Emma Higgins – Game Designer

Lead Designer/Writer

November to December 2023

Made by: Emma Higgins, Anna Zhu, Urvi Bhuwania, and Xander Beaky

Bee Low Sell Hive is the world’s best (and only) bee themed stock market board game. Play as a queen candidate as you show your skill in the econobee and prove yourself worthy to be crowned. At the start of each round, each player plays a card from their hand, which is shuffled into a pile. Then, players can buy and sell stocks as the cards are revealed one by one, using their knowledge of the card they played and other people’s actions to choose what stocks to invest in. They can also play extra-powerful crime cards to drastically swing the market, but if the other players can tell who played it, they’ll be harshly beenalized.

As the lead designer/writer, Bee Low Sell Hive made me learn how to refine a relatively simple game to be as fun as possible, rather than continuously adding new features. My team and I kept attempting to add more complications to the rules, such as wasp cards that did harmful things to opponents, but they ended up just making the game more complicated and less fun. Instead, I had to focus on changing how long the game lasted, tweaking the rules to be faster to learn, and modifying the extent to which each card moved the stocks, all for the most streamlined and entertaining experience possible.