Pete's Log: Game Review: Bee Genius
Entry #2295, (Games)(posted when I was 44 years old.)
JB picked this out at a recent visit to a game store. It's a fun solitaire game for kids aged 3-8 that encourages problem solving and spatial reasoning. JB enjoys playing it and it's fun to watch/help her.
The game comes with the "hive", a queen bee tile and six worker bee tiles, and pieces to fill in the rest of the hive. You also get six colored dice to determine the initial setup.
To start, you place the queen bee in the center of the board, then roll the dice, with each color-number combo telling you where to place one of the worker bees.
If you set it up following these rules, every game is guaranteed winnable. Many similar games seem to come with a set of cards with each card showing you a starting setup, so I enjoyed this method of determining the starting configuration. It feels more open.
The pieces you place on the board vary from filling one space up to filling four spaces.
For an adult, the game is (unsurprisingly) not challenging, but for a four year old it seems to hit the sweet spot of tricky but solvable. It's fun to watch JB work out how to place the pieces, removing pieces to backtrack when she finds herself at a dead end.
And the pieces are sufficiently pleasant to play with that the game has also kept her entertained when she doesn't want to be constrained by rules and decides to make up her own ways of playing the game.
Designer: Aron Lazarus
Publisher: the Happy Puzzle Company
Year: 2020
Price: $28