Pollen Pit

The hive dug its pollen store too deep and hit something, and you are the bee standing at the bottom of the hole. It is a narrow hole, and what is down there comes at you in ranks. You aim and you throw; the ball does the rest, bouncing off the walls and off whatever is climbing down before it drops back to you to be thrown again. A run is where you stand, which balls you collect, and which two of them you are willing to destroy to make a third — and what a run brings home is wax, which builds the village that every run after it starts with.

How it goes#

• Walk with `W` `A` `S` `D` or the arrow keys, along the floor of the shaft. The mouse aims and holding the button throws — the aim is always yours and there is no scatter, so a ball goes exactly where the sight points.
• `F` toggles auto-fire. It pulls the trigger for you on the throw cadence while you carry on aiming, which is what you want on a long run rather than holding a button for six minutes. On a phone it is on and cannot be turned off, because there is no spare finger to hold a trigger with — but the aim is still yours: drag along the bottom to walk the bee, and touch anywhere up the shaft to point the throw. Either finger works without the other, and the aim stays where you put it while you reposition.
• A ball is a verb. There are six to find and they differ by what they do, not by their numbers: the Pollen pellet bounces, the Ember sets things alight, the Rime slows what it hits, the Seed pod bursts into shards, the Wax boulder ploughs straight through without turning, and the Static arcs to whatever is standing near. Each has five ranks, and a rank is damage, size, and how many things the ball may hit before it comes home.
• Fusion is the point. You may hold six balls at once and no more. Get two of them to rank two and a seventh appears on the next level-up — Ricochet, Firecracker, Hailstorm, Magma stone or Glacier — and taking it destroys both parents. That card is guaranteed to be offered the moment it becomes possible rather than left to the roll, because a run only ever gets a handful of chances at one.
• Pollen falls off every kill and is hoovered up inside your pickup radius. Enough of it is a level, and a level stops the pit and offers three cards — a new ball, a rank on one you hold, or a trait, which is a stat line that stacks.
• The shaft is narrow. It is a corridor down the middle of the screen with rock either side, not the whole width of the glass, and that is the point: a wall is never more than a moment away, so a ball spends its whole flight bouncing rather than crossing a room.
• They come down in blocks. A depth does not trickle its foes in one at a time — it sends them as a grid across the shaft, two or three rows deep, marching down together and holding formation until it is nearly on top of you. A block is as wide as the corridor, so a throw into the front row is a throw that hits several things and clears a hole; picking off stragglers is what happens after.
• A depth is a quota. It sends a set number of things down the shaft and is clear when the last of them is dead. The next block only goes when the pit has room for it, so how fast a depth comes at you is set by how fast you clear it. Every fourth depth sends one thing instead, it has a name and a health bar across the top, and killing it leaves a charm — one of three, kept for the rest of the run. Nothing else spawns while it is alive, so it gets angrier the longer it lives.
• The bells hang in the shaft, two to a depth, and are the one pick-up here you cannot walk to. Only a ball can reach one, and ringing it is worth eight seconds of a faster arm, a heavier ball, or a longer bounce.
• Health does not come back on its own beyond a slow trickle. Royal jelly off a kill is the only real patch job, a cleared depth hands back a fifth of it, and armour comes off every hit before it lands.
• A run banks wax, and wax builds the hive. Dying is not the end of the progress, only of the run: depth and kills pay out in wax, and every run opens on the village — a grid above the pit where you place a Forge, a Springhouse, an Apiary and the rest. Every building is a permanent bonus that later runs start with, and two of them let you begin holding a second ball.
• A building only counts if it is connected to the hive by a path of other buildings. That is the whole puzzle of the grid: an unconnected Forge is wax spent on nothing, and it is drawn struck through so you can see it. The Wax path costs eight and does nothing except join two halves of a village together. Selling a building back refunds half.
• The village is saved on this device, the same way your personal best is. It is not tied to signing in, and clearing your browser clears it.
• Sound is on. `M` or the speaker in the corner of the status bar turns it off, and the cabinet remembers which you chose. A boss brings a tune with it, and it stops when the boss does.

Where the score is#

Kills pay their own worth and nothing multiplies them. Clearing depth N pays N × 300, so the triangular sum swamps everything else by about depth eight — this is a depth score, and a run that stalls out shallow will lose to one that got deep and died there.

Posting a run#

Sign in with Discord and the run posts itself when you fall; play as a guest and it is kept as a personal best on this device instead. Either way the game is the same game — the board is the only thing sign-in changes. The arcade page has the longer version of how that works, and the other cabinets.