Project Two - Bee Hive! Final!

BEE HIVE!

Objective: The first player to collect 5 ‘nectar points’ by making 5 trips to the flowers and back wins.

How to play: Players (2-4) roll a dice to determine the number of spaces they can move their ‘bee’ game piece. Landing directly on a red circle earns the player a ‘honey slick’ which they can later place anywhere they land to block other players from that route. A player may trade in their ‘nectar point’ to remove a ‘honey slick’ road block.

Why it is fun?
Bee Hive! is a competitive game in which players can block and thus ‘screw over’ other players. Removing a 'honey slick' block decreases a point. Thus, it encourages competition, rowdiness, and laughter.

Bee Hive! Employs highlighting to show that the red spots are rewarded ‘honey slicks’ when landed on. Uniform connectedness is also used because all the places you can land are circles and most are the same color other than the special ‘honey slick’ dots. Affordance is limited as the player moves up the board game because the honey comb narrows. The players themselves can also limit this affordance but laying down ‘honey slicks’ and thus blocking other players.

Improvements: One improvement made since user testing was making the spaces where players would land more apparent by highlighting them with dots. Originally it was just stated that each corner of the hexagon of the beehive was a space but some users were confused by this. It also made it easier for players to cheat as the spaces couldn’t as easily be counted.
Another improvement made was incorporating the red dots in which ‘honey slicks’ could be earned. Originally ‘nectar points’ which players earned could be traded in for ‘honey slicks’ but this trade in was discouraged by the fact that the main objective of the game was to simply rack up 5 points. Thus competition and fun were diminished. By making the ‘honey slicks’ spots that player would land on by chance would increase their likelihood to collect and use them thus blocking other players and heightening competition.
The last improvement made since the very first conception of the game board was narrowing the honeycomb paths players could take. This forces players together, down to only 2 paths at the very end of the game board which heightens competition and limits affordances.