Propolis puts the bee in board games

Each row in the landscape area has four cards in it, and once all four cards in the row have at least one beeple on them, the players check to see if any player has the majority, with fortified beeples counting double. If so, that player gets to take all of their beeples back, and the rightmost card is removed and replaced. This area control aspect is the weakest part of the game; it’s a scant reward for having the majority, and it’s only worth pursuing the majority if you believe it’ll get you your beeples back immediately. Most of the time, it’ll be more efficient to grab additional resources in pursuit of one or more structures.

Structures may require payment of beeples as well as resources, but nearly all of them offer some kind of benefit. Some give permanent resources as a reward, in a specific color or as a wild resource; some allow you to take temporary resources or reclaim your own beeples from the supply; many offer game-end points, which can be fixed or variable based on other cards you’ve already purchased. The Queen’s Palace cards are much harder to obtain, as they require that you have multiple permanent resources already in your play area on structures you’ve purchased, which in turn requires that those have shown up in the structure market, and they give a few extra victory points as reward—probably not enough to justify going specifically for them as a strategy.

The game ends when any player has 10 cards in their tableau, including their starting structure (which gives a permanent resource as well as three starting resources), after which you score, adding up the points from any structure cards showing either a fixed number or a formula giving points based on resources you have or specific structure types. It’s possible to get 40+ points, but that would be a rather exceptional game, and getting into the 20s is going to be a challenge for new players.

Propolis—a real term referring to a glue that bees produce and use to seal holes in their hives—combines worker placement, resource management, tableau-building, area control, and engine-building in a single box, and in theory, that’s fantastic. I like all of those mechanics, and many of my favorite games at least mix a few of those together. Propolis could probably have done with one or two fewer mechanics to streamline the game’s scoring and strategies, though; the area majority part didn’t do it for me, and the tableau-building part is limited to the resources granted on the tops of some of the cards. The core of the game is in the placement and the resource collection, with the placement decisions driven not just by what you immediately need but by the limitations of the available resource spaces, and that ultimately makes the game a winner—and because it’s fairly quick to play (well under an hour), it’s a great introductory game for people who haven’t played this style before.

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