 So, long time ago, at a, I think it was PAX. I don't know. I think we picked this game up at a PAX or a Connecticut. This was like a PAX multi years ago. Yeah, it was called The Hive, or Hive. Well, I was going, basically, let's find a two player game we can play really quick. I think it must have been PAX 08 or 09. Corollary to that, find a weird game. Yeah, find a weird game we never seen before. So we're in the PAX library, and I see a game in a bag. And I'm like, that's a winner. So I grab the game in the bag, and we play it really quick. And it was okay. It didn't really fully grasp it. We were, we were, we sucked. Yeah, we played it once, like, all right, whatever. Then we put it away and went to a concert or something. I don't know what we did. I remembered the game because every time I went to a PAX, I'd see it in the library and be like, oh yeah, that game. It's one of those games that you see around, but you never play, right? It's like when you go to a store, especially like a gaming store, there's the, there's the section or a comic store, especially. There's the section with the new stuff, and it's always changing. So you're always looking there really closely to see the new stuff. There's always that shelf where the stuff never gets bought. And it's just sitting there with the same stuff on it. It's all the old war games and Memoir 44. Right. And you just sort of like, you don't actually look closely at the shelf. Your brain doesn't process each item. It's just your brain remembers the shelf as a whole unit. And you can, you just recognize it and you know, you can immediately tell nothing has changed on it just by glancing because it matches your memory exactly. But if someone asked you, name one thing on that shelf without looking at it, you'd be like, ah, all right. So the hive is one of those things. Like you see it everywhere. There's a picture of it in your brain if you go to the game store, but you never actually look closely at it or even recognize it exists. And if someone like where to take it off the shelf and show it to you, it would like disrupt your brain. Like what? Like you couldn't even imagine that the shelf would move. I wonder if there's a name for this, like a neurological or psychological thing. Whatever. Chunking. I've heard people use to describe that, but I don't know if that's a technical term or just what my AP bio teacher called it. Weird brain stuff. Woo. My AP bio teacher called it chunking, that your brain will take a set and if it can chunk it down into like one discrete unit, that's much more efficient. And then you'll remember the unit, but maybe not any details of the unit. Though a detail may trigger memory of the unit, even though you won't know why it triggered it. So anyway, the hive is one of those things where you'll see it, but you won't actually look at it closely until we tell you to right now. So the hive is just a bag full of a bunch of tiles. They're all hexes. And they're equal. It's a perfect complete information game. It's completely symmetrical. And the goal is to place your little grasshoppers and aunties and beetleys and spiders. That's all the things. Well, there's expansions like the mosquito and the ladybug. We gotta get that shit. Yeah, people don't seem to like them that much. Whatever. But your goal is to surround the other person's queen bee. Surround bee to stay alive. Without having your own bee be surrounded. And it can be surrounded by tiles of either color. It doesn't matter if the queen bee is completely surrounded, the queen bee dies. So beyond that, every bug has a power. And the game actually has a pretty unique starting metrics or starting conditions. So you place any bug that you want, the first player. Second player places a bug. It has to be touching the first bug. They're all hexes. From this point forward, you can only play a tile if it is placed such that it does not touch any tile of another color. So the other person's tiles. You cannot move any bee, any bugs, until you place your queen bee. Once you have placed your queen bee, you can either place a guy or move a guy. So now if you play the bee first, you can just start playing and moving all that you want like crazy. But if you play something else, you've got to play some, you know, you got to either play the bee or play something else until the fourth turn where if you haven't played the bee yet, you'll be forced to play it now. So that's the rub. You must place the bee in one of your first four turns. But you cannot matter which one. But also you can't, on your turn, normally you can move or place. But I said that right. If you have not placed the bee, you cannot move yet. And then it's just a game of maneuvering and every bug has a power. The ant can just move around the whole outside. But not the inside. The beetle can walk on top of shit. The bee moves like a chess king. The bee kind of sucks. Well, the bee is the defendant. Grass Africa can only jump over any number of dudes. And a straight line. Spider moves three like spaces around the outside of other towns that we already ran into. A spider problem. Yeah, we came across an unresolvable spider situation. I have to go through the erotic to figure out what to do. Yeah. And so far it's a good game because I'm always a fan of the simple, fairly abstract, direct competition to player, complete, perfect information games like Oshi or the stick game. Right. The idea is you have a game that's basically fundamentally the same as chess or go, right? You can see everything that's on the board. You know every move the other person can make. There's nothing hidden, you know. And it's just moving pieces and placing pieces and you're trying to win. And everyone has the same thing. And the only difference is who goes first, right? The difference here is that, you know, chess and go have like a, you know, such a huge play space, you know, a solution space. Coupled with the fact that good players are way above you. Playing against someone who's good at chess is the same as playing against someone who's good at Street Fighter. But the games also while having such as big space of decision making also have a lot of pieces. Like there's a lot of, even a chess board has a lot