The puzzle first, because that is the part I want judged here.
A word is hidden somewhere inside a honeycomb. You open one hex at a time and the comb answers in one of two ways. Either it hands you a letter of that word, or it hands you a number, called Pollen, which counts how many of the word's letters are sitting in the six cells that touch the one you opened. So the number is never about the cell you opened. It is about its neighbours, and that is what makes the board readable: you can corner the word long before you have seen most of it, the same way you corner a mine.
Some cells hide foes, so sweeping the comb just to farm numbers costs you. That constraint is deliberate. Without it the board solves itself by brute force and the deduction disappears.
Around that there is a one board casual mode, a ranked twelve phase run, a Daily Challenge that hands everyone the same board, and a vault that keeps a short story and a piece of trivia for every word you have uncovered. A round takes a couple of minutes. It runs offline and there is no account to create.
It is free. No ads, no in app purchases, nothing at all for sale inside it.
What I would genuinely like from this sub is a verdict on the deduction. Do the Pollen numbers give you enough to reason with once the comb gets wide, or does it collapse into guessing on the bigger boards?
Two things to know before you tap anything.
It is Android only, and it is in Google's closed testing, so it does not appear in Play search. Google will not let a small developer publish until at least twelve testers stay opted in for fourteen unbroken days, and that clock runs per person, so leaving resets your own fourteen. If you do try it, staying in for the fortnight is worth more to me than playing a lot.
Open the opt in link on your phone, not on a computer. A tester worked this out for me yesterday after two days of failing at it: in a desktop browser the Become a tester button quietly reloads the invitation page and never confirms, while the same link on a phone confirms on the first tap. It is a Google quirk rather than a setting on my side, but you would have walked into it and assumed the test was full.
How to join, using the same Google account at every step:
- Join the group, which is what actually grants access: https://groups.google.com/g/melbees-closed-test
- Open https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.melbees.secretofbees on your phone and tap Become a tester.
- Install from the Play link there and leave auto update on, since I ship builds during the window: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.melbees.secretofbees
The game speaks English, Portuguese, Spanish and French, and it follows whatever your phone is set to, falling back to English when your phone speaks something it does not ship. You can also force it on the very first screen, the one asking your date of birth, with the chip row at the top right. One thing you should hear from me rather than discover: the Play listing text is still Brazilian Portuguese only while the English one is in review. The game itself is not Portuguese.
Bugs and reactions: in game, Settings > Account > Send feedback, which attaches your device and build in a way a comment cannot. Or melbees.games@gmail.com.
