Very first impressions about Apiary

We are finally back from vacation! Don’t get me wrong it was amazing, but we kind of missed our game collection - especially all the new shiny games that are waiting for us to try. 🤩 One of the games we got to the table was Apiary, the newest game of Stonemaier Games. I get easily excited when I hear about games with unique themes, and this game surely has one!

So what is it about? After the unfortunate demise of humanity, some species had to rise and fill the void. This was none other than bees! 🐝 In Apiary you play as bees who have evolved into sentient creatures, learned everything from the remnants of humanity and advanced even further technologically. Now you are traveling in space, visiting and pollinating planets. This theme of space traveling bees is apparent in the game: your Mothership is moving between planets as you collect resources, you expand your hive with hexagonal tiles, create carvings, and workers have to keep hibernating often.

As usual in Stonemaier games, accessibility is at the forefront. Rules and gameplay are pretty straightforward and we were playing it in no time. The iconography is clear, and for the rare case of not understanding some of the more complex tiles, there is a nifty appendix listing everything.

👉 On your turn you either place a worker on an action spot, or retrieve all your workers. Worker bees have a strength value that can go from 1 to 4, which is important for resolving actions, and each action spot has its own little rules and details. Whenever workers are retrieved or bumped off a spot, their strength goes up, or if they were already value 4 they have to hibernate. Hibernating is also the timer of the game: if every hibernation pod spot is filled up, you tally up points.

💬 To me the main highlight of the game - besides the theme - is the peaceful and tranquil gameplay with exploring the space and building up my hive with hexagonal tiles. We’ll go deeper into the details as we play it more, but for now we liked our first session with Apiary. 🙂