Apiary - Board Game Review - Insert Lame Buzz Joke Here

so you thought I wasn't going to do a review of apiary did [Music] you hi everyone I'm Luke Hector and you're watching the broken meele this is a YouTube channel about board games where I give reviews top 10 and my honest opinions regardless of the consequences we'll get on with the show in just a minute but first a Qui word for my sponsor as a fellow gamer you'll understand this is unacceptable the solution head down to my new sponsor kendra. Kender stocks many of the hot new releases as well as some old hidden gems free delivery on orders over £30 further discounts on bulk purchases and even 5% of your spending refunded back to you as points to be used for further discounts down the line if you use the referral Link in the description below and sign up for a new account you'll get 5% discount on your first order over £60 so let's make gaps in your collection a ft of the past get down to Kender and start saving today thank you for listening and enjoy the rest of the video get on with it so you thought I wasn't going to do a review of apiary did you well I might have told a little bit of a tiny sweet white lie about that one because I didn't grab this deson because frankly the concept of paying €90 for this Essen was just downright obscene I cannot believe people queued up to pay that kind of price for this when it sells for $50 on their website but the main thing with this was that I was able to play someone else's copy and kind of borrow it and just basically have some fun with it in the time of October and then recently asaday kindly sent a review copy out for this and so I can actually do a proper honest review for this now oh my word is this getting and I hate to use the stupid pun Buzz because a lot of people are talking about this game and there are definitely mixed opinions some people do not like this game and some people think it's the one of the best games of the year I certainly have my thoughts on this now going back to ston Mario games in general I remember the heights of ston Mario which was things like scythe and VI culture and wingspan you know those games just like brilliant games from SAR that I still have on my shelf to this day but then with things like pendulum and tapestry and charterstone H things have been kind of going a little bit downhill for them lately and it's like I've not been into their games and I've been noticing lots of issues like balance and you know like some design flaws and that and it's just they've really not being quite at the height as they used to be for me I'm hoping that they can turn it around and give me a game that really makes me go right this is like stonem like I remember stonem will apiary be the one well let's see apiary is a worker placement game where you are seeking to of course get the most victory points but in doing so you are essentially trying to gather resources you're using those resources to play tiles into your hive which either get you bonuses or end game scoring or special abilities or maybe more income and you're also planting cards which can enable you to trigger off special abilities but also potentially score more endgame points but the way it works with the worker placement is that you have spaces where you can go and you have these bees which are these cool sort of you know clasy molded be like dice ships in a sense and the idea with these is that these are numbered one to four and so when you place them on the spot the number dictates how powerful the action is that you do but particularly if it's at level four it does an even more power powerful action when you go there now when you have the bees on the spots they can be pushed off by other players you don't block in this game but when your bee gets pushed off it goes back to your height and levels up to the next level and the idea is is that you can also retrieve your workers voluntarily which also bumps them up to the next level rating but once your be gets past level four it effectively hibernates which some bees do hibernate not all of them most of them don't but there is there are one or two species of bee that do and and the idea is that once it hibernates you get to trigger some more endgame points and you know some little bonuses but the idea is that the B is now no longer in your hive so you now have to go get that bee back so you're constantly circulating these four worker bees in order to you know go to the locations trigger what you need and get what you need but it's about micromanaging what levels of bees you've got when you have them how many you have as well as all that there are other little actions as well like creating your own little conversion action for one of those locations that can reward you with some points and an easier way to get the high level resources there's a queen's favor track at the bottom of the board which enables you to get points by leveling as far up as you can on it and of course you have the rest of the cards and endgame tiles that you are striving for in the first place players will continue leveling up their bees and triggering the locations Gathering the resources and building up their hive until eventually the hibernation comb at the bottom of the board is used up with all the hibernated level four BS at which point the end game is triggered you look at the end game scory and of course of course when it comes to worker placement we've seen the mo before it's the DI dozen for the genre however a couple of games do spring to mind with the whole concept of these bees that level up are leveling up workers one is tail to huacon it