Hive: My New Favourite 2 Player Board Game!
In my continuing quest to help couples just have fun and CHILL together, I want to tell you about our newest favourite 2-player board game.
With thanks to Gen 42 Games for sponsoring this post!
A few years ago I wrote a post on 20 awesome two-player games you can play as a couple, and that post has consistently been one of my top traffic generators. But what’s cool is that I can track my Amazon links from that post and see what people are buying (okay, that sounds mildly creepy. But I don’t see any INDIVIDUAL information, so don’t worry!).
Anyway, one day I took a gander and saw that a ton of people were buying something called Hive. (They followed my links to buy another game, but then bought this, too). I’d never heard of it. But every Christmas I buy new games for the family, so I bought this one for Keith and me, since we were recent empty nesters and I was looking for more two-player games. And it had won so many awards, and was so highly rated, I was intrigued.
We really enjoy it! It’s kind of like chess, except it’s WAY easier to learn, and each game takes maybe 10 minutes. So we often play “best 2 out of 3” or “best 3 out of 5”, and that way it’s likely that each of us will win at least ONE game.
It’s also highly portable, so we sometimes take it down to our local pub for a game night date. We play a game while we’re waiting for the food, and then two games after, which is exactly what we did last week. And I’ll show you pics to explain all about it!
In the basic Hive game, you have 5 types of pieces:
Queen Bee, who can move one space;
A Bettle, who can move one space, but who can ALSO climb on top of other pieces
A Spider, who can move exactly three;
A grasshopper, who can jump over any number of pieces in a straight line;
And an ant, who can travel around the outside of the hive and go anywhere.
The Rules to Hive are quite simple.
To win, your opponent’s queen must be fully surrounded (by you or by a combination of your pieces and the opponent’s pieces)
The Hive must stay together. You can’t pull out a piece that would separate the Hive into two distinct hives.
Each turn, you can either lay a piece or move a piece.
You can only lay down a piece so that it’s touching your own colour, not any of your opponent’s pieces
That’s all there is to it!
When we first played it, all we did was try to surround the other person’s queen. Now we’ve realized there’s a balance between trying to surround the queen, and trying to make sure that the other person can’t move well.
I’ll show you from some games we played. We went to the pub, and I was so afraid that Keith was going to win all three games we played, because I knew that you all wouldn’t want to buy a game if your husband always won. 
