Spelling Bees

Spell words by placing lettered tiles onto the hive, a shared triangle-based grid. Incorporate a tile with a worker bee on it to earn bonuses for your word. Words aren’t necessarily in a straight line; they can meander in any direction following the paths of adjacent tiles.

At first glance you might see this and think of Scrabble, but there’s no fixed board and no bonus squares. Instead, it’s just as much of a spatial puzzle as it is a word game: how you lay out the words can be the difference between a clever word and a power turn with lots of combos built out of simpler words.

The sizes and shapes of the tiles are related to their frequency: the least common letters are the biggest tiles (a full hexagon made of six triangles) and there is only one of each letter in the set, while the most common are just a single triangle and the set comes with six of each. In between are a diamond shape (two triangles) and trapezoid or half hexagon (three triangles).

But every letter is represented by six triangles, regardless of the shape tile, and you always draw tiles by the hexagon-equivalent (six triangles, three diamonds, two half-hexagons, or a single hexagon), so you won’t get a refill of a shape if you get stuck with one or two tiles that you can’t use. Manage your inventory carefully!

Players: 1-6; play with one set of letter tiles for solo or 2-player modes, or two sets of letter tiles for 3-6 players. Game play time scales with player count.