Apiary strategy board game almost wastes its most valuable resource

polygon.com:

Art for tabletop games is often the most expensive part of development. Case in point is the success of Stronghold Games’ recent campaign for more Terraforming Mars, which, despite earning more than $2.2 million on Kickstarter for a franchise stocked by Target, Walmart, and Amazon, elected to use content generated by artificial intelligence instead of human beings. Stonemaier Games, the publisher of Wingspan, continues to take the higher road.

Take, for example, the company’s breakout hit Scythe. The germ of the idea came not from a heady backroom playtest session, but from an article featuring the art of Polish artist Jakub Różalski. His striking pastoral scenes mixed with dieselpunk mechs created a stir when they were first shown on Kotaku. Scythe would go on to become one of the most successful board games of the past decade.

With Apiary, Stonemaier has once again gone all in on high-quality, human-generated art. The high-concept, non-confrontational game is excellent. But it hides the light of its artist, the incredible Kwanchai Moriya, under a bushel basket. Or, rather, a beehive.

Apiary is a collaborative tile-based strategy game where players compete to take the crown as the most productive member of a colony of sentient spacefaring bees. Just like Scythe, it’s asymmetrical, meaning that everyone at the table has a slightly different set of powers and goals. It takes its thematic cues from real-world melittology. It’s a science that has fascinated human beings since the dawn of civilization, and one that is increasingly important in the era of rapid and unalterable climate change. Players move from planet to planet, gather resources, and build out their colony. There’s even a little gimmick where you can teach the