of pieces on it. Now chess is more fun if you play it with someone who is at your skill level. Yeah. But it does run into the problem of it'll take years to fully explore that play space. A game like the Hive or Oshie, if you're smart and you keep playing against one person or a few people over and over and over again, you're going to rapidly go through like phases of gameplay. We're already seeing that. Yep. So the thing is a game like Oshie or Hive, right, gives you quite a large decision space but a lot less pieces. It's like, it's somehow, it's like compressed, you know, because you have less pieces on a smaller board but there's more complex rules perhaps or just the way the rules are. You know, I mean, the fact that they're hexes and there's different tricks you can do. It's like you've managed to be able to get, you know, a very complex game, maybe not necessarily as complex as go but it's easier to keep the whole game in your brain even if you haven't studied it for years and years and years. And it's also by being perfect and complete it's a game where you can fully analyze everything that is happening and everything that has happened and they're great games to teach you pattern recognition and, you know, gaming analytics, game theory, analyzing data and patterns in game theory sense even if you don't understand the math. Yeah. And of course there are two player games which are rare and it's rare you get a good one and very quick to learn and quick to play. You know, people talk about easy to learn difficult to master. Yeah. Sure. Whatever. Quick to play is very important because otherwise you're sitting there for hours. You know, the first time I heard that term was watching mask. Okay. m.a.t.s.t.k. And I think it was Matt Tracker got into miles. What's his name's little motor bikey thing. And then he's like trying to shoot somebody with it and then the bad guy radius him and he's like, ah, you can see that is very easy to pilot a minute to learn but a lifetime to master. And then he blows them up or something. So in our playing of the hive I'm going to say, and I say this about every game like this, this game is straight up the stick game in that its primary pattern is between stable and unstable states. Unstable meaning one player. You should put a link in the show to your stick game because people don't know. I should make like a web game. I should make the stick game online. Yeah. Get put up against a random opponent. That'd be pretty easy to do actually. I'm not going to do it, but it'd be easy to do. Okay. But anyway, so the game is stable and unstable. It becomes unstable once one player has a direct path to victory as in they can just start attacking the other B in such a way that the first player cannot fill in or defend fast enough. Right. It's like if you're beat, you remember you had to surround the B and it's a hex. You need six pieces around the B. So if your B has four around it and mine has three, you're ahead by one depending on whose turn it is. You know, even if I go first, okay, so now we're even, but then you're ahead. But it's still stable if a player doesn't have a clear immediate path to finishing the surrounding due to, you know, attacks. You have to count. Basically what you end up doing is you look at how many things are already around your B. Then you see if you can maybe move your B, if you can move the B, if it's not trapped yet, then that means you can probably really fuck the other guy over. Thing is, B gets trapped like right away in the base game with an A. And there's not much you can do to avoid it either. And Grasshopper. Right. But what you do is once the B is trapped, you count how many actions it will take for the other guy to completely surround the B and how many actions it will you to take to completely surround his B if you did full offense. And then you're like, all right, what are the alternatives that can occur here to maybe change those numbers? Now it's funny that whenever Scott and I play games like this, they always go through the same pattern. The first bunch of games, I'll win them because it's a new game we haven't played before and Scott always tries to play a real strategy. And I literally just look at the game and say, how can I do the most aggressive, just make the game as unstable and unpredictable and crazy as possible and then just hope that that'll make me win. And in a game like this, that'll work until we both know the game and then I'll lose an equal number of games following as Scott uses real strategy and my attack only one strategy no longer applies. And then, you know, since, you know, we're both trying to figure out how to solve the game, it's like, I'll just try crazy stuff. And sometimes it works. Like my B, ant, ant, ant, that was a great move. But then I came up with the counter. I can't win against it, but I can force a draw reliably. Yeah. And then we also learned that like going first sucks. Yeah. We got into this pattern where, you know, I won a whole bunch of games and then Scott won a whole bunch. And then we alternated and then we realized we were only alternating because whoever went first always lost. So we started going first and trying different like patterns of play from going first to figure out if there's a way to escape. There's actually a very specific and direct way to win if you go second. And the only way I can come up with to get out of it is to be able to force a draw. Yeah. And I've been, I found myself going for the draw if I went first because I knew I couldn't win. I won one game going first, but that was the game where Scott tried some crazy bullshit that was ill advised. I was just trying it out. It's like, you know, you can't get better. I tried my all spiders in the beginning strategy. That's something I noticed that happens in a lot of games, right? It's like, okay, you've gotten to sort of a rut, right? You're using the same strategies over and over because, you know, they've worked for you in the past or whatever. Teeny, I'm a huge victim of that. I will almost always play the same strategy. You'll do what's familiar and safe and you can't risk experimenting with the unfamiliar because you might lose. I always start in the middle with my