COMBWRIGHT

Lay out the comb. Raise the brood. Keep the colony through the winter.

A free beekeeping game in your browser. Each hive is one frame of comb, and you decide what every cell is for: brood, pollen or honey. The bees do the rest, by rules you can see.

Three things that pull against each other

• The comb. Draw bare foundation into comb with wax and give each cell a job. Brood only grows where the cluster keeps it warm, so the brood core has to be central. Turn on WARMTH to see it.
• The colony. Eggs, larvae that eat pollen, capped brood, nurses, foragers. A pollen shortage today is fewer bees a brood cycle from now.
• The year. Four seasons with their own blooms for your foragers. Winter has none, and the colony lives on the honey you left it. In spring a crowded colony swarms and half the bees leave, unless a spare hive box catches them as a new hive.

Wax draws comb and caps honey. Honey feeds the winter and sells. Take too much and the winter takes most of the colony: a hive that starves is robbed of everything it stored, so a careful keeper earns more than a greedy one.

No restarts. A colony that starves keeps its comb, and a small wild swarm moves in the next spring. It saves as you go, and while you are away the season you left runs on to its end, never into the next.

Controls: tap a cell to read it, or pick a tool and tap or drag across cells to use it. Keys 1 to 5 pick a tool, H opens the help, M turns the sound off. On an upright phone it switches to its own tall layout.

Paid, from the same studio

• ROOTWORK ($5.99): grow one seed's roots down through the soil under a generated meadow to reach every pocket of water.
• The Turning Year ($9.99): one dial turns the season across the whole world; freeze a brook into a road, melt a fell to float a boat.
• NIGHT PLOUGH ($5.99): steer one snowplough through a generated village before dawn, every street cleared, none driven twice.

Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. More free browser games: HALFLIGHT, POLDER, ROOTBOUND. Everything we make: csaf.itch.io.