Propolis is a board game where you play as competing bee colonies. You take turns sending worker bees to collect pollen, protect your areas, and build your hives to make your queen happy and be the best colony!

As bees compete for flowers, they collect pollen to make propolis for building their hives. Being the strongest in different areas gives you extra points and building materials. As your hive grows, new buildings give you more resources, ways to score points, and help you build a special palace for your queen. The bee with the best hive wins.

Each player gets a player board, colored re

The game is played in turns until someone has 10 Structure cards. On your turn, you can do one of five things:

1] Send Worker Bees – put any number of bees on empty Landscape cards to get rewards. This usually means getting resources, trading resources, or getting bees from the middle. If you place on the last open card in a row, you get a Wild re

2] Protect Worker Bees – tip up to 2 of your bees onto their sides. Again, get the re

3] Call Back Worker Bees – remove any number of your bees from any cards on the table. You don’t have to remove all bees from a card.

4] Build a Structure – buy a Structure card from the market, paying the costs on the bottom. This could be resources (taken from your player board or from cards you’ve already built) or bees (put from your supply into the middle supply). Put the card in front of you and get any bonuses on it.

5] Build a Queen’s Palace – you can only build one of these per game. You need to use Bees and permanent resources (only found on Structure cards you’ve already built).

At the end of your turn, look at the cards on the table to see if any rows are full (all cards have at least one bee). If so, check who has the most bees in that row (1 point for regular bees, 2 points for protected bees). The player with the most bees removes all their bees from that row and puts them back with them. If that player isn’t the one who just took their turn, they also get 1 Wild resource. Now, remove the right-most empty card, slide all cards to the right, and add a new card on the left. If there’s a tie, nothing happens until someone protects a bee to get the majority.

The game ends when any player has 10 Structure cards. Play until everyone has the same number of turns. Then score points based on the Structure cards you have built.

• Each Structure card has scoring rules or simple point values
• 1 point for every 5 resources you have left over

The player with the most points wins. If there’s a tie, the person with the most unused resources left over wins.

When I first read the rules, I thought this would be a family game with a bit more strategy. I’ve found that many games from this design team are good for family play with some extra depth – like Point Galaxy and Point Salad. Once I set up Propolis and started playing, it felt very familiar. After a few turns, I realized Propolis is basically Splendor but with a bee theme.

On your turn, you either get resources or buy a card from the market. When you buy a card, you use resources you’ve collected or use permanent resources from cards you’ve already built. As the game goes on, you use those permanent resources to buy special Queen’s buildings.

The way you get resources is different – you can’t just say what you want. You have to place your bees on empty cards in the re

The whole idea of having the most bees in a full row seemed a bit complicated at first, but after a few games, I saw how players used this to get “free actions” – they didn’t have to spend a whole turn getting their bees back from the board. Instead, they got them back when they had the most bees in a full row.

Some cards give you simple points, while others have more complex scoring rules that require you to collect certain types of buildings to score them.

As you’d expect, the game starts slow when players don’t have many permanent resources. So at the beginning, you spend a lot of turns getting just two or three resources. The double-sided cards are pretty neat and make each game different. If you flip up a lot of expensive cards at the start, the game can be very slow as everyone has to spend many turns before they can afford anything.

This is one place where having different levels of cards would be nice. It would also encourage players to buy resource-producing cards from the start. Once you have a few buildings that give you things, the game moves to regular slow speed. Even when you have some built-in resources, it takes time to look at the ten buildings on offer to see what you can afford (and what other players might be trying to build). But things stay slow because you also have to check the re

Also, you have to manage your bee population. You need to figure out how many bees you’ll have free to both gather resources and have available to sacrifice when building buildings. In general, buildings that provide resources cost bees – so as you build your re

When you get to the endgame, you should have lots of resource-producing buildings, so you’d think the game would speed up, but now you have to consider the Queen’s buildings you can build. Also, for regular buildings, you might not want to build just anything you can afford because you might need a particular type of building for another card’s scoring, or you might avoid building a certain building because you don’t have the other cards needed for it to score.

If you’re looking for a more complex game that feels like Splendor, Propolis fits that very well. There are definitely more decisions to make in both collecting resources and buying and scoring buildings. If you want a game that feels like Splendor but takes closer to 45 minutes, Propolis fits that too.

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