Are you ready for the Waggle Dance?

Back in December we reviewed Grublin Games‘ brilliant debut game Cornish Smuggler and now they are about to kickstart a second title:Waggle Dance designed by Mike Nudd

LET THE WAGGLE DANCE BEGIN!

Waggle Dance is a euro-style worker-placement dice game for 2-4 players; in Waggle Dance players control worker bees to build their hive, produce more bees, collect pollen, return it to the hive and make honey!

Players need to organise their bees to make as much honey as possible to see the hive through the coming winter. The winner is the first player to successfully create seven or more honey tokens in their hive.

It’s up to you how to achieve this… Do you focus on pollen collection, increasing your bee population, expanding your hive, seeking favour with the queen or splitting your resources to accomplish all of these? Whatever you choose, the natural world is a competitive environment and you can be sure the other players will be looking to maximise their advantage.

Waggle Dance has been designed to be accessible by all, but without sacrificing any strategic depth. The entire game is language independent and with a brief concise rulesheet.

Mike Nudd, the game’s creator, is an experienced game designer, already having one successfully published boardgame under his belt: (White Wolf’s Vampire: Prince of the City) and has been actively designing games for the last fifteen years: “The theme of using bees and honey really appealed to me. I have long held a deep respect for the creatures to the extent that I will try to save exhausted bumblebees I find on the pavement by feeding them sugar and water. I appreciate that their role in natural cycle of things is important and I am concerned about the consequences of bees around the world going extinct. If I can in some small way generate enthusiasm for bees and draw attention to these issues then so much the better.”

If you’re wondering about the name, it is appropriately bee related: waggle dance (noun): 
a series of patterned movements performed by a scouting bee, communicating to other bees of the colony the direction and distance of a food source or hive site.” (dictionary.com)

All of the illustration in Waggle Dance is being created by the incredibly talented Mateusz Szulik and can be accessed here

“We wanted to design a game that had pure gameplay at its core, is beautifully designed, portable (we’re still working on the box size, but it’s probably going to be pretty close to the RftG size) with a truly impressive component count, and all for a very competitive price.”
 Henry Jasper – CEO Grublin Games

Waggle Dance will be live on Kickstarter from 27th May 2014.

More information on the Kickstarter campaign for Waggle Dance will be released mid May. Until then you can follow our very own Waggle Dance on Twitter via #30DaysOfBees campaign.