comes from Bor and dice and this is a game that's not talked about much anymore but in that one you used dice in order to do your actions around the side of the board but as you did the actions the dice leveled up in value until they effectively ascended and you know went away and you had to start off from the bottom that's n exactly too dissimilar from this except this tends to happen a little bit quicker than it does in that game the other one that does come to mind uh more on a slightly distant level is Euphoria which is actually a stone meire early release and this one I mean the game's fine I I don't mind it I don't love it I I like it don't love it but that one had dice that you didn't necessarily level them up as you went but you rolled them in the values matter because if your values on the dice were too high it triggered something bad for you so that's a little bit more to lesser extent but both of those games have had these deals where the workers are workers are dice or numbered in some way and that number actually matters so we'll start with the production values and even though €90 was a massive ripoff at Essen I know why they did it it was all the freight shipping and stuff like that but still €90 you had to be desperate but for $50 50 is actually not bad value for your money especially from production side of things you get a lot of variety in terms of the tiles your starting factions your starting mats but then you've also got a lot of these chunky tiles with you know half decent artwork and on there you've got these very cool plastic like B ships I think these are probably the Highlight where they do look a bit like sort of miniature space bees except they look like they've been shoved into like Square coffins or something it's kind of weird but you know they've got the clear numbers on there they've been ink shaded so that you can see the numbers clearly so it's not too difficult to spot them you've got wooden resources and on top of that you've even got you know really good reference cards for each player with all the iconography and a good on your turn end of the turn you know during game points you know a lot of useful information finally somebody's actually doing these things but of course you even get a pretty sweet insert I mean the insert there with some baggies for the resources you have to kind of stuff them in a little bit to fit them but otherwise everything else kind of fits in nicely I mean there's a cubby hold for pretty much everything in here you know tiles will sit in here the hexes will sit in there the resources can go in there the hipes can sit on top you know the insert is pretty well designed with the one sort of niggling aspect that these conversion tiles of which you've got about five or six of them they don't appear to have a specific home in there they kind of just sit on top kind of just loose which is kind of weird you know you've you've made effort to put in a spot for everything else but I can't see that you've put in a spot for these and if there is great but at which point maybe put a diagram in your book to actually say how you put the game away or something if you know if it's that obvious but all in all it looks good on the table you know the artwork is fine I like it I don't love it it's it's decent artwork and the box cover is pretty cool but during the game I don't sort of get a huge amount of like interest from the art and the artwork is kind of sparse on these tiles anyway most of it is just the color background for what type of tile is and the information so really most of the artwork in this game is on the board and a lot of the times that's covered up with hexes and other pieces and other tiles and stuff so the art is decent it's just not really on show but production wise you know it's been built not to a budget really spectacular spared no expense the game's also relatively simple to play I wouldn't call this lightweight this is still a midweight game but the rules are not complicated if you've played worker placement games you've already played most stuff like this before the idea of right I go to this location I bump your worker off I get to do the action and then we carry on and there's no real like you know extra complexity there but the rule books are written pretty well and it's not difficult to reference rules in them particularly when you've already got a decent reference Aid and even I was very pleased to see a teaching guide a a separate teaching guide which is kind of like a nice little memory jogger for if you're teaching the game and you already know the rules but you just got to sort of relay it out to the other players this I found very useful when I was teaching it to other players but on top of that you know you got several other books you've got an appendix for every single thing in the game so at least you can read up on those although I did notice there's like a couple of things that are missing on there which is like hm interesting but for the most part you've also got another solo rule book I'll talk about that later and the rule book is not particularly big it's got a decent amount of text for what's the size of the book but also enough pictorial representation so you can see what they're talking about but really I found this quite a breeze to learn and play I dare say you could probably learn this from the box if you were teaching it to other players like I've done with some other games it really is quite smooth and it doesn't feel clunky now this next one is kind of a mix of good and bad but the automa mode is done by automa Factory which they tend to use for a lot of