow or shrink based on the resource density of their biome without making big moves this season.
Hive Expansion Phase
Bessie is pretty well constrained this Spring. She needs to feed her adult sisters and store the Honey for which they foraged. She has 18 Pollen to work with, so our playtest exchange rate works out perfectly - she spends 6 Pollen on Bee Bread to feed the adult population and 10 Pollen to build a Honey cell, leaving 2 unused Pollen to expire before Summer.
Reflections So Far
I think this is weird, and cool, and fun. I want to test out the rest of the year as a solo bee and see how things feel, then hopefully I can record the rules cleanly enough to run some more social playtests.
Since I was acting as both GM and player, I found that even knowing the locations of landmarks and rival hives barely drove my behavior because I was so focused on the resource economy. I am definitely wondering what information needs to be concealed from players. As an enjoyer of the traditional GM+Player play structure I still see the value in having one player manage encounter tables and the details of the map, but that may change over time!
I think sortie-based navigation is exciting and fruitful, I hope others find it as exciting as I do!