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Forage is a 2-4 player game about the world of bees.

Grow your beehive by collecting nectar, pollen & bees as you deal with pests, bears and the opposition.

Discover the secret world of bees in this game which closely mimics how a bee colony actually works, naturally learning bee ‘rules’.

See Strategy & Gameplay further down for more details.

Each game comes with a complete rule book with setup, scoring, how to play the three versions of the game (child, standard, extended), strategies and detailed rules on bee movements, dice, raising baby bees and more.

PDF of the rule book can be downloaded below:

NOTE: the final rule book will add more illustrations on Setup, How to Play and several example games.

Rule book may also be translated into German and French.

We all agree bees are important.

 

There are three distinct phases in Forage:

Stage 1 - Fill Your Brood Box
Focus on your own hive by gathering enough bees, nectar and pollen to start making baby bees in your brood box.

Stage 2 - Store Nectar in the Super
Midway through the game players may jump ahead with double-up ‘nectar flow’ cards (making them a target for others) as they fill their honey super.

Stage 3 - Rob Other Hives
In the extended game players have time to raise Drones & stealing nectar from one beehive to another until finally someone finishes the game.

This creates a naturally simpler game for the shorter Childs Play and more competitive & strategic for adults in the 60 and 90min game.

Some base strategies include:

• Should you raise baby bees first, or get the best nectar?
  
• As the brood box cannot be robbed from, do you wait for higher scoring nectar & ‘lock it in’, or fill it quickly with any nectar you can get to move ahead?

Scoring with Nectar

Each game has 64 wooden pieces, laser cut into hexagon shapes and printed with a flower on top. There are:

• 12 Clover tiles (1 point)
• 12 Sunflower tiles (2 points)
• 12 Eucalyptus tiles (3 points)
• 12 Mānuka tiles (4 points)
• 12 Pollen tiles (makes ‘bee bread’ to feed baby bees)
• 4 Queen tiles (needed to make baby bees)

Each flower has a different score, so Mānuka is worth 4 times Clover nectar, this dictates a lot of the game strategy as players seek out the most valuable nectar.

Oh, it’s a good idea to keep a little cheap Clover nectar aside to feed to any visiting drones.

Although pollen is not worth any points, without it your beehive can’t make baby bees, which becomes VERY important later in the game, especially if you lose all your bees to spiderweb, cane toads or varroa mites.

Read a more detailed description of the wooden pieces here.

Bees Bees Bees

Bees have many roles in your beehive:

• Nurse bees raise new baby bees
• Forager bees fly out of the hive and gather nectar and pollen
• Drone bees move into other players hives eating up their nectar

There are also some ‘ceremonious’ bee duties (not used in gameplay) such as:

• Undertaker bees
  
• Cleaner bees
  
• Ventilation bees
  
• Builder bees
• Nectar transfer bees

Each bee has a small magnet underneath to pick up the wooden nectar pieces with.

Seasonality

Seasons in Forage may be ‘weighted’ so that Winter is very poor pickings for bees, while Spring and Summer have the lion’s share of the best nectar such as mānuka.

To play with seasonality, setup the board as follows, place:

• 5 clover in winter (1pt each)
• 5 sunflower in autumn (2pt each)
• 5 eucalyptus in spring (3pt each)
• 5 Manuka in summer (4pt each)

The remaining nectar and pollen tiles are placed randomly around the board.

Hero & Hazard Cards

Hazard cards include bear attack, beekeepers rob your hive & varroa destructor mite.

Hero cards stop bears with an electric fence, guard bees for robbing & spider web rescue.

There are 40 poker-sized cards per game, 25 x Hero cards and 15 x Hazard cards.

Cards are placed on the cloth board in the marked spaces just outside the Spring and Winter seasons.

Hero Cards
There are 9 different Hero cards in Forage (25 in total), these are the the ‘positive’ cards which protect your hive (guard bee or pest trap) and give you an advantage to get ahead (rob a beehive, double nectar flow).

Most Hero cards neutralise a Hazard card, and can be collected and kept until needed
E.g.
Guard Bee card neutralises both Beekeeper and Asian Hornet

Hazard Cards
There are 9 different Hazard cards in Forage (15 in total), these are the the ‘negative’ cards which have a bad influence on any players who pick them up.

Most Hazard cards have a matching Hero card, which neutralises the action of the card
E.g.
Bear Attack card is neutralised by Electric Fence card.

The tables below outline how many of each card there is, its action, and any neutralising effect it has:

When to Pickup a Card
Spin the waggle wheel and it will point / show if you need to pickup a Hero or Hazard card, depending on the game version (Basic or Deluxe) this looks slightly different:

Forage Deluxe
The wooden waggle wheel with magnetic stoppers shows which card to pickup using the finger hole cut into the wood, as seen below:

There are 4 Hero card zones and 3 Hazard card zones the wheel may stop on (and 1 spider web) as shown below:

Here’s a little animation of the waggle wheel stopping on a Hero card, and waggling as it comes to rest (thanks to the magnets inside):

Using Cards
Hazard cards are played immediately and put face-up on the Hazard discard pile for other players to see.

Hero cards may be kept hidden from other players, until used (on a players turn) at which point they are also placed face-up in the Hero discard pile.

Hi I’m Yari, I’m a beekeeper of 10 years and a closet board game lover.

UPDATE: 2nd Jan, free shipping & VAT / GST on all versions of Forage!

There are two versions of Forage:

Rewards - Stretch Goals

If the campaign goes well, I’d love to add some extra features, for no extra cost to backers, such as (let me know what you think in the comments):

Extra Hazard Cards
Such as Hive Thieves, Stressed Bees, American Foul Brood (AFB)...

Extra Hero Cards
Such as Sunny Day, Pesticide Ban in local area, Bee-Friendly Planting…

Premium box
Not just a rectangular shaped box, this would be something very unusual, perhaps in the shape of a beehive?

NSFW / Adult 18+ Cards
This explores the bees mating habits and other fascinating tit-bits such as:

• Explosive sex life of bee drones, they literally explode!
• Drone comets, thousands of male bees chasing one queen
• To fly a queen bee must go on a diet, including a vigorous fitness program
• Bees ‘alarm pheromones’ smell like overripe bananas
• African Tulip poison tree
• Umbrella tree paralyses bees

Forage is in it’s very last phase of development and is 80% complete.

My aim is to raise AU$125,000 to make an initial 1,000 copies of Forage, this is the minimum run most manufacturers will accept.