Honey Buzz - Why Own It? Mechanics & Theme Board Game Review

[Music] hi guys and welcome to our special edition of thinker fema why is it special because it's the middle of the night it's not normal it's not the middle of the night it's still dark though we've got our pretty lights going and we're trying to pump out as many reviews as we can pre-christmas and today we're super excited to be talking about honey buzz honey buzz was a kickstarter we're looking at the deluxe edition today it's by paul solomon and the publisher is elf creek games so what are we trying to do well interestingly enough in honey buzz bees and you play a bee but bees have to come discovered economics which means that they've uh they've wisened up and they've gone wait a second instead of us having to battle all these bears and fight off all these people that want our honey what if we just get organized and we sell our honey at the market so we're all going to be playing accounting bees trying to optimize our operations and the honey making production line in order to make sure that the queen bee is happy and that we can sell the most honey to make the most profit and have a prosperous uh hive i can see why you love it so much when you talk about it that way it sounds so fun it is yeah i won't spoil it too much but okay yeah automatically it's quite fun okay so let's talk about how it works because i didn't even introduce us at the beginning i'm amy i'm the thinker and i'll be talking about mechanics and as you would have guessed by now this is maggie my fiance the themer who as you can tell can craft a great story and get really get behind what the designer is trying to love the beans yeah so in the honey buzz you have you start with just one b and your little worker b is going to be taking worker placement spots around the board and you are going in these worker placement spots um first of all you're trying to build up your number of bees like many other games where you're trying to get additional workers more worker bees yeah so you'll be doing that and then as the game progresses you'll be competing over these worker placement spots because the trick to them is the first person to go there gets to put one b there and take a tile but if you're the next person to go there before people have taken back their bees then you have to put a b lime bees which is called a b line in this game so um you would have to put 2b so it becomes more expensive to go in these worker placement spots and why do you want to go there because there are different types of tiles that are going to help you build out your little hive puzzle in front of you everybody has an individual player area and you are building out hex patterns using these a wonderful little and actually like nice and thick beautiful quality great cardboard quality game is just amazing anyway we'll talk about that in a moment but the the patterns get placed into your personal little hive to create complete hexes and once you've completed that hex you get to activate each of the actions that are shown surrounding that completed hex and so what's interesting about this worker placement game is that you're placing a b and not getting to immediately take an action like a normal worker placement game you are just doing it to collect the piece that will eventually help you take a whole host of actions at once and so that's where it starts to get interesting to think about well when i close off this loop what's it going to give me and trying to think out the order in which you do things now what else is going on on the board so there's the worker placement with the bees at the top and then there's this interesting uh one of the actions that you can take once you activate is to go hunting for nectar and this is a little puzzle in and of itself it can be played in two different ways so it can be played as a memory game so with all of the tiles face down so um in the play testing that's how i believe that was the original way um that the game was um designed to be played but then a lot of people don't like memory style games and didn't like that element and so actually it may have even been after a rado review but um they included a notepad instead that if you want to play the memory variant you can have a notepad to take notes of where things are if you don't want to you can play it with full information and we've been playing with full information so far um and it's you know it's still a tricky puzzle because yeah what you're doing in this puzzle is you are finding the matching hex to go in the hole that you've created um by placing a tile and what's interesting about that is the pattern that gets created when you complete a set of tiles you can see here that it's got two white pieces and then it's got four red pieces and you need to find the matching piece of nectar so in that case it's this one that will slot into there and if you can do that then you can start collecting honey of that type and why do you want to collect honey well honey can be taken to the market the market is another action and you can sell that honey for a specific amount depending on how much honey has already been sold in the game so the objective of the game of course i should have said at the beginning is to get as many victory points as you can by the end of the game um but the game ends when either two piles of contract cards have been depleted or all of these honey types reach the bottom of their scale and every time someone sells that honey type back to the market it declines in value similar in styles other games that we've played like yeah with anything with a market like clans of caledonia or just trying to think of other ones on the top of my head more glenn moore too that we've been playing a bit of um you can see as well there's pollen that you can collect in other ways which also is in the market and then of course as i mentioned the contract card so once you have these different combinations of honey on your board you can instead