Bee Lives: Game Overview

- Hi, I'm Bebo, and today I'm going to give you a quick game overview of Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer. Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer is a worker placement, and resource management game for one to four players, with a playtime of 30 minutes per player.

Each player controls a beehive and does their best to survive a year in nature. Victory points are earned by spreading hives across a shared map, through swarming, successfully robbing other hives, defending against being robbed, and by having honey and workers in your hive at the end of winter.

The player with the most points, and at least one surviving bee at the end of winter wins. The game is setup with two main fields of play. In the center of the play space is a shared map, this is where you preform all activities outside of the hive and interact with other players and wild hives.

You begin the map on a single tile, but as the game goes on you expand your map, and once summer begins, the map of all players combine to form a shared area for all of you to use for your bee business. The other area you will spend most of your time in is the player board.

This is where you manage your workers, and it's where you'll take care of all the business that occurs inside of your hive. From here you can track how many workers you have, how much space you have in your hives' comb to hold honey, pollen, and water resources.

You can also check how healthy your hive is by using the disease tracker. Your queen bee also resides inside the hive. You can choose to either have a prolific queen that gets more workers, a hygienic one that keeps your hive nice and tidy, an aggressive one which makes you better at stealing honey and keeping other bees out of your hive, or a queen that likes to swarm frequently and spread wild hives across the map.

The player board is also where you decide which of the eight end-game actions you will take. The scout action lets you grow your map in the shared map. Using one of your workers it allows you to pick two tiles from the bag and place one of those tiles on the map.

The other tile goes back in the bag. The forage action lets you go out to the shared map to bring back honey, pollen, and water resources to your hive. Be careful though, as you'll also make your hive dirty by venturing out into the world, and increase your disease track when you forage.

Once a tile has been foraged, no one else can use it that game round. The further a tile is from the hive, the more workers it takes to reach it and bring back resources. If you need more space for resources in your hive, the build action is for you.

It costs two honey and a worker, but it lets you grow your comb to house more stuff throughout the game. When your hive starts to get a little too dirty, you may want to take the clean action. This action uses one worker, and reduces your position on the disease tracker by one.

Sometimes it's too hot outside, and your hive overheats. When this happens you'll need to take the cool action with a worker and a water resource to air condition your hive, and gain new workers. Not liking how your queen is ruling your hive? No worries.

You can overthrow her with the requeen action. This uses one worker to change to a different queen, but also prevents you from getting any new workers during that round of play. If you're getting short on honey, and you can't forage more, then you could always steal it from a neighbor.

The rob action lets you use any number of your workers to try and take resources from a player or a wild hive. Roll a four-sided die to see how much honey you can steal, and then the defender has to decide if they wanna sacrifice any of their workers to prevent you from taking their honey.

If they let you have it, then you also get two victory points, but if they keep their honey safe then instead they'll gain victory points. Aggressive hives nearby? The defend action has you covered. Place bees you want to protect your honey on the defend action, and they'll automatically protect some of your honey as well as make any robbers think twice before coming to your hive.

To begin, the first player chooses an action to take with one of their workers, then the next player takes an action, so on and so forth until all of the workers have been used. Once this happens, it's time for the next round to begin. Rounds of play in Bee Lives are called months, which take place over the seasons of spring, summer, and fall.

This is represented on the season card board. Each month has a season card that puts certain weather effects into play that may help or hinder you. When starting a new month of play, you first need to feed your bees, spawn new workers, and check for swarming.

Bees need a lot of energy for their work, and they get this from honey. One honey resource will feed up to two of your workers. Any workers you can not feed starve, and they're removed from play. The pollen resource lets you gain new workers each month, but be careful with your resource management.

New bees will only hatch if there are empty spaces for them within your comb. If you're high enough on the disease track, you may even lose some workers to disease. Finally, you need to check to see if you swarm. Your hive can only support so many workers before they need to split off and find a hive of their own.

When you swarm, half of your workers will leave and find a wild hive, which is run by a simple AI, and it will try to rob and forage all on its own. These wild hives are tracked on the wild hive strength board. Swarming also lets you choose a new queen if you wish, and it gets you points.

Five points for swarming in the spring, three in the summer, and one in the fall, so swarm early and often. Once nine months have gone by, it's time for your bees to stay in for the winter. During the three months of winter, your bees will keep eating honey, and they also succumb to disease if you have a dirty hive.

Once winter's over, you score additional points for any honey and workers left in your hive, and then you determine the winner. How will you survive winter? And that should give you a general idea of how to play Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer. As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below.