Hive

There’s no board. That’s the first thing anyone who hasn’t seen it says when I show them, and it’s the reason it made the pack when three other games got left in the truck. Twenty-two hexagonal tiles, bakelite in the pocket set I carry, each with a bug pressed into the top. You build the board as you play, tiles clicking against each other on the table, on a flat rock, once on the floor of the tower during a lightning hold when I didn’t want to be near the window.

The rule you’re building toward the whole game is that you have to surround the other player’s queen bee on all six sides. Everything else is mechanism for getting there. The spider moves exactly three spaces around the hive’s edge. The grasshopper jumps in a straight line over however many tiles are in its way. The beetle climbs on top of the hive and can pin another piece underneath it, taking its move away entirely, which is the meanest thing in the box and I mean that as praise. The ant can go anywhere along the outside of the hive in one move, which sounds broken until you’ve played enough games to respect how much the “one hive” rule constrains it, since the hive has to stay connected after every move, no piece can be moved if it would break the swarm in two.

That connectivity rule is the whole game, honestly. It’s a simple sentence and it produces genuine depth, the kind where I’ve sat with a position for ten minutes because the obvious move breaks the hive apart and I hadn’t seen the crack in my own formation until I traced it a third time. No board printing means no fixed geometry to memorize either. Every game starts from the same empty table and goes somewhere different.

I play it against myself more than I’d like to admit, moving both colors and trying to think a move ahead as each side, which is a worse approximation of a real opponent than Patchwork’s solo variant but still useful for working through openings. It’s better with the actual second player. A hiker stopped through in August, we sat on the platform railing and played two games while she waited out a squall, and the whole set including the bag weighs less than the water I was carrying that day.

Bakelite doesn’t crack in cold the way cheap plastic does, which matters when the tower drops toward freezing at night even in July. No box to warp, no board to keep flat. If I had to keep one game up here through a five-month season, on weight and durability and the depth of the actual game, it would be this one. I don’t say that lightly, I’ve thought about it more than the job probably requires.