beesness/game

🐝 + 💸 = Beesness, a boardgame for 3-5 players that turns a hive capitalist.

Beesness

Beesness is a game for 3-5 players that simulates a capitalist market economy.

A beesness is a business for bees.

Not your usual bees. In this game, bees have learned how to do business from us humans: they can trade flowers for honey and honey for more bees, they can extort honey from other beesnesses and even employ cheap labour.

You play the director of one beesness. You compete against other players over flowers (resources) and honey (money).

To win, your beesness must end the game with more honey than any other beesness.

Your beesness operates in the garden of Commons. If all flowers are taken from the garden, at any point during the game, everybody loses immediately! To avoid this tragedy, you can cooperate with the other players to replant flowers.

Will you manage to maximise your honey profits while avoiding drone strikes and a collective beesaster?

Versions!

This project is work-in-progress. Below are different versions of the game we're prototyping and playtesting:

• v1 was more of a playable theory than a game, back in 2015
• v2 doesn't actually exist, we skipped straight to v3
• v3 was v1 turned into something more playable
• v4 is what we presented at NowPlayThis 2017, where we had loads of fun with friends and friendly strangers. At the end of a 5-hours playtesting marathon that day v4.1 was born 🐣
• v4.1 features a beesaster referendum 👍 👎
• v4.2 and v4.3 sport free-lance & full-time bees + gambling! 🎲
• v5 is still a cloudy idea 💭
• v6 is like v4.x with colours 🌈
• v7 will feature a workers-owned cooperative ✊
• v8 focuses on the market, with drones playing the traders
• v9 will be a cooperative game
• v10 is a fast-paced simultaneous-action game
• v11 aka Imbeerialism, the beesness model of the colonial past

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License