Bumbling - A solo hex game about bees!

For today's Itch.io Library first-look, I've played a bit of "Bumbling" by Button Kin Games.

Bumbling is a charming little map-making and journaling game wherein you take on the role of a newly hatched bee.

Your primary goal is to collect pollen for your hive, and to lead other bees to flowers so that you can fill your hive with honey!

It's a very simple game, perfect for a relaxing bit of map-drawing fun when you're bored. For physical materials, you'll want something to draw with, something to draw on (hex grids are great but not mandatory - you could just do this on blank paper), and a d6 dice.

If you want to do a bit of journaling as you go through the game, something to take notes with would also be useful. I didn't opt to journal my bee-adventure, as I was mostly excited to spend an hour or so drawing out a fun hex map while my youngest played play-doh at the table with me and suggested where my bee should go.

I opted to print out the low-colour version of the game just to save on some magenta ink, but I do enjoy the bright pink of the pdf.

Mechanics

The game is wonderfully simple mechanically, with the vast majority of the game having a very simple 3-step choice of what you do next. You can:

Learn

You watch the elaborate dances of other bees to get led to patches of flowers. There is a table of dance moves (like a butt wiggle, wing flap, hop, etc) that you string together and each move corresponds to a different type of location (hills, farm, trees, lake, etc).

Dancing

Once you learn all of the dance moves from the experienced bees in the hive, you can opt to do your own bee dance and guide others to patches of flowers you've found... which gives quite the haul of pollen for honey!

Questing

You can take off to either follow a path that you know leads to flowers, or you can explore your map to find out what's around you! If you're lucky, you'll discover a new patch of flowers and you'll be able to race back to the hive and report your find.

Everything is run off of a d6, so as you explore your map you roll a d6 when you enter a new hex to see what kind of landmarks are in this area. After you discover the new location, you roll once more and if you get a 6, there are flowers as well!

My starting setup:

Above is my beginning setup for my map. The hive sits in the middle and around it are 6 types of terrain - woods, farmland, lake, farmhouse, hills, and flat/plains.

As you play the game, you'll explore out from and return to the hive. If we look at the next photo, I've explored north and found another set of hills, and then some farmland with flowers!

Each time you find flowers you can head back to the hive, deposit some pollen for honey, tell other bees where to go via the art of bee-dance, and get even more pollen! The goal is to end up filling 180 cells of honey, which is a lot easier to do than it might sound and is, as described, a very fun and relaxing hex-mapping game.

I did a 30 minute or so video of gameplay for this which you can find here:

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I'll post more solo TTRPGs in the coming days, so watch my bluesky page or follow me here to enjoy that!

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