18 December, 15:03 UTC

Beegone is two-player game similar to chess, but with bees as pieces and played on a honeycomb grid. I made it in 2023 to learn more about WebAssembly and frontend programming.

Features

The project has:

• Game logic implemented in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly
• A Svelte frontend that uses the compiled WASM
• Shared types between Rust and TypeScript through Typeshare
• An SVG GUI, with fancy animations that only work on FireFox because other browsers didn't bother to support them
• As of recent, strange visual artifacts in FireFox due to an unfortunate update
• A computer player that knows how to play the game (but not much more than that)

Rules

The game is played by two players, taking turns. Each player starts with a queen, a drone, and two nurses. During your turn, you can either move a piece, capture an enemy piece or use a piece's special ability.

Moving

Every piece can move to any of the six tiles adjacent to it, as long as there is no other piece or wall there. Moreover, if a piece is adjacent to a piece of the same team, it can 'hop over' that piece, as long as that tile is accessible (either empty or they can capture the piece standing there).

Capturing

Most pieces can capture an enemy piece adjacent to them by moving their piece onto the same tile. However:

• Guards can only capture other guards, gatherers, builders, nurses, workers and drones
• Gatherers can only capture other gatherers, builders, nurses, workers and drones
• Builders can only capture other builders, nurses, workers and drones
• Nurses can only capture other nurses, workers and drones
• Workers can only capture other workers and drones
• Drones can only capture other drones

Summarized, pieces can only capture the same or 'weaker' pieces, where guards > gatherers > builders > nurses > workers > drones. Additionally:

• Queens are unable to capture at all, and cannot be captured normally
• Walls can only be captured by builders

Special abilities

Some pieces have special abilities:

• Queens can spawn drones on any adjacent tile, or, if a drone is already adjacent, she can spawn workers on any adjacent tile
• Nurses can promote adjacent workers to builders, gatherers or guards
• Gatherers can walk in a straight line any number of tiles, as long as there is nothing blocking the way (they may also do this right after hopping over an ally)
• Builders can place walls on adjacent tiles

Winning the game

Unfortunately, I never finished the project properly; one minor detail that's still on the backlog is implementing a win condition. The good news is that you can now continue playing indefinitely.

If I were to finish the game, however, I would likely add the following win conditions:

• It's your opponent's turn, but they're unable to make a move
• You capture the opponent's queen with a guard (this would require changing the rules a bit)

This hasn't really been playtested, though. If you want to give it a try, the game can be played here (and the source code can be found on my GitHub). If you have any feedback or ideas on how to make the game more fun, please leave a comment!

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