Further Information

Beeznees in 5 bullet points:

- learn about the lives of bees and beekeepers
- discover the significance and context of beekeeping in Slovenia
- sponsor the creativity and entrepreneurship of high school students
- help in the development of an original and unique strategic board game
- spend some quality time with you friends and family playing a game, knowing that your support enabled the creation of the game

Visit also our web page and become a part of the FB or IG community.

What and why?

Beezness is a strategic game that was developed as a project work in the junior year of Škofijska klasična gimnazija in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2018 the 20th May the first World Bee Day was celebrated. Slovenia was the promotor of the initiative that was adopted by the UN in that year. And we would be delighted if Slovenia could give the world the most fun and insightful game about bees and beekeeping as well.

Project work that is not tied to any specific school subject and is at the same time a part of the regular curriculum at the school. Its purpose is to support student innovation and creativity. One of the main emphasis of the project work is in its connection with the real life outside of school walls. Students need to put their knowledge and skills to the real test and in the course of doing so, hone them far more than they do in regular school work.

Maja, Lea, Manca and Anamarija decided to dedicate their work to the exploration of the lives of bees and beekeepers, development of the board game and rigorous testing and finaly, designing and endless refining of the design leadinf towards the preprint preparations.

How do you play Beezness?

Beezness is a strategic board game of the economic genre. The game is divided into 5 game rounds, appropriately called years. Each year is then divided into several stages corresponding to the life of a beekeeper.

At the beginning of the year player can hire workers, buy bee families and machines or perhaps even storage units for their beekeeping business. Later they plan the pastures for their bees in secret. If they manage to have their bees alone or in majority on a certain pasture, they receive certain bonuses. After that one of the players reveals 4 of the event cards that usually influence the production or price of certain types of honey. Some players might have the ability to addapt to these events in some years. Towards the end of the year all players pour the honey and potentially turn it into some higher added value honey products that they then try to sell.

The goal of the game is to have the highest profit in a single year. For most players the highest profit will be achieved after the final year when their businesses are most developed but you never know what events the final year might bring.

In most of the test plays the very first stage of a year has proven to be the crowd favourite. In the blind auction phase players bid against each other (not seeing each others bids) to obtain the special cards that can help develop their brand (and permanently increase the price for wich they sell products) or build audiences or improve refining capacities. These cards also carry the honey product recepies, special abilities, some awesome bee families and some cards can even be used against other players.