From John Hattan comes BaffleBees, a quick, fun puzzle game for those on a coffee break. Be the best by ordering your bees around the hive until your entire honeycomb is filled with honey.
Control of your bees is as simple as clicking and dragging. In fact, it is clicking and dragging. When a bee is on a honey spot, that spot and the surrounding six spots are toggled. If they started empty, then they fill with honey, while if they have honey, they empty out. By recognizing some common patterns that show up, you will soon be ordering bees around like a queen. Beware: you only have three chances to attempt for a hi-score. High scorers that have logged in will have their game displayed on the hi-score table the next day. The top games can even be played to show the steps that were taken to complete it.
Login is not required to play this game or any of the others on the site (a recent change), but logging in does have advantages. Most notably you can have your game displayed on the hi-score table. You can also start accumulating a wide array of trophies that are awarded for the different games. These awards come for a variety of reasons such as a perfect score or taking too long to finish the game.
Analysis: The game has extremely simple graphics and almost zero sound. That said, it is fun and casual play. I found this nearly a month ago and yet I still play it almost daily. Little details make all of the difference in a simple puzzle such as this. For example, the tile that you drag the bee out of is highlighted. This allows you to easily replace it without costing yourself a move.
There are a multitude of other games on the site as well. Many of the games are similar to other games at other sites. ConFusebox, is similar to Rotate2 at Games for the Brain, but its gameplay is much better. In ConFusebox, the pieces can be rotated in either direction and the game tends to feel smoother and more responsive on my machine.
Another interesting feature is the developer's blog which has been going since 1999. For those interested in developing games as well as playing them, John Hattan has some interesting insights into the game development world.
Overall, Baffle Bees is a fun puzzle to solve and a fun site to explore.
This is a fun game. Is there a way to play previous daily puzzles?
Brandon-
No, there is not any way to go back and play previous puzzles on the web. I think I saw that the guest puzzle and the logged player puzzle are different. So there are at least two versions you can play.
I think the puzzles come in sequential order as well so that if you buy the puzzle pack, you could play yesterdays puzzle (or any other day as well).
These bees have me baffled. What pattern does the game follow when there are bees near each other? The directions didn't explain it well and sometimes when I move a bee, the cells change twice. Even when they are not near another bee. I'm totally confounded.
My strategy is to move all the bees to the bottom rows and work my way down from the top. That makes it a lot easier to figure out where to start placing.
Quite an easy game, though it took me a little while to figure out what the movements did. I'm curious to see where I am in the list tomorrow :)
You can make it yourself pretty easy
first put all the bees to the side somewhere, like in the last rows at the bottom of the field. Then try to be as efficient as possible.
Ok, this took a while to figure out, I first tried to permanently change a field's filling by... nevermind.
Very innovative yet highly confusing in the beginning, but after I got close to the end, it made fun :)
This website could use better explanatory text all round. Take a look at Voracity, for a game that really really could use some better directions.
BTW, the bees change the color of their cell and the adjacent cells both where they take off and where they land. So if you move a short distance, any cells that are adjacent to both take off and landing will flip and back, leaving them unchanged.
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