Honeycomb Hustle Review - Thoughts From Origins 2026. A boring, tedious, waste of time.

0:05 What does that even mean? Bowers game corner. Boy there YouTube. We're back again with another thoughts from the corner here with my good friend Adam. We're live at Origin 2026. Thanks support to.com who do some amazing crowdfunding work. Just check out the link down below. They help send us here. So go check them out. Right now I'm super excited. No, I'm not to check out honeycomb hustle last night games. It's just 10 plus. take you 30 minutes to play and it's for two to eight players. And in this game, you got a bag uh you're gonna pull out of it uh little hexagons. They are they represent your honeycombs. They have little uh pips on them that you can attach to other ones as you're pulling more and more out. Uh there's usually two things that connect to. So you're basically creating a line most of the time. Uh they have different colors. The different colors represent like blue ones, if they're next to each other, they double. Red ones, they don't have to be next to each other, but you have more than one, they double. Uh there's ones that just have numbers on them, and those are the how many points you get.

1:11 Uh anyway, you're going to keep going until you get honeyotss on the end of all of your little branches.

1:17 You have no more pips.

1:18 Yeah. Can't can't go anywhere else. That That's your thing. Except if you twice during the game if you think you can do better than whatever you pulled out, you can turn in one of these cubes and just redo that part over again.

1:32 It's not a fun part. By the way,

1:33 everyone's doing this at the same time. Uh

1:36 either way, do not specify that.

1:38 You could do it individually, but that would be a waste of time.

1:40 And if someone's a stickler, otherwise, yeah, it's

1:43 do it at the same time. Just kick that person out

1:45 because it is not a fun process.

1:47 Yeah. Uh at the end you count up how many points you had uh in your little honeycomb for that turn. Uh you get the option whoever has the most you draw them out draw new tiles out of a bag

2:02 and draft over.

2:03 The first person gets to choose first set whoever second. I don't know if do you go around the

2:09 I'm pretty sure you go around. And I do want to specify something right now.

2:13 None of these are exciting. There's five or six different abilities in the game and none of them are going to excite you in any way, shape, or form. Nothing you pull out of the bag is probably going to excite you except [clears throat] for, oh, now I have another blue that's going to Oh, now I have

2:26 They all do kind of very similar.

2:27 Even the stealing ability still feels like, ah, I got to hand off my steel to anybody else, which is it's fine.

2:35 Well, the fact of the matter is there there are usually two pips that you can attach to on each hexagon. So it just creates a line that you have one that has three. So you could have three branches most of the time. The most excited I got was when at the very end of the game we drew another zero out of the bag. And I was like sweet, I can create more branches. Why don't they have more of these like so that you can make it bigger? But maybe that just gets out of hand. I don't know.

3:04 Well, here's the I I want to answer the question. I want to ask the question first. You said that was the most exciting you got in the game. That was not very exciting, was it?

3:14 No.

3:14 Okay. So, that is the peak. Like I And second

3:20 would That's one of my issues with the game. And there's a lot of problems I got with this game is I also wonder if Yeah, because this has that Dominiony aspect where it's like, "Hey, look, I was able to play out my whole bag, guys." And it's like, "Oh, cool. We've been sitting here just waiting." Because Yeah. I like,

3:36 you know, I'll enjoy because you were so far ahead of me. Now I get a catch-up mechanic where I get these tokens that give me just three points and it's like,

3:47 okay,

3:47 okay. Yeah.

3:49 And and the goal is that you get like cuz you buy after this, you take the money that you have cuz you draft a new tile, which once again, not very exciting. You can also there's a buyro also not exciting where you can buy nectar which is like okay you you string the three of these together and you turn to honey or honey which is the main victory point and whoever has the most wins the game and you you just do that over and over

4:12 and over.

4:12 The thing is because of the randomness of it just seems like

4:18 there's not a lot of choice in this game. Even the choices you have aren't fun though. Like like even like there are some but they also suck.

4:26 This is this is a choice but it's a choice of what of these 13 different pieces that I have in the bag now is going to come up next.

4:36 Okay. Well, let's talk choices. What

4:38 you designed your bag in a particular way.

4:40 Is there any fun choices? So, first choice is what what what actual choices are in this game?

4:46 So,

4:47 where place a tile? Not fun. Not excited. Not not fun because

4:50 most of the time easy like that makes more sense.

4:53 Blue goes to blue, right? You try and get the other things together and if it doesn't work out tough like it it's not it's not like the end of the world if it doesn't work.

