Waggle Dance Review

Board games are very much the flowers we gamers flock to, the nectar-like pre-cursor to our game night fun. Although hopefully no one’s cards get sticky… anyway. Dragging this metaphor onwards, it is the role of the board game reviewer to scout out the flowers that will lead to the best fun and report back to you all, so that you can rush from your hives and get hold of it. Has my most recent scouting trip been a success? Yes, it’s time for me to get my Waggle Dance on!

Waggle Dance Game

Waggle Dance is a game about bees! And making sweet, sweet honey. But making it quickly, faster than those other players from their inferior hives who are always getting in your way and trying to steal your nectar from you. You’ll start off with a small hive made from 3 of the most exciting components in any board game, ever…

Waggle Dance Hex

Brown hexes! Ooo yeah! [/sarcasm] You’ll be aiming to fill these with 4 identical nectar cubes in order to flip them to their honey side, as the first player to reach a certain honey target will win the game. There are options for short, medium and long games, which just shift the honey target to steadily larger numbers and don’t really add too much to the experience. A medium length game is fine but a long game is just too long. Now, to get that nectar you’ll be utilising actually the best dice ever, your worker bees:

Waggle Dance Dice

Look at those!! There’s a bee on one side (the “1” value) and all the others have had their pips replaced with little hexes!!! That’s awesome, and I don’t care if you think I’m being weird. Kickstarter games have the best components.

But the sweetest components won’t make up for gameplay with a bitter after taste so how does Waggle Dance stack up? Fortunately, very well, and not just because your worker bees are being used for… worker placement! Isn’t it perfect!? I am disproportionately pleased by the simplest of things sometimes… but I bet I’m not the only one.

The nature of bee-ing

So, you roll your bee dice at the start of each round, and then these values determine where they can be placed on the set of action cards (rather than a board). Each action has a space available for each number, meaning if there is something you really want to do (as there always is), the second thing you do in each round is look at what everyone else has rolled and figure out what dice you need to place where and how quickly. I love dice placement for exactly this reason; it makes your decisions as much about what you think your opponents are thinking of doing, and are able to do, as it is about yourself. This is true in all worker placement games of course, but the random nature of the dice gives things a wonderful twist. If you are the only player to roll a 2, say, then you are free to place that last, while if everyone has a 5, you probably want to get that out as soon as possible.

The actions allow you to expand your hive, which you’ll always need to do to reach the target honey number, obtain eggs that in one of the games sweetest mechanics can be hatched to give you more bees (dice), or get a special action card that can be played to boost one of your actions, or occasionally to attack another player (although you can play without the attack cards if you don’t like take-that mechanics). Bees can also be placed in your hive. You’ll need pairs of identical numbers both to hatch the eggs you collect, as well as to convert nectar into honey. Oh, but where do you get nectar from? The flowers, obviously!

Waggle Dance Flowers

There are 6 different types of nectar in the world, each corresponding to a differently numbered (and coloured) flower. As you might have already guessed, you need to match the value on your bee to the flower type but what you might not have guessed is that only by having the most bees on a flower will you get full use out of it! That’s right, an area control battle is being waged alongside the worker placement shenanigans, offering multiple ways to passively mess with people. Winning an area, regardless of the number of bees, gets you 2 of the 4 nectar you need to make some honey, coming second gets you a measly one, and tying just makes things worse for everyone.

Between this mechanic and the pairs you’ll need to hatch eggs and convert a set of 4 (matching) nectar cubes into honey, that second-guessing of your opponents I mentioned earlier really comes to the fore. Are they planning on using that pair to hatch their egg, or will they compete with me for nectar? Will you need a big pile of dice to win an area, or will everyone ignore it, letting you slip in for a pair of cubes for one ultra-efficient dice?

Waggle Dance Hive

The early bee catches the nectar

Efficiency is very much the name of the game in Waggle Dance, it is a race to the finish after all, and the player reaching that target amount with the fewest active dice will win any ties. Yet having lots of dice is also a powerful advantage. You can hold off committing dice values you share with your opponents to see what they do, threatening them with defeat on the flowers, not to mention giving you a greater chance of rolling what you need. But it’s still possible to win without ever hatching an egg… at least in the 2-player game I tried this in. At 4 I expect you’d struggle to pull it off.

There is a real balance between committing your dice for new workers and on collecting nectar. You need to keep your eyes open for opportunities, adapt to the actions of your opponents and judge when to throw yourself towards the finish line. The only disappointing element is the racing-style of the game, it can give rise to situations where it is clear who will win before the final round is played and that is always a disappointing way to end a game. It is a simple goal, and this is a nice almost entry-level game, so I understand taking this approach. I just wish there was a little more subtlety to the victory criteria, maybe having other ways of scoring that could obfuscate who will win in the final round.

Waggle Dance PlacementWaggle Dance is a very nice game. There’s not a huge amount of depth for experienced gamers, but for families and those looking for a lighter worker placement game, this is great, and there’s still plenty of interesting decisions for gamers to make. The theme makes it a much easier sell to those put off by the latest fantasy tie-in and the mechanics and objectives make sense in the context of said theme. It takes some well-known mechanics and uses them to good effect but it might be too simplistic for some.

 

Rating: Sweet!

 

Our copy of Waggle Dance was provided to us by the publisher Grublin Games for review.

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