In recent years, there has been a clear boom in the world of board games and we can now find proposals for practically any theme. Among them, animals have become a very recurrent and popular theme, and insects have not been left behind.
For those of you who want to have insects in your games, we have selected four recommendations in which they play a very important role:
1. Cockroach Poker (Cockroach Poker)
Despite its name, it is not a traditional poker game. "Poquér de bichos" is a fun game for 2 - 6 players, where the main objective is to avoid being cheated and, in turn, to manage to cheat the others. To do this, you exchange bug cards face down and try to deduce or simulate the truth about their contents. The deck includes eight types of animals: cockroaches, bedbugs, flies, spiders, scorpions, bats, frogs and rats. Don't worry if you're not good at bluffing, with a few rounds, the game will teach you to give "fly" for "rat".
2. The cheating bumblebee (Schummel Hummel)
As the name suggests, in this game for 3 - 5 players, you also have to cheat, a little or a lot depending on what each participant prefers. The aim is to run out of cards in your hand. To achieve this, we have to play flower cards and insect cards that trigger different actions. But we can also get rid of our cards by cheating, that is, by losing them without being discovered by the player who has the "guardian worm" card. In fact, cheating is necessary to lose the "cheating bumblebee" cards, which cannot be played any other way. The combination of cheating with actions that require speed and reflexes creates a very lively game in which you can't lose your attention for a second.
3. Hive
Hive is a two-person strategy game reminiscent of chess, but with bugs. The game consists of two sets of hexagonal pieces with different types of arthropods, which players place to form a "hive". The ultimate goal is to capture the opponent's queen bee by surrounding it with pieces.
Each type of insect has its own rules of movement: for example, grasshoppers can jump over any number of pieces in a straight line, while ants can move any number of squares around the perimeter of the hive. A great advantage of this game is its portability, thanks to its resin pieces and the existence of a pocket version (Hive Pocket) with smaller pieces.
4. Honey Buzz
Honey Buzz is the most complex game in this selection, with games lasting over an hour. In this game, bees, who have just discovered economics, must manage their hives to produce honey and sell it to other animals in the forest. To achieve this, players will manage their workers, who will expand the honeycomb cells to store nectar and pollen, produce honey, raise new worker larvae and sell their products.
The game components are very nice and detailed; for example, there are different pieces representing different types of honey and pollen. In addition, although the base game accepts between 2 and 4 players, it includes specific rules for enjoying the experience alone.
As you can see, the styles of play are very different and there are options both for those players who enjoy analysing every move and strategy, as well as for those who are looking for light games to have fun and laugh with company. Even so, this is just a small sample of the many games with insects that exist and that, as we try them out, we will introduce you to them.
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