Honey Buzz was one of the most… buzzed-about games in 2020. It’s a charming worker-placement game from Elf Creek Games. Designed by Paul Salomon, with enthralling art from Anne Heidsieck and Jason D. Kingsley, it’s a testament to how good board games have become over the last few years.

Great games are rolling out of the factories like crazy, pandemic be damned. This makes the choices in front of us ever more appealing and paralyzing at the same time.

If you like worker-placement games, then Honey Buzz might be something to check out, as you send your bee drones (beeples) around the hive in around to create a network of nectar-producing goodness for the local markets. If you like tile-laying games, then it also presents an interesting challenge of figuring out how best to organize your hive, when to capitalize on actions by creating an empty nectar cell, and what nectars to produce in order to meet demand and sell more than your opponents. And if you like accessible games with a high replay value, then again, you’re in luck.

Ultimately, I didn’t care for Honey Buzz but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right game for you. Let’s dive into what’s going on in the world of bees and nectar.

What It Does

Spring has sprung in the woods of Sweetwater Grove. But something is different this year. The bees have discovered economics! The queen has a plan to open a stand in the woodland market. If the bees sell their honey, maybe the bears and other woodland creatures will leave the hive alone, and the bees will find peace and prosperity at last.

This is like a reverse A Bug’s Life. Instead of an ant colony looking for a conflict resolution to stop other creatures from stealing their production, a beehive is looking for an economic resolution to prevent any further loss of honey. When you can’t scare away the other animals, bribe them with honey!

There is a problem, though. A power vacuum exists below the hierarchy of the queen bee. The hive has a need for economic strategists and architects of nectar production to step up and solve this problem. That’s where you come in!

Each player is in control of a growing portion of the hive and must manage the arrival of new bees from the nursery, the creation of nectar cells within the honeycomb structure of the hive, the foraging for pollen and nectar, as well as the production of it all once completed. Not to mention the selling of nectar and pollen or the fulfilling of orders from the woodland market. It’s a daunting task but there are a lot of beeples are your disposal to get the job done.

Players start off with a shared configuration at the beginning of the game, but after that, it’s a contest of who can create the most efficient hive space, who can complete the most orders or market sales, and who can follow the instructions of the queen to reap the most rewards.

Whoever has the most points at the end wins.

How It Does It

Honey Buzz is a mish-mash of several mechanics that pretty intuitively allow the player to organize a honeycomb structure and create a nectar-producing hive in preparation for the market orders.

You’ve got worker-placement. That exists in the form of beeples (who are adorable little wooden worker bees) and players will place them somewhere on the main hive board to get a tile for their own. To be clear, the actions on those tiles are not happening. Just the claiming of the tile and the positioning of it in your player space. The actions themselves will occur when an empty cell in the middle of the tiles has been closed off, creating a space for nectar and then activating all icons adjacent to that cell. So the worker-placement directly results in tile-laying. And it’s the tile-laying that will galvanize your actions based on gaining more beeples, foraging for nectar or pollen, producing nectar, and selling things at the market. There is also a straight financial gain, but that one is the least connected to the other actions.

Several factors influence how the worker-placement and tile-laying will best be implemented. At the beginning of the game, the starting configuration is used by all players. Also, the Queen’s Contest cards determine essential challenges that players will want to meet to score bonus points. And then the Order cards will give players an idea of what nectars need to be produced in order to fulfill the cards and gain the points.

The player count is also important as that will give you an idea of how competitive certain hive board locations will be and how many other players are competing for the same Orders and Queen’s Contests.

An additional variant includes a memory game with the foraging tokens (which typically are face up and don’t require mental concentration as to where to go), but many players may never even use that gameplay modification.

Probably the most complex thing in Honey Buzz is the visual understanding of a player’s hive space. Each type of nectar is created by a different tile pattern and when all of the tiles are mashed together, it takes some practice to see each nectar pattern within the larger honeycomb. New players will likely have the hardest time but repeated plays will make it easier.

In terms of mechanics, though, it’s a pretty simple game. Not that it’s shallow. It is just accessible because the way that the mechanics interact makes sense and it’s easy for players to pick up. That’s definitely a strength in Honey Buzz. Strategy exists in how to build out your hive depending on the starting configuration and also the best tiles to put together and when to activate the empty cell action cascade, but those are things that naturally start to proliferate in the player’s mind when exploring what the game can do.

Why You Might Like It

Why You Might Not

Final Thoughts

Honey Buzz has a lot going for it. It’s an accessible game that is inviting to both new gamers and people enmeshed in the hobby. There is enough strategy to satisfy people who want to get their think on, but it also doesn’t overwhelm you with analysis paralysis. The combination of worker-placement (or bee-lining) and tile-placement creates some spatial puzzles and interesting decisions. And it’s absolutely gorgeous. The production value from Elf Creek Games and the artwork from Anne Heidsieck and Jason D. Kingsley really make this stand out on the shelf and on the table. It’s the kind of whimsical world that you’d want to get lost in.

That being said, Honey Buzz just didn’t really do it for me. The point scoring was not satisfying to me, as it felt really swingy with contest bonuses by the end of the game. Massive point differentials didn’t accurately reflect how close the games were, which doesn’t feel rewarding or satisfying to me as a player. And the player interaction didn’t match what I prefer in worker-placement games. I like situations like in Lords of Waterdeep or Dune: Imperium where my actions and placements force another player to go elsewhere and possibly reconsider their strategy. In Honey Buzz, opponents can work around that by placing more than one bee drone in a location (or attempting to wait for me to regroup my workers and clear the space). So you’re never really stopping someone. Just delaying or inconveniencing.

And, finally, there is a somewhat lopsided feel to the player's actions each turn. Some are over quite quickly and don’t give much tangible reward or notion of forward movement. And then others—when you complete an empty cell in your hive space—are flurries of activity as you complete all of the actions around that space. It makes the pace somewhat jarring or inconsistent at times and it can make for weird jumps between practically nothing happening to a lot happening.

that being said, the game works wonderfully for many gamers and I think it would definitely serve to introduce many people to the hobby in a positive way, but it won’t be a keeper for me. There are too many other worker-placement games I like more and I have numerous “welcome to board games” titles that I’d prefer showing off to friends and family given the chance.

I still encourage you to check it out for yourself, though, as you might feel differently! Thankfully, there are so many great games being released nowadays that’s it’s not a problem when a good experience for many just doesn’t work for you.

What are your thoughts, though?

Have you played Honey Buzz before? What is your favorite worker placement game? Do you prefer standard or deluxe versions of games?

Let us know in the comments and give a recommendation for other games of which to share our first impressions.