their solo modes and automa Factory tends to be pretty good in making simple to operate solo modes but what they tend to flounder on a little bit is making it feel like you're going up a proper opponent this one has those same characteristics though it's a very simple AI to operate you essentially just have a small deck of cards that you flip the top card off it tells you what actions will happen based on what type of workers are left whether there's any like enough workers that you need to retrieve or level four worker or gray or yellow cuz they use two colors and then the back of the deck basically dictates like tie Breakers and what resources important that kind of thing it's a pretty small deck and it's pretty much entirely random and there's the problem because as much as this AI is very simple to operate and that's the good thing I want to mention it's also a little bit punishingly hard at times I mean if you're playing this on anything harder than say the second level difficulty in this I think there's four of them and expert mode as well then you're looking to get absolutely trounced by the AI but the problem is is is that the AI is random you have no agency over what it does it just basically sucks up spaces and puts bees down it doesn't care about resources it ignores half the game and you have no agency over what it does or stopping it and I'm the bad guy or you can basically decide on is whether you're going to bump one of their workers in order to bump up in the level to do what you want to do that's it other than that you can't stop them they don't really stop you it's just a in the background so it doesn't really feel like I'm going up against a multi player opponent per se but then again for reasons we'll get on to later it's probably not too far off but it is simple to operate and if you want to play this solo at least you're not going to have to spend very long learning this game with it in fact I dare say you could probably learn the game from scratch as well as the solo mode on top and it wouldn't actually be that much of a bug bear the game also does a good job of giving you some good starting setup variety I mean I kid you not this is the starting lot of faction tiles that you can have you already have five of these mats which I'm kind of surprised surprised there's only five in the Box I'm surprised I don't give you a few more but here you've got a decent amount of faction tiles which have different differentiated starting setups for resource storage but also a special ability starting worker worker differences and they can all be flipped to have some more powerful version of its ability there's certainly a decent amount of them here that being said also you have the tiles which involve like the end of game scoring ones you've got the the ones that give you special abilities as you go through you know these are going to come out and you won't see all of them in the game so there is a decent amount of variety in a box to keep you trying different ways of playing the game My First bad point is going to link on to the previous good point that I mentioned yes there is a lot of variety in the starting setups and where you can end up but in terms of strategies those tend to be a little bit more linear and limited in fashion because really when it comes to the point scoring there's really two things you should be worried about you should be worried about planted cards because planted cards give you endgame scoring and these can be quite significant you should also be entirely pretty much concerned about the honey carve tiles these also give endgame scoring except these tend to give you a lot more points than potentially even some of the endgame cards do so to play this game you must do some combination of these two things either Focus entirely on the cards Focus entirely on these or do a combination of both and honestly you probably are going to likely do a combination of both because you are limited in how many of these you can plant whereas these you're only limited on space and how much honey you can generate but these are your bread and butter of your points there's other things in the game that can score your points but they're not anywhere near enough I mean you can get a few little odds and sod points from a couple of tiles or maybe like taking the level four action here which is should you not do the advanced level four action is completely pointless but also there's a tiny little bit of area control at the bottom of the board with a hibernation comb where essentially when you hibernate you take up spots and there's a first and second place but the differential so low and so limited that it might as well not even be a factor in the game you could cut out that element of area control and it would change nothing really in the game and then you've got the Queen's favor tracker on the bottom of the board which is only worth it if you're going to munchkin it all the way to the very end and even then the amount of effort it takes to do that usually outweighs the points it's given you compared to Simply getting a couple of honey and buying yourself a couple of these tiles now and again you know you could spend ages getting your ping to the end of the queen track for 25 points or you could simply gather yourself two honey grab one of these and it will probably get you half of that by itself if not more than half so why am I faffing around with the track which is boring and not as good as simply just grabbing a really good honey tile how dare you off with his head yes you do have some unique setups and maybe just a little like your early