Wingspan publisher’s next board game is about bees in space
Unbee-lievable.
The studio behind Wingspan, Stonemaier Games, has revealed their next tabletop title – Apiary.
Set in a distant future wherein humanity no longer inhabits the Earth, Apiary sees enormous honeybees now populate the planet. The cause of the human’s disappearance is unknown, but their absence has enabled the humble insects to claim Earth as their own. Now ultra-intelligent and ultra-large, the honeybees have developed their own advanced civilisation that’s capable of exploring the stars.
An upcoming board game for one to five players, Apiary sees people competing to create and develop their own advanced honeybee civilisations. At the beginning of the game – which takes about 60 to 90 minutes to play, depending on the player-count – competitors are able to choose from a selection of 20 different factions, each providing their own unique playthrough. Each faction begins with their own hive, small collection of resources and team of worker bees. Using these starting elements players will need to develop their faction to become the most successful on the planet and beyond.
Apiary is primarily a worker-placement board game, meaning that players will need to assign their various tokens in order to perform different actions. Throughout Apiary, players are expected to carefully balance the various aspects of the game: from gathering resources, to developing their technologies to creating carvings to represent their faction’s achievements.
Along the way, players will be able to send their queenship out to explore and pollinate new planets, leaving them better than they were before. Players will then be able to advance along a progression track, depending on how they’ve built it. All of these things will translate into victory points at the end of the game, as well as players can balance their workers’ actions with needing to hibernate.
Apiary was created by Connie Vogelmann, with this being the Stonemaier colleague’s debut title, with the artwork for the game coming from Kwanchai Moriya, the artist behind titles such as Flipships and tabletop roleplaying game jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall. Besides Wingspan and Apiary, Stonemaier has also published titles such as Scythe, Tapestry, Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest and Rolling Realms.
The release date for Apiary is set for sometime in November.