Queen of Bees
ROLE
Lead Designer, Art, Playtesting
DESCRIPTION
In this 4-6 player party game, you build four colonies, each with 5 necessary bees to win! Along the way, you will gather upgrades, downgrades, and action cards to strengthen yourself or deter your opponents. Once you have 4 complete colonies and draw a Queen Bee, you are the Queen of Bees and win!
YEAR
2019
GENRE
Party, Deck-Building
PLATFORM
Analog
Design
I began the design of this game with a close friend of mine, Stuart Little (yes, that is his original, legal name). Inspired by games like Unstable Unicorns and Exploding Kittens, and bored out of our minds, we brainstormed multiple systems and themes as we often do.
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Once we settled on the theme of "Bees", we got to work on the game system, which is what you're probably here for.
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Firstly, we knew we wanted a game that could be played among a large crowd of people; the game should have competitive and strategic elements, while still being quirky and fun around friends!
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With this in mind, we tested multiple 'base' systems, similar to how Unstable Unicorns has a 'Stable' where a player places their unicorn cards. However, in order to differentiate it, we added another dimension and combined upgrades with the bees themselves! So, instead of simply getting 5 unicorns in a Stable, a player would need to build up multiple 'Colonies' with up to 5 bees. To make things even more interesting, we made it so that only the bee at the top of a Colony was considered active, and when a player finished a Colony, that Colony could no longer be played on by anyone (Fig A.). 'Upgrade Bees' and 'Downgrade Bees', then, only took effect in the turns they remained on the top of a Colony.
The alpha design of the cards
(Fig. A) Planning for Colonies with Active Top Bees
While working on Action Cards, such as No U, which reflected a move back on a user, or Pesticide, which would kill any active top bee in the game, we came up with an interesting idea that added a new level of strategy: Seasons!
Season Cards are rare action cards that can be played to create a passive effect that affects all players. For example:
Spring allows all players to draw an extra card at the beginning of a turn.
Summer makes all downgrades inactive.
Autumn forces all players to discard a card at the beginning of a turn.
Winter makes all upgrades inactive.
These could be used strategically to change the course of the game entirely, boosting some players and hurting others.
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For example, if a player was winning with multiple Juggernaut Bees, upgrades that gave them multiple turns in one round, playing an Autumn card could force them to lose out on a lot of cards, or playing a Winter card could make them lose out on those turns, as the card would become inactive.
(Fig. B) Planned layout of game
Playtesting and Perfecting
Of course, I would be a poor designer if I did not force my friends and family to playtest our game, and that is exactly what I did.
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In doing so, I realized many design flaws and exploits--or bugs, if you'd rather call it that--that I needed to fix. For example, shuffling the deck itself was problematic due to its sheer size; but it was also never evident as to when players should shuffle it, and thus, important cards were never recycled. There was also a problem with alliances, which made the game incredibly easy between two allied players as they could constantly protect and power each other up.
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The biggest challenge was knowing when to stop with rules. They had to be clear and concise, but issues such as those above could really ruin the fun of the game.
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Through very meticulous wording and a few rule changes, I was slowly able to weed out most of the problems, and ended up with a finished game system that worked surprisingly well!
The game at play, moments before a winning move.