game is going to be different from game to game because of the setup tiles but where you end up and how you score points really isn't that much different from getting a game and I found it getting very syy very quickly the game also progresses kind of as a very big rinse repeat the B says one to five players 60 to 90 minutes I would stretch that more to 60 to 120 if you're going to go for this player count this game can easily suck up 2 hours if you go with the max count of players and I really strongly don't recommend you play this with five you yes well cue the meme five is right out yeah five is too many I mean this game has a reasonable amount of downtime when you're waiting for other people to hurry up and take their turn and because your bees could get bumped off or values change everywhere and tiles can get nicked then you can't really plan ahead so you got to wait for your turn and then you got to think and it just causes the game to drag on a lot you and 60 to 90 minutes is doable yeah when you do it with two or three players and certainly solo should take you no more than about 60 minutes but the problem is is that the game length is kind of half determined by how quickly people hibernate with the level four BS if people do it quickly then the game will end a bit quicker than it should or for about that 60 to 90 minute time but if people are taking their time and trying to build up this big Hive and do all sorts of stuff like that the game will just drag and drag and drag and it kind of gets to the point where it outstays its welcome fairly quickly I mean 90 minutes is as long as this game should take takes any longer than that it's taking too long and the rinse repeat thing is exasperated by the fact that it has a similar issue with its game Arc that I have with games a bit like the original Great Western Trail Yokohama and and stuff like that where basically you create an engine you see your engine through it's complete but the game hasn't finished yet this one has the same problem you get to a point where you start off grab a few things and build stuff up then you reach a point where you've like right I've used all this I've got my major scoring bits I've hibernated a few times I'm now pretty much out of bees because most of them have hibernated or you know they're at low levels now I'm ready to end and I can't end the game because there's at least two or three other hibernation spots left and and I have no means to accelerate the end of the game so a lot of the times you reach a point you reach that Peak and then you're just going through the motions just trying to find something to do that's reasonably meaningful until somebody triggers the end of the game that always becomes a pain particularly when you know the game's already gone beyond 90 minutes even in Solo mode it can be a problem like I've achieved my solo puzzle oh the game's not going to end for a bit um well okay I'll flip a card still not hibernating all right fine I'll guess I'll go expl for a few more resources what else can I get well I can get that that's worth a couple of points maybe like you've already exhausted everything you can do for the big points and you still got to keep going just end I hate endings as a sideline to the rinse repeat problem the locations themselves are also very limited in what you can do you have got several locations on the board and you think okay there's a good variety of places to go until you realize that you're pretty much going to the same threee on a regular basis and the others are just ad hoc not often do you have to go to the conversion place cuz you're only going there if you really want to make honey cuz that's the main reason you go there you're not going there to turn a caterpillar into a water you can get those by exploring easily so you're probably going there to get honey because honey is the harder resource great you don't need to do that a lot few times in the game you go there as an efficient grab honey and that's it the rest of the time you just leave that spot alone the grow spots where you can get more workers or the frames if you're not growing for frames that's useless to you and you only need to grab more workers when you've used up the workers you've got so you're only going to go there every now and again so really and even the carve towel with the honey towels you only go there when you need the honey towel and you might grab two of them in the game you know two three of you are incredibly lucky with the honey but mostly you'll probably grab one or two so that's not even a common thing and you need a level 4B to do it anyway so really you're pretty much for the game spamming explore advance and research explore Advanced research explore Advanced research explore Advanced research so now I've gone crosseyed some sometimes you might even not even do that much research you might just literally be going back and forth between explore Advance explore Advance explore advance and it just constantly rinse repeat you know and these actions aren't exactly the most exciting of actions I mean come on you grab a towel and it goes on your board and it either gives you an instant bonus or a farm which isn't that interesting or the blue tiles that give you some special ability okay they can be cool but there's a limit to how much that gets exciting the explore action isn't any fun either I mean literally all it is is that you move across this grid board here flip a tile it tells you whether it gives you another resource you put another resource on it to basically say what it gained you so it's literally just gained some resources and