On Boardgames: Hive

I've been playing the game Hive (designed by John Yianni and published in 2001) for ages, and I still love it.

With average play time lasting around 20 minutes, it's a fun game to play while you're waiting for the rest of your boardgame buddies to show up. It's also simple enough to play whilst intoxicated, and the heavy, colorful tiles seem designed around this. Or, you know, Yianni designed the game for children (although I'd like to argue that the two groups react to losing this game in similar fashions).

This is a game for two players, composed of 22 bug tiles in black and white. Each player gets three soldier ants, three grasshoppers, two beetles, two spiders, and one queen bee tile, and each type of bug tile has different rules that govern its movement. Players place tiles one at a time, with the main rules being that you cannot place your tile adjacent to your opponents' tiles, you cannot break apart the "hive," and the tiles need to be able to slide in and out of the spaces they are moving to, with a few exceptions based on the move actions available to each tile.

The goal of the game is to completely surround your opponent's queen bee. Once that happens, the game immediately ends and you may commence swearing at that punk kid who just smugly beat you at the game you've been playing for ages.

I like to think of this game as a combination of checkers and chess. Once you get the hang of it, it's easy to start planning two, three, even four moves ahead, and you have to carefully balance both the defense of your queen and the harassment of your punk kid opponent's. The pieces move almost like chess pieces, such as the queen moving one space in any direction and the grasshopper moving directly over pieces in a straight line, but the options for movement can get pretty limited since all pieces must stay connected. With that in mind, it's important to plan how you'll control the board, or "hive", early in the game. The rules may be simple, but the strategies get more complex the more you play.

If you get bored with the base game, there are expansions available that add additional bug tiles to the mix, such as the ladybug, mosquito, and pill bug. Or, if you don't want to purchase or heft around the actual tiles, that stupid punk kid can stomp you at the Android or iOS version of the game.

On Boardgames: a review of Legendary, the Slightly-Rubbish Deck Building Game

As far as board games go, I generally prefer there to not actually be a board involved. Deck builders are my absolute favorite. I'm also a screaming nerd when it comes to Marvel comics, so when I found this bad boy at my local game shop I made embarrassing squeaky noises and jumped up and down. It was relatively pricey as far as games go but it had Deadpool. So pffft.

I bought the thing and 80 bajillion card sleeves.

Setting up this game will take you into retirement age, especially if you let your dumb friends pick their favorite superheroes. If you make my classic mistake and do not read the rules AT ALL before you invite people to play with you, you're going to spend the rest of your life trying to decipher rules that have obviously been written by an immigrant kindergartner. 

That said, the game moves pretty quickly and is silly easy to learn. Cards are pulled from a giant Bad Guy Deck and you fight them, and cards are pulled from a giant Good Guy Deck and you buy them. It's a classic deck builder in a lot of ways, mainly in that you have two mechanics: fight stuff and buy stuff, and you have to balance them. 

The game creators gave their superheroes plausible abilities which I think adds to the game flavor, like for example The Hulk hurts himself and everybody else a bunch but then turns that into damage. Superheroes gain special abilities when you group them with similar types, so if you flood your deck with all X-Men or all Avengers you can get some pretty neat ability stacks. I wish there would have been some indicator of this in the rules, such as it is exponentially harder to defeat Magneto if you have no X-Men in play. But the rule book barely even told you how to play, so there's that.  The way the mastermind works is pretty ingenious with thematic scary things happening whenever the Bad Guy Deck activates him or his Scheme. Some are vastly harder than others, and depending which superheroes you've let your dumb friends pick they can  be significantly easier or more difficult to defeat. 

If you thought setting up this game took a long time, eventually you will have to put it all back. And then you will know the true meaning of the word forever. 

So all in all I quite like it. The long-ass setup and take-down is a pretty serious deterrent, but overall it's got great re-play potential and the learning curve isn't too steep. It falls into the category of simple rules - complex strategy games I love so much. That said it wasn't epic; the game mechanics are a bit blah. It's almost like someone threw comic art at Ascension. 

Oh, and the box it originally came with is infuriatingly designed to dump everything into a big slurry of bullshit the moment you move it. Which, as a game made out of eleventy-million cards, is generally enough to send me straight into a murderous rage. I highly suggest either putting it into a card box or one of the expansion boxes.