Apiary Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Apiary, a worker placement board game published by Stonemaier Games. In Apiary, players are using familiar mechanisms to try and score the most points.

One of the most interesting things about modern board games is how innovation is often hidden behind unnecessary complexity. It seems that many new designs add mechanism after mechanism, most of which serve to unnecessarily bloat a game. (Vladimir Suchy—a good designer overall—is particularly guilty of this.) Sometimes, however, a game takes a few tried and true mechanisms, doesn’t change them all that much, and yet still combines them in a satisfying design.

This is what Stonemaier Games’ Apiary is attempting to do. Is it successful? Don’t ask me, Dear Readers, I won’t find out until the end of the review just like the rest of you!

Apiary is for 1-5 players and is designed by Connie Vogelmann. It takes about 90 minutes to play.

For the most part, many of the things players do in Apiary will be familiar to experienced gamers. Each turn, players will take one of their bee worker meeples (the workers in this game are space bees—did I not mention that?) and put them out on an action space on the board. These spaces all do different things, but they are fairly familiar actions such as acquiring new tiles and/or cards for one’s tableau, grabbing end-game scoring bonuses, or snagging some of the game’s limited resources. (All of these things have bee-adjacent names because THEME. “Buzz Points,” “Stinger Supplies,” “Bee-Kind Bucks.” Stuff like that. (I made all of those up, but you get the idea.))

The game’s main twist on this worker placement stuff is that no spaces are ever truly blocked by opponents. Instead, when someone’s bee goes to a space with someone else’s bee, they bump said bee off the space. Sometimes this is just to a different slot in the same action, but eventually, that bee will be bumped off the action entirely. When this happens, the owner of that bee gets to decide if they want to take a