To avoid any confusion, there are no apes to be seen here. If it's apes you want, check out After Us (Catch Up Games). For those not in the know, an apiary is a collection of beehives, so Apiary is a game themed around bees. Well, sort of... the bees in Connie Vogelmann's game aren't merely flitting between flowers and turning pollen into honey, they've become sentient, shed the shackles of Earth and ventured into outer space!
In Apiary, from Stonemaier Games, the 1-5 players each control a clan or faction of bees chosen from among the 20 asymmetric options in the game. Each has their own specific mix of starting resources and special abilities. Your busy bees are the workers you place out at your choice of locations on the initially dauntingly busy-looking board. There's a lot to do and plenty of highly dersirable choices open to you but the trick, even moreso than in most other euro games, is to find the ideal mix of choices in just the right order to optimise your advantage. This involves strategy but you'll find that luck too is a factor in Apiary because you can end up with a honey-sweet megaturn if just the right mix of tiles happen to be in place.
The standout feature in Apiary is the way in which your worker bees grow. Bees have strengths in the range 1-4. The higher the level of your bee, the more effective its action will be when placed out at a location. And when you or another player places a bee out at a location you alrady occupy, your bee is bumped back to your supply but upgraded to its next level. When your bees are at strength 4 they are at their most powerful, and can take actions and get benefts unavailable to lower-value bees, but they must then 'hibernate': they are no longer available to you for further worker placement actions but they give you a hibernation benefit and contribute to prospective end-of-game area control points.
Player interaction isn't merely through bumping each other's bees. Other players can benefit from the actions you take. For example, if your bees learn a dance that sets the conversion rate for resources, other players can use that dance but, when they do so, you gain a benefit - moving up the Queen's Favour track where you can garner further points...
From the bee spaceship to the ink-washed four-sided worker bee meeples, and with artwork from Kwanchai Moriya, Stonemaier Games have done a fantastic job with the production of Apiary. With so many different bee factions and varied set up, this is a game with almost unlimited replayability. Tho' Apiary is highly strategic, it's also a game where you need to adapt your tactics to take full advantage of the opportunities that open up to you to put together powerful combos. We've especially enjoyed Apiary as a three- and four-player game: enough players to maximise creative interaction without having overlong waits between turns. Just beware tho' that for some players the choices can be bewildering: if you find yourself playing with anyone suffering from Analysis Paralysis you may well bemoan this game as AP-iary!