Making a Hive-Centered Map

I finally broke through my mental block on preparing the ashcan copy of Honeybees, so here is some more progress on the "Before Play" part of my outline. Here, we discuss making a game map. Preparing the MapThe map for this game is a 5-ringed circular bulls-eye centered on the players’ home hive. This circle is divided into 150 “flower patches” of equal area. This range corresponds to the common wisdom that honeybees tend not to scout or forage more than 5 miles or 10 kilometers from their hive. These two distances are obviously not equal, but both numbers are used as folk wisdom when discussing honeybee behavior. You are welcome to use either set of units; the important thing is that each range band corresponds to an incremental “Range Penalty”, which represents the metabolic cost of foraging that far from the hive. A blank map annotated with the default Range Penalties is included in the figure below. There are 8 codified Biomes included in this rules text. Biomes reflect…