it may have a level four ability on it which sometimes they're cool sometimes they're not worth a level 4B but that's all the explore action is there's no like real theme to it or any nonsense all you're doing is just moving this giant fat queen bee [Music] along and from there we go on to the theme you could make the there's any theme you wanted just because you made everything into hex's to look like a honeycomb doesn't suddenly mean I'm feeling like I'm controlling a space beehive yes I've got honey as a resource that could be any resource these tiles could be anything the Queen beee Mother Ship really I mean that's what we're going for you will have already forgotten this game is really about bees by the time you play it I mean you look at the workers and they don't exactly look like bees from the get-go so it's you know it's not like you're looking at those and going oh yeah here's my little buzzy be you know doing all this so really if it didn't have honey as a resource and it wasn't hex's which let's pH it as a staple in Euro games anyway you you'll quickly forget that this thing is about space Beast this could have just been any abstract theme and it would have still worked so I struggle to get immersed in it from that extent other than quoting future armor jokes I'm sick of shaking my booty for these fat jerks it also wouldn't be a stonem game if I didn't mention the word balance yes I don't normally like to talk about balance in games but stonem has has a bit of a reputation for kind of ignoring that word is in the dictionary I mean tapestry enough said oh God you're killing me but when you actually look at some of these tiles and cards there's a clear differentiation as to which ones are better than others I mean you could get yourself one point per Farm great you could also get yourself three points per frame up to 12 getting a frame simply requires you to go to a spot pay two resources and get it you don't even have to fill it up and if you do fill up they get you eight more points so I mean frame are pretty good but yeah you could literally just gather some resources during the game any resources you feel like go to the frame thing get four of these and it's worth 12 points little to no effort or you could try and get 12 points worth of farms that include that involves you having to get 12 green tiles good luck with that in the game especially when you have nothing else to show for it so that card doesn't feel you know balanced on that front and then other one's like five points if your hive mat is full F your hive mat is not difficult and it's a five five measly points and it takes up one of your four crucial slots and I say four if you get two extra frames if you don't get any extra frames for your hiem there's only two spots for you to plant these cards and you're going to waste one of them on a fivepoint card when there's one here that I've just said get your 12 throw yourself in next time in rivers of your stupidity balance also stems off with these location actions for the level 4B level 4 BS aren't something you're going to see a lot of in the game so you need to use these wisely so would you use it for a honeycomb TI that get you 12 points would you use it for a planted card that gets you somewhere between 6 to 12 points or you going to waste it on an action that gets you free or you going to waste it on an explore action it might just get you an extra little sub action while you do it or you going to waste it making one of these dances which I swear is one of the most useless things in the game that there is this idea that you can go to this conversion spot do a dance which essentially lets you create this new X toy conversion thing of your choice using whatever resources you like to create honey and or to create whatever the the end the result is could be victory points could be honey whatever but you might think well yeah that's great yeah but everybody else gets to use this as well and all you get is a tiny bump on the Queen's favor track for it it's not enough I mean I am literally giving everybody else in the game something really cool to use and all I'm getting is the occasional bump on a tiny track that won't even give me enough victory points to be worth anything unless you spam it like crazy so most games in fact if not all games I've played of this anybody who makes one of these is just wasting their time nobody has been able to make these work for what they want to do and so I'm not going to waste a level 4B on it it's just going to sit there in that location and most people aren't going to visit it that often and even the honey tows I would even call that balanced in themselves I mean I've got a few here that I've seen and here's some examples of what you've got right three points per wax okay wax is something that you can kind of store but you're not going to have that much wax on your table but yeah you might get nine points by the end of the game for that I say okay fair enough all right let's see this three points per honey tile you're not going to get a lot of Honey tiles they cost the hardest resource to get and they are you know sought after and there's not that many in the game so you're probably going to get maybe N9 to 12 points out of these um free per placed hibernation pod I don't know you might be able to get 12 out of that okay fine so you're talking like 12 points here now they take a bit of effort to deal with those ones let's have a look at some of these other ones 14 points if you have no frames so if you literally just stay on your BL mat you can for no effort just get 14 points okay all right 15 points