My son made a late-season request for one of his favorite games of my game collection: Hive—and thanks to my local acrylic supplier could grab a few of the colors I didn’t already have in stock. And a couple late nights—and it’s done! Whew!
So I designed the set to be smaller/more portable (31.5mm) than the original tile game (38mm), but a little bigger than the normal Hive Pocket game. (The bug hexes you see on each tile are the same 25mm size as the original Pocket edition.)
And then, while designing and tweaking the bugs and overall color design to have a more graphical style, I wanted the pieces to ‘read’ better than the black/white-only Carbon (original size) set while still having some of the elegance that set introduced. Also made for a good time to create the published fan expansion tiles (like the Butterfly, Mantis and Earthworm) including a dazzling twist on the Honeycombo tile (center).
And then to finish it off, the flip side of his favorite Queen Bee (black) is engraved with the Venom fan expansion Wasp, along with his ‘kingly’ initials. (Still haven’t got all the rest of the Venom-edition bugs that engrave on the flip sides of the tiles designed, so that last step will be finished over the Christmas holiday using a placement jig.)