red black leaders. I make the checkerboard. Right. So what you have to do is you just be like, all right, you know, this game is short enough in a long game. It's like, you don't want to risk losing because it's for serious, but in a short game, you can play it a bunch of times. So you just, just try crazy shit. Even like one round, just play randomly for like a few turns. Like, you know, just be like bug, bug, bug. And then if you haven't gotten the B by the fourth turn, bring it out and then, you know, just go for it. See, see what, you know, try to win with whatever you happen to play. Well, more importantly, once you get, once you get to an equilibrium where, you know, the people you're playing with, victory seems to follow play order or victory seems to be pretty even. Or if you get to a stability point where one player is always winning, then keep playing the game over and over again and iterate through starting strategies because the starting like two moves of this game determine a good deal of what comes after. And you'd be surprised. You have to start reacting to what your opponent did immediately. Like if you go second and he, the first thing he puts out is B. Well, you got to take that into account on your, on your move. Yup. So choosing your second piece, for example, is I'd say probably 60 to 70% of the victory condition of the actual underlying game. Yeah. The other thing in this game, right, is that there's sort of these two aspects, right? There's the aspect of, since you don't remove any bugs from the board, but they do get trapped where they can't move. Yup. Because you can't move a bug if it will disconnect the hive and make it two separate hives. It has to be one big hive. And also you can, a bug can be trapped. Like if it can't physically get out without bumping any other bugs out of the way, then it can't move. So this, that creates this aspect of geometry. We're like, regardless of which bugs are out there, you have to make the board a certain shape to be a disadvantage of your opponent. If too many of his bugs are trapped or, you know, holding the hive together on like a big long string, then that those are bugs that can't attack your B. And now you've got the advantage. Another aspect of the game is the bug select. Ow. Is the, is the bug selection. There was a round where I was actually winning. I was going to win. But, but I had chosen grasshopper, grasshopper, grasshopper earlier, which means I didn't have any left. And the only bug that I could have won with was grasshopper. And I could have, I didn't have to use the grasshoppers earlier. I just chose to stupidly. When I should have, if I had used a beetle earlier, which I very well could have, I would have won. Yup. The geometry of the board will definitely matter when you get into more advanced play. If you play the game a whole bunch, like try to move a bug next to my own B, just to allow my B to move. Yup. Which, you know, works if no one's looking. You want to move your B out as much as you can, but a smart player is going to block you with an A. That's true. But I mean, if you think about the shape of it though, right, if there's, you know, it's a hex. So if, you know, if you surround it on four sides out of five, out of six, it can move out of that center piece and go to the edge. And now it's only surrounded on one side. It's like the ultimate killer move. Cause now the guy's fucked cause he's, he has four or more bugs, you know, committed to this line, this, this half circle of, of bugs that can't be split up cause they're holding the hive together with your B at the very end. And if you manage to pull that off, you win. So in some, if you're a board gamer at all, just buy it. It's cheap. And it's one of those games you can just bring with you to like any event, whip it out at a restaurant, just play it whenever it's great for like being in line at a con. Or as a warm up game while you're waiting for other people to show up to play a real game. This is the thing with the warm, this has been a lot of warm up games lately and not enough hardcore games lately. Well, we're fixing that tomorrow. Our private board game night is Puerto Rico. Great. The thing with the, the warm up games that there's so many of them and sort of like I'm tired of them. I want to play more real games. That's why you have so many so that you always have one you haven't played in a while. That's true. And also you got to have a variety of them. Like spot it is good with a lot of people, but the hive is good with two people and the hive is better. It's more brainy and the, you know, you get all kinds of different ones. Oh, she's good, but it does take too long. It's kind of a flawed game, even though I like it. Yeah, it depends. Zero was really boring to me until we played that tournament at PAX where the publisher was like, here's the tournament rules. And he made them up kind of on the fly. And they actually made for a really good tournament. It was all right. Yeah. Who won that tournament? Yeah. I still love the fact that against these people, we just randomly played against. It was a perfect tie between you and me for first place. And we had to come down to like a sudden death tiebreaker. I was one fucking tile away from wallowing you off. Yeah. But I couldn't keep it up. Nope. Yeah. So the hive is pretty awesome. Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. I don't know about the expansions though. I want to try them out. Mosquito, the ladybug. Are the rules for them online? Yeah, it looks like it. All right. This has been Geek Nights with Rym and Scott. Special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music, Cat Lee for web design, and Brando K for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at frontrowcrew.com for show notes, discussion news, and more. Remember, Geek Nights is not one but four different shows. SciTech Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays, Anime Comic Wednesdays, and Indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek Nights is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution 3.0 license. Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience. But unlike those other late shows, it's actually recorded at night.