It only took two words to pique my interest over Stonemaier’s latest release. Space Bees. The mechanics, the pieces, and everything else aside, those two words completely hooked me. What can I say? A good concept goes a long way for me.

All of that information aside, the game itself is delightful. Newcomer Connie Vogelmann has crafted an interesting mix of worker placement and empire expansion and all of it designed without combat elements. If you were hoping for direct unit combat amongst these future hives, you will leave disappointed. That said, what exactly is Apiary?

Throughout an Apiary playthrough, players will manage up to four hive workers with power ratings between 1 and 4 to expand your interstellar insect empire. Whether you decide to grow your hive, explore the cosmos, or gain more workers, you’ll have plenty of options to on your quest for end game points.

Let us now explore the placement options for your bees. Players have six locations to send these insect workers each with different benefits to your hive. The explore option allows you to earn basic resources. Placing your worker in the appropriate worker outline allows you to move the Queenship, a beautiful plastic miniature bee spaceship, around to different planets to collect the fiber, pollen, and water you’ll need for some of the other options.

Next we have the advance action which allows you to purchase/hire hexagons to continue expanding your space empire. these hexagons are separated into three different types: Farms, Recruits, and Development. After purchasing, you’ll place them onto your hive board, allowing you to activate income and receive bonuses.

The grow option allows you to, unsurprisingly, grow your hive adding space for extra hexagons within your hive. It also allows you to purchase or repurchase workers for placement, which is absolutely integral to Apiary. Mismanaging the number of workers will doom a player, as I learned firsthand during one playthrough. The carve action allows you to purchase some more expensive hive additions that will basically improve your end game scoring. This is the only action that requires a fourth level worker. The convert action allows you to trade resources for different resources, in case you’re not happy with your current storage.

The final action is Research. With Research players can draw seed cards that can be played to various beneficial effects, whether that be upgrading worker or extra resources, players will find plenty of different options to improve your game.

Each action, except Carve, also has a secondary ability when activated by a fourth level worker for little extra awesome benefits. I’ll let you to find out exactly what those are, rather than list them. That said, your most powerful workers are removed from the board once they’re used at level four, so choose wisely. Once that happens players have to repurchase these workers.

Once a worker is expended from level four, they enter hibernation. The hibernation comb offers various benefits, but the most important among them is a way to end the game. once any, the game ends player has used each of the seven hibernation tokens supplied to them, the game enters the end phase where players will get one more turn before counting up all of their hard-earned points. As ever, most point wins.

As always, the team at Stonemaier has crafted a gorgeous product from artwork to pieces and tokens to form a cohesive and beautiful game with a perfectly designed box for easy and organized clean up. The colorful art really shines and workers are such a nice hard plastic. You’re definitely getting your money here. They have also a handy appendix of all the rules as well as a comprehensive rule book for learning or resolving rule discrepancies.

Apiary is a special game that sort of reminds me of Twilight Imperium (3rd Edition) meets Monsters and Meeples both without the combat. Since I quite liked both of those games, this marriage was a nice blend. The game took us some time to get our stride, but it was well worth it. I look forward to it hitting our table for repeated sessions.