of at least one of each of the other tiles is adjacent that is not difficult to do on your map because frankly it's not that difficult to position things on your hive map uh four points per frame Max 16 remember the card I mentioned that said three points per frame up to 12 you get that in combination with this all you got to do is spend eight resources in the game by four frames you don't even have to fill them up and the m points you get from these easy to acquir T is ridiculous I mean come on and then we have the retinue oh have I seen this appear on Board Game Geek a few times in on PES one Victory Point per space in the queen favor track this means that you could potentially get another 25 points from this tile alone 25 points for the Queen's favor 25 points for this no other tile in the game can reward you with as many points as this tile does honestly if you are able to get to the end of the Queen's favorite track and you grab this tile you pretty much have won the game it's that broken and there's just easily a Divergence in the tiles and I don't know why they can't seem to get this sort of stuff right we're sorry so AP is fine I mean I don't think it's all that and I think that this is probably one of the better Stone Mario games in recent years but that's not exactly a high Benchmark given that I gave Expeditions of five and gave pendulum a four and charterstone would probably be a five if not a four as well you know these aren't exactly you know benchmarks to be proud of here but this one is okay it does the job I really don't get though where the nines and tens are coming from here where people are trying to claim that this is the best game of the year there's nothing new in here we've seen this before we've had the bumping workers before it's cool but we've seen it the worker placement is nothing new and even then you're just rinse repeating the same stuff all the time two or locations over and over again and all that will change from game to game is your starting faction tile and early game will feel different but then eventually medium and late game you're going to be doing mostly the same stuff you've done before so it just feels quite repetitive and even then I'm going to be gunning for the same sort of stuff each game because I know from experience that gets you more points than doing half of the other stuff things like this just make this a okay game at best nothing amazing but it is smooth it looks nice it's produced well if you get it at the normal price and not that stupid 90 price you've got yourself a half decent deal here and it's midweight it's pretty smooth you can play it solo if you don't mind that the AI is kind of whatever it just does its own thing at least you can play a relatively quick game of this solo because it doesn't take a huge amount of time to set up and get things going particularly as the insert helps on that front so there are good qualities here it's fine I could be convinced to play it every now and again but it's not one I want to keep and honestly it pales to the early days of stonem and there are far better games that have come out this year I'm not getting the UN like the undying love for this game I just don't get you know I mean have you played a lot of other worker placements I mean go play some of the Garfield game stuff that do much more unique stuff with worker placements but this is what you've seen before it's just pasted a space Fe theme on and just forces you to go through the motions a lot until the point where you want it to end end and it won't end so it's it's a little bit inconsistent from game to game you sometimes get a good game you sometimes get a boring game you get a game where you know the stars align with your strategy and you get another game where just Randomness sort of gets in the way because you don't have enough agency over these bees it it's just like it's fine it's okay I would certainly play this over Expeditions I think Expeditions was worse that one drags on way too long has worse balance issues but this one is fine it's it's another worker placement game I have a feeling that I'll be forgetting this one fairly soon I don't know if anybody else will I think this is still going to be talked about after a while but yeah I just don't really pun intended get the Buzz for it so that's it for me on this episode of the broken people if you like what you see then please fum it up on YouTube and thumb it up Bor gamee when it goes live on the site don't forget to check out the rest of the content I have been putting out reviews like crazy there's been loads lately including the big age of innovation the teror mystia Remake and also coming up soon will be the Ticket to Ride Legacy spoiler and non-spoiler reviews that's coming up very soon because I have now finished all 12 games of that and boy do I have some thoughts on that one until next time remember regardless of how fat your queen beam mothership is it's still only a game so bye for [Music] now

Channel: The Broken Meeple

Views: 6,238

Keywords: apiary board game review, Board Games, Dice Tower Network, Luke Hector, Broken Meeple, Gaming, Reviews, Podcast, Top 10, Games, tom vasel, boardgamegeek, playthrough, top ten, cull, preview, gamer, apiary dice tower, apiary thinker themer, apiary board gaming ramblings, apiary board game ramblings, apiary stonemaier games, stonemaier games, apiary, apiary review, apiary board game, apiary broken meeple, broken meeple reviews, broken meeple honest reviews, board game apiary review

Id: TY_1xbx8MBA

Length: 29min 34sec (1774 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 07 2023