of selling them to the market you can complete a contract card and then you get the victory points for that contract card in the end so what makes the mechanics interesting here is really that idea of creating the patent in front of you on the board and reactivating different tiles and things that you can do along the way using wilds to do any action you like and the fact that each of these patterns as i mentioned are associated with a different pattern on your hex which relates to a type of honey and so if you know you need cherry blossom then you've got to work backwards to try and work out what pattern you need to create and therefore what tiles you need to get and so that's the strategy of this game yeah um let's talk about theme integration i really enjoy this game because of the components like there's just so many of the elements that just bring me right into this world the graphic design and the illustrations are beautiful stunning everything from the board to the actual um the the order um the kind of order cards that you can complete um the the nectar and we have like this is the deluxe edition yeah so so they're a little bit more beefed up like this like the little what did we say that this is called a honey wand dipper honey dipper it's got lots of different names so this is your first player token um which is wonderful that's an actual uh little you know honey won't and these these are the the the actual honey tokens are kind of squishy and semi like transparent like translucent um and the poland and the little poland tokens are a little backpack because it's a bee you're just carrying these cars oh it's super cute super cute so it's so that is just adorable and fun to play with um in terms of like if we talk about like integration in terms of the actions and all of that you are you are creating um your hive you are creating your little cells and that's where things are going to be activated um i think it's a it's a pretty decent little integration there was one point where we played uh four player and one of the one of our friends on the table was doing this um i don't know what i'm gonna get and it was literally like a b for a g yeah i cracked up laughing because it's like it's one of those like like ultimate thematic moments in the game it's like you're doing exactly what a bee would be doing trying to decide do i go there or do i no [Music] so that was that was another wild saturday night i think could see my household yeah yeah so wild um so yeah i think i i absolutely love the theme integration in this one now um what's the experience of playing this game i actually really really enjoy it it's not it took me like i didn't actually get the puzzle like until amy pointed it in a while together i was like how do i get these combinations of the colors around the cells um so it took me about a game and a half to figure that out once i knew what was happening it's like okay that's good and you do have a very handy um guide card or yes variation card yeah that play right playwright exactly i love also oh like some of the bees um the the actual components one of them is furry so it's like an actual furry v it's just oh it's just too much and as amy said like the components the cardboard any cardboard elements are really high quality yeah um i do love like there's some things that feel new and different to me like for example you don't actually take the action when you take that tile you you're only getting to play that action when you complete a cell so that empty uh hex um and so it means that not only do you get to do all of those actions then so it's kind of like you're setting out setting up and then all of a sudden you get a whole bunch of actions they can also then be reactivated or retriggered when you use those same um same tiles to create cells in other areas or like around it um so i absolutely love that one thing that i really like obviously if you've been you know watching our channel you'll know that meg and i really love worker placement games it's our favorite style of game and we played this just the two of us um quite a few times and then we we played with four players and i have to say i enjoyed it much more at four players um because even though there are different sides of this board for than the player count i found that when it was four players there was much more competition going on here because if someone's collected a lot of bees they don't necessarily have to take a turn to take all their bees back which means they were leaving them out in the worker placement spots which was like super frustrating when you couldn't afford the tile that you wanted to take yeah um but there are other clever things that are going on here the puzzle itself is really unique um just the fact that like maggie said it's quite hard at first to get your head around the way that you can combine this shape to create that circle um by moving it in all different kind of directions and matching the colors associated with the honey so that's really unique and then on top of that you're getting the nectars that match those patterns and it just it's really nice the way all the mechanics come together um for me it was at first it felt a little um again and i feel like i'm saying this in every review but games that are a bit like multiplayer solitaire when you're working on your own puzzle and there's not much that people can do to really stop you um the the minor points of interaction is that you know people are selling their goods which is bringing down the value of goods that you might want to sell um the worker placement spots but really when it comes to your puzzle it is and i think this is why maggie enjoys this game so much is again it's like your own safe space where you're creating out your puzzle and you're working towards objectives um one thing that um means that i actually enjoy it in spite of it being multiplayer solitaire is the public objectives um and that for me is always in in a game like this that for me adds