Wanna Beekeeper - An exciting boardgame about bees and nature

  • Backers

    2

  • Funded

    40 €

  • Stage goal

    2.000 €

Added value for the environment

The project saves or improves the areas of ...

human

ground, water, air

climate

animals and plants

biodiversity

material and cultural assets

energy and use of resources

Resources used

The resources used are ...

produced sustainably

eco-certified

fair-trade

of regional origin

used efficiently

recycled, upcycled

renewable (e.g. energy)

This self-assessment by the project starter serves as a decision support for the crowd. Not all criteria must be met, but all alternatives should be considered.

Summary

Wanna Beekeeper is a tactical boardgame for up to 6 players. We aim to provide a challenging and fun game for everyone!
While doing that, we want to show how important bees are for our daily live.

Description

Wanna Beekeeper is a worker placement game for two to six people. The goal is to build a healthy swarm of bees including multiple beehives on different kinds of terrain. The winner is, who collects the most honey after a certain amount of time.

But beware! Don’t take to much or your bees could become vulnerable to infections or less productive!

Every cent this campaign receives as support will be direct to the development and design of the game.

The finished boardgame targets the audience for 8-year-olds and above. The finished game can be pretty complex but we want it to be easy to understand so everybody can have fun playing it.

In its current form Wanna Beekeeper consist of :

  • beehive figures, score markers 
  • Player sheets for population and action-points. (For up to six players)
  • A small deck of terrain cards for the 3 x 3 field, the game is played on.
  • A shared point sheet, on which every player has a single stone at its current points/honey.
  • A weather-dice
  • A disease-dice

Please be aware, that the exact amount of small pieces like Hive-meeple and scoring markers are yet to be determined. We’re testing with about 10 hives and a handful of markers.




Before the game:

  1. Every Player gets a point sheet and scoring markers
  2. Also a couple of hive-meeple
  3. A playfield of 3 x 3 cards are randomly drawn and laid out.
  4. Every player places his/her starting hive

The gameplay:

  1. Clockwise, Players can decide to move, split, or add to their hives or treat diseases. (actions are limited by action points)
  2. Again, players can react to other players actions by moving/splitting/adding their beehives. (actions are still limited by the same action points)
  3. Everyone decides if and how much honey they want to take.
  4. Now weather dice comes into place! It might increase or decrease the amount of honey the bees produce
  5. Disease dice is rolled, depending on the health of your bees (and multiple other factors), they might become sick and less productive
  6.  Another round starts

We’re considering printing the gameplay loop on the shared point-sheet, so every player knows at all times what to do and what they can prepare for.

The winner:

The winner is who collected the most honey by balancing the size of their hives and the amount they took per round.

What is the funded money used for?

150 € Professional rulebook
500 € Paid reviews, marketing and playtesting
500 € Prototypes (20-30)
600 € Design for the game an packaging
2.000 € Development of the game and mechanics

Why Donations?

While the team is working on the game and its campaign, I’m writing my bachelor thesis about crowdfunding, trying to find out the relevant success factors for a crowdfunding campaign, from the idea to marketing and communication with its supporters.

It would simply be too much workload to finish the game, organize printing and shipping, therefore I decided on a donation-based campaign.

How is the funding goal calculated?

Our goal is to create a high quality and fun game, therefore we need financial support. Our calculation can be seen in the following table. Some numbers are estimates, the most important ones like prototypes, development and designers are based on real proposals.
If something is not easy to understand or seems wrong to you, please let us know and get in contact, every feedback helps!

Expense Details Cost
Design (digital & print) Team of 3 designers, working as freelancers 300€
Prototypes (cards, meeple, dice, package, player sheets) Circa 25€ per game. Needing 20-30 500€
Development time  Circa 3-5 months for finetuning, balancing and playtesting 2000€
Package design Freelance designer 300€
Marketing Social Media and other websites. Online Commercials 200€
Reviews Paid reviews. Videos and/or blogs 200€
Playtesting Games with strangers for testing 100€
Rulebook Professionally edited rulebook 150€
SUM 3750€

Why is the project an EcoCrowd project?

Have you noticed the rapidly decreasing amount of insects in your area? Many people know that bees are important for the ecosystem and are useful for more than tasty honey. But not enough attention is given to the subject, therefore we’ve made the decision to design a game around bees. First of all, it should be fun to play and easy to access.

Second, Wanna Beekeeper aims to shine a light on the topic of decreasing insect population. Maybe some players even decide to become beekeepers in real life through the topic, that would be the best scenario!

All in all, we want to create a fun free time activity which handles an important topic. With this board game, we want to bring bees and nature into everyday life. Our production considers our ecological footprint, local businesses and beekeepers will be prefered and supported. 

Without bees, there won’t be any more honey, then no more flowers, trees and rich meadows. 

Tell us something about yourself.

This game is still in an early stage of development. The cornerstone was set by one of my professors at the University of applied science Niederrhein (Germany) and he thankfully let me use his version for further growth.

I’m a student for business & IT, currently writing my bachelor thesis about this very project. I’m interested in the topic playing as a whole and got a little bit of experience in competitive esports as well.

Some close friends of mine decided to support the design of the game, without Sarah, Jeany and Caro this game would never look as good as it does already!

They’re also students, so none of us is an expert for board games. But we love playing them and are determined to deliver a fun product in the end.

We sweeten the future, because ...

Wanna Beekeeper saves the bees!

Jörg Jasser

Duisburg, DE

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