Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
What a charmer, this Honeypot. It has a great hook. It’s hard to have a bad time when you’re tucking cards into tiny manila folders. Also, there are bear costumes. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Honeypot isn’t quite I Split, You Choose, but it’s close. I Arrange, You Decide, maybe. I Slice, You Bite? I’ll work on it. As secret agent bears across five brisk ursine rounds, players draw six cards from the massive deck, arrange them however they see fit, place them in the aforementioned manila folders, and hand said folders to the next player in the direction of play. On your turn, you open your little gift and look at the first two cards. Now you have to make decisions.
If you want the two cards you revealed, great. You keep them and that’s your turn. But what are the odds your opponent, this rival secret agent bear with a grin on their face, would put the best cards at the top? The honey only gets sweeter the further down you go, right? If you think there’s something better deeper in the dossier, you can discard the first two cards and reveal the next two. If those are not to your liking, you can do it one more time, though you’re stuck with whatever you find at the bottom of the folder.
Scoring is a bit of a nightmare, though in no way excessive. It’s standard point salad, with different sorts of set collection. These post-game accounting sessions are never my preferred way to finish a game, but they do fine, and Honeypot is the rare design in which a point salad approach really works to its benefit.
The fun here is in the arranging of the cards, in finding ways to trick or trap your opponent. Because there are so many different types of cards, you have more options for how you can split things up. If I know my opponent really wants one of the Bear Costume cards, I might pair it with a card they don’t want, to make the decision just a little harder. That’s pretty standard stuff, but what if I use the pairing of a Bear Costume and a negative point card to trick them into tapping out before revealing the pair of Bear Costume cards underneath? Hoho. These are the moments in which Honeypot excels.
Then there are the tokens. If my gut tells me there’s something good left in that stack once you pass, I can spend a token to take the folder and continue to riffle, though I too will be stuck with whatever’s at the bottom. These too are a joy, both when intuition pays off and when intuition backfires, as it so often does. Occasionally, you find yourself arranging cards for both players downstream of you. When those play out the way you hoped, you feel like a genius.
As I said, a charmer. I cannot overstate the impact of those little manila folders, especially when paired with the art from Kwanchai Moriya and Brigette Indelicato. There are games that maintain a temperature of “Pleasant” with occasional spikes of “Exquisite.” Honeypot is just such a game. Stir a little in with your morning coffee, or glaze it over an after-dinner dessert. However you take it, you’ll enjoy it.
