oh what a wonderful thing to be
Square. Oval. Wiggly line. It’s been a while since we delved into the realm of the abstract hasn’t it? Lets plunge headlong then, right into some hexagons. Hexagons with bugs on. If you have a hankering for a highly portable two-player game I might have just the thing for you.
Hive is everything you’d expect from the typical abstract game. Like chess or go it is a game of black and white pieces through which two, and only two, intellects clash in a battle of wits. The central conceit of Hive is that you and your opponent control rival arthropod armies in an attempt to surround each others queen bee piece while preventing them doing the same to you. To this end you have a stack of hexagons at your disposal representing your forces, made up of ants, beetles, grasshoppers, spiders, the all-important queen bee, and if you’ve added expansions (or bought the all-in pocket version) a ladybird and a mosquito.
There is no board required for a hive-off, any flat(tish) surface will serve as a playing area. Each turn you may either place one of your pieces (ensuring that it doesn’t touch one the opposing pieces – a rule understandably suspended for the first turn) or move one of your pieces according to the individual movement rules for each animal. You must have placed your queen in order to move anything at all, and she herself must be placed as one of your first four placements (or second, third or fourth in a recognised variant). Written down all of these rules and exceptions seem niggly, inelegent, the last thing you want from this most refined of game genres. Yet they don’t play that way, the game in motion is fluid and intuitive. Or at least as intuitive as you’d want in a system that still allows room for crazy gambits and last-minute hail-marys (maries?). Besides, exactly the same reservations could apply to castling in chess, or ko fighting in go. Even more besides, in Hive these rules aren’t really the ones that are going to affect your game.
Much more interesting and important are the rules governing movement. Each kind of piece moves in its own way, queens move one space, as do beetles but they can move on top of other pieces, as does the ladybird for two of the three spaces it moves. Grasshoppers jump in straight lines, spiders move three spaces and three spaces alone, mosquitos copy whatever they touch, and ants can go wherever they like. Well, almost.
The rules that in many ways make the game are all about what you can’t do. You have to be able to physically fit a piece through any gaps you want to move through, a lovely fusion of the rules and the physicality of the game, and you may. Never. Break. The. Hive. If moving a piece would leave other pieces isolated then move it you cannot. This results in the bread-and-butter of a game of hive revolving around a series of strategic pinnings of your opponents pieces and attempted freeings of your own, the net result, if captured in stop motion, would be a writhing network of hexagons creeping and shifting over the playing surface.
There’s a lot going for Hive. It has a simple and refined ruleset (despite those apparent inelegancies of earlier), it provides satisfying gameplay in meaty ten-to-fifteen-minute bites, and the gorgeously tactile, near indestructible bakelite pieces mean you can take it anywhere and play on the beach, on a train, or even have the unusual experience of a picnic enhanced by ants and beetles. It has enough similarities to those classic abstracts that you will easily be able to lure any chess, tafl, or go players in your life into a game, and it has enough depth of strategy that you’ll be getting that lovely warm glow of reward as you notice yourself improving, trying new strategies and being able to read what your opponent is trying to do.
Most obviously going against it is that only two people can play, and as such its obviously not suitable for a dedicated game night. Having said that it makes an excellent warm up of you’re waiting for others to arrive. Also there are many, many, two-player abstracts out there, so why would you play Hive and not one of those venerable alternatives?
Well, I would argue that here Hive’s relative youth is a definite asset. While you could become the dominant chess player in your group by reading up on the extensive literature detailing strategy and counter-strategy, I think I’m right in saying there is a grand total of one Hive strategy tome, and without either a lucrative tournament scene or mainstream intellectual acclaim there’s no real motive to seek it out. Any advances you make will have to be earned through hard-fought trial and error, new ideas will have to be forged in the white heat of play. It also provides all that thinky goodness in a much shorter playtime, which might also be attractive if its not something the soviet government are insisting you devote your entire life to. On a more shallow note, perhaps my favourite reason to play Hive over these others, especially in public places, is just the sheer otherness of it. You feel like a patron of Ten-Forward on the Enterprise pulling it out down at the pub or the park (ooh-er), feeling curious eyes scanning the alien spectacle going on in their very midst, warming their hands on the heat of the Spock-like brain power being expended. Mmm, nerd-smug.
So yeah, Hive manages to seamlessly combine elements of gaming that feel both classic and very fresh into a lean delicious package. Unless you have a serious aversion to the abstract game, or bugs, I can’t see why Hive wouldn’t deserve a place in your collection, especially as you can pick up the pocket version (my favourite) for twelve to fifteen quid, and you can always try it out for free on the excellent boardspace.net to see if it’s for you. Not quite so easy to play that version in the park of course.
Bee a honey and check out all the other great stuff at G*M*S Magazine