5:02 Moving on.

5:02 Yes.

5:03 Should I use my redo a thing?

5:07 Okay. It's nice. It's fun. It's not fun.

5:10 Even in the rule book, it's like use them cuz you're just going to waste them.

5:13 Yes.

5:15 Not fun though. All right. And then there's the choice of like what am I going to draft? Once again, none of the tiles are fun. So, this is not a fun choice,

5:23 right?

5:24 And if you're playing with a larger player count, there's probably going to be most of the time even less of a fun choice. Fifth, six,

5:30 you're left with the crap that no one else wants.

5:32 And there is one extra one more than players. Once again, I go back to none of this choice is fun.

5:37 And it's random, too, because like just luck of the draw that you happen to be on top

5:43 and then the buy phase. What's the Is that a fun choice? There's two things to buy and neither of them are fun.

5:53 Yeah, they don't. Neither of them like progresses.

5:55 That's it. That's it. You're buying a victory point or a thing to get you a victory point. It'd be like a Dominion if I was just like, "Oo, would you like to buy an estate or this could become an estate?" And I'd be like, "No, none of those are either of those things." And and the worst part is, and this is what really irks me the most about this game, I am so incredibly used to in this hobby, getting done with the first game, looking in the box, and like, whoa, look at all that variability here. We didn't, oh, we didn't play with that. Oh, next time. Like, even if there were more tiles that I didn't think were exciting, I would still be this much more excited if there were like three just like broken tiles. Like that would have made it more entertaining because YOU'RE LIKE, "YES, I GOT IT. I GOT IT. I JUST NEED IT TO COME OUT OF MY BAG, you know?

6:44 I feel like they're coming.

6:46 You were enjoying this game more and I think you're coming around to not

6:50 Well, I mean it. Yeah, it was not a fun game.

6:56 To wrap it up, my last words I wrote were tedious, boring, never an exciting choice. that it's feeling most disappointing game of origins. I don't understand the sentence in the middle, but the sentence at the beginning and the sentence at the end encapsulate my thoughts on Honeycomb Hustle. Maybe there's a version of this game that is really awesome when you have an expansion or two that I don't know if they're out, but the base game I thought it sucked. I never want to play it again. I at no point had fun. And I realized relatively early on that the funnest experience that I was going to have with this game was shooting this video so that I would never have to hopefully play or think about it again until an expansion comes out cuz I I just it was so tedious.

7:46 It's a shame too cuz like I I kind of liked that idea of like oh cool like I get to build my bag.

7:51 I love bag building. This is my jam.

7:54 You know linking things together. Yeah. But that is honeycomb hustle from last night games. Have you tried this one out? I would love to hear other people's opinions on this one. And in the comments below, let me know. If you could have a lifetime supply of honey, how would you use it to take over a third world country?

8:19 Um, I feel like drowning is the obvious choice. I think I'm going to go with drown.

8:24 Drown. You're going to drown the whole country? No, you just got to drown one person.

8:28 That's

8:28 Is it magic? Honey,

8:30 you still have to get it there.

8:31 I have a lif.

8:34 I'm going to drown an evil dictator with the honey. Don't criticize my answer. Just You don't even have one.

8:40 That just seems impractical. Uh I suppose I would sell enough honey some Oh, what what if I This is a pipe dream, right? I'm going to create a honey engine that runs on honey and then I can sell it all and uh bankrupt them.

8:56 Wait, wait. Why do you have to develop the engine? Why can't you just sell the honey?

9:01 You can't. Nobody wants that much honey. You got to have another purpose for it.

9:07 What are you talking? You can see honey. You could undercut the entire market drastically. you. Yeah. And especially places that don't have access to honey are going to end up being like, I don't want any honey. Get this honey out of here.

9:20 Do you not like honey?

9:21 I make honey meat.

9:22 Do you like honey?

9:23 I do like honey. Yes.

9:24 Honey. Who Who are these people that don't buy honey? Don't like honey.

9:27 You're going to destroy the market. It's not like honey is crazy expensive right now.

9:32 I'm just I'm killing a dictator.

9:34 You're destroying the market, man.

9:36 Let me know in the comments below what you're doing with this honey to take over a third world country.

9:40 Magic honey. This video is brought to you by all of my amazing Patreon supporters, and I would love it if you would join their ranks and have your name immortalized in the end of many of my videos for the end of time. But consider for only a dollar a month. And as always, thanks for stopping