that competitive edge because it's the first person to complete three orders gets uh 20 dollars and money is victory points in this game um or the first person to get two nectar each of any two types or to have the most empty cells so there are all these public objectives um and yeah it's that race element that really is that's what makes me excited i want to build the most efficient engine to get to some kind of end point rather than just not knowing who's got how many points and that kind of abstract wait till the end so because of that even though this is like more of a mid-weight game it's one that i would be always um happy to play um and because maggie does love it so much and actually she really loves it and i think like the componentry from someone who's into theme you can really immerse yourself in this world of bees like it is just it is really well done the theme um even with me someone who doesn't appreciate it even i feel like kind of this buzzy like you're actually doing what a bee would be doing so that's really really nice and you've been playing it a lot solo as well i really enjoyed solo um as well though it feels um there's a couple of variants that you can use with the solo like we got one of the expansions that i haven't actually played with um where it introduces uh dice for for the actions that the the drone bees or the ai will be doing i haven't done that yet i've only played it with um there's like the ais in the form of cards and so each round that the ah each turn that the ai is taking there's two drone bees that are occupying different spots and essentially blocking you from going there that round but then the other thing that's happening each time the ai takes a turn is it's usually taking either stealing one of these nectars or bringing down the cost of one of the honeys um which means like the end at the end of the game gets triggered or taken away one of the um the the order cards and that's going to fairly quickly speed up the end of the game because game ends when four of these components um are down or when as amy said as like two of the piles are depleted oh yeah i kind of started talking about that and then i didn't complete myself it's all good that's how the game ends but yeah i was going to say that actually maggie said that the solo is quite difficult because i i feel like based on what you've just explained that the drone is actually the drone bees are actually more efficient than a competing player because they're actually removing something yeah doing something every turn whereas they work way faster yeah that's right whereas a normal player might not do that every round or might need to take their views back um which takes a whole action around yeah yeah so highly like i really enjoy it obviously it's a solo experience it's a very it's ah it's similar but different i don't know how to yeah in terms of like you're still doing the same things you're still looking for that efficiency puzzle obviously it's a solo game there's no down time because you're taking all the action so you know that can be quite fun um i do enjoy i still do enjoy particularly playing with other people that you don't know where you know what people are going to do or if they're going to unpredictable it's it as you said though it's it's rare that someone will completely mess up your game by taking something yeah it's a very it's a very pleasant game i would say there was no point where it felt like super tense or maybe towards the point where you're racing for the public objectives or you're just towards the end where you're trying to get that last contract hard and that kind of thing there is a little bit of lean in a little bit of like anxiousness towards the end but generally speaking this would be a really nice game it's kind of like um gateway plus to me yes it's like not for new newbies it's actually far crunchier than the artwork would suggest yeah um it reminds me a bit of like that calico kind of level where it's like it looks very inviting but actually if you're a gamer there's a lot more to explore um a lot like a really difficult puzzle to solve and so i think for that reason it's good for to get combined groups together like this will absolutely stay in our collections yes um and not and also just the component quality the table presence is just a light it's beautiful absolutely yeah it is a real delight and it's one that is like crunchy enough and interesting to teach people who are kind of into games um or you know smart enough to get into puzzles um and maybe aren't quite gamers or into bees if you're into bees you're going to learn to go into bees or into honey yeah any of these components will bring people to the yard absolutely so that's our review of honeybuzz if you liked this review please let us know by doing all of the things all of the youtube things hit like hit subscribe hit notify say something in the comments say anything in the comments tell us what you think of this game um are you going to get it did you back it um tell us what are you what are your thoughts yeah we love interacting with you our channel is only i i think maybe two or three months old and we have just been overwhelmed with the amount of support so thank you everybody um obviously we wouldn't keep doing this without you so we really appreciate it yeah um and we'll be back soon with more reviews hopefully before christmas yeah bye for now [Music]

Channel: ThinkerThemer

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Keywords: board games, board game reviews, board game mechanics, tabletop games, tabletop game reviews, board game themes, thinker themer, thinkerthemer, top 10, boardgames, boardgame, top 10 boardgames, honey buzz, honey buzz game review, honey buzz board game, honey buzz kickstarter, honey buzz board game review, elf creek games, honey buzz review, paul salomon games, honey buzz elf creek games, why own it?, mechanics & theme

Id: fRTiTZh_9iQ

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2020