Game review: Bee Lives

What is Parasite Unleased?

In Bee Lives you take on the role of a queen bee trying to manage your hive of honeybees over the course of a calendar year. It is a difficult task; each month you must make sure you have enough honey to keep your worker bees fed and enough pollen to hatch your new brood. If that was not challenging enough, alongside foraging outside the hive for resources you need to contend with threats both in and outside your hive, such as overheating and other hives raiding. Though Bee Lives is a competitive game it also comes with an enjoyable solo mode, complete with scenarios and campaigns.

Is it Fun?

Bee Lives is a very rich strategy game. There are many interesting factors to contend with! At the heart of the game is your hive and maintaining your worker bee population so they can forage for resources. The worker bees are very versatile, and you have lots of choices each turn, such as scouting out new areas to forage, helping you expand your hive size by building wax, or even raiding another hive. The game’s real beauty is its approach to the seasons. In the spring you are effectively playing on your own scouting and foraging, but in the summer all the hives compete for the same resources. To make things more challenging, as well as your fellow players’ hives, ‘wild hives’ come into play foraging for their own resources. Each month in a season results in a card, such as ‘cool temperature’ in the autumn that keeps some of your worker bees in the hive. These cards, plus the changing availability of resources, make each game very dynamic and varied.

Is it Educational?

The game has gone to exceptional lengths to consider the lifecycle of a hive and build this into the game. Every action available to you in the game is planned around a behaviour seen in nature, such as the swarming effect that comes into play if you have too many worker bees to fit in your current hive. The game also takes care of small details. The disease picked up when foraging, that attacks and kills the brood, is based on real varroa mite. We certainly have learnt a little more about bee behaviour whilst playing the game.

Conclusion

The game is beautifully made and a pleasure to play. It does take a little while to grasp all the rules, but once you do you will play a rich, challenging and engaging strategy game where you acquire resources to help your hive survive the dreaded winter months!

Dr Louise Robinson is Lecturer in Forensic Biology and Dr Ian Turner an Associate Professor in Learning and Teaching, both at the University of Derby.