Tumble Bees - Blame it on the Bossanova!

Hiya, Mr. Bear!

Tumble Bees is a word game created by Pogo. Your task is to fill a jar of honey by making words from the falling letters inside of a beehive. Longer words will earn more honey, so stretch that lexicon!

You make words in a Boggle-ish fashion, connecting one letter to the next. But Tumble Bees expands the possibilities by letting you connect letters to any previously connected letter. Pogo highlights the available tiles in a brighter color. But to be honest, I have a really hard time seeing what's "highlighted."

Thankfully the bonus tiles are pretty easy to spot. ^_^

A word made with a green tiles will earn you bonus Pogo tokens.

A word made with a blue tile will remove random letters from the board, but NOT letters used in the Buzz Word. This feature is quite useful when the board is nearly full, or when you've just made the Buzz Word.

What's the Buzz Word? Well, if you spell the Buzz Word, ALL of the remaining tiles on the board will turn into green bonus tiles!!

My favorite color!

You'll get a new Buzz Word after you turn one in, so you can keep turning the board green if you want! You will also get bonus tokens for each Buzz Word you spell.

I'm still newbie at this game. It's pretty rare for me to get the Buzz Word. :(

Since the "highlighted" tiles were so hard for me to spot, I made a little step-by-step guide to show you how the letters work. The first picture is the game screen. The second picture is the same picture, but with helpful circles on it.

The first letter I picked, V, is in the blue circle. All of my options for the next letter are circled in red.

So far so good. ^_^ Next I pick the letter A. Now I have even more possibilities for the third letter.(Remember, the letters I picked are circled in blue. The options for the next letter are circled in red.)

So far I've spelled "V-A," and I have 6 letters (plus a wild) to chose from. I'm going to be bold and finish this word with a T. Hah!

V-A-T and we're done! If I wanted to go further I had 7 letters and 1 wild to chose from.

That was a very simple word, but I hope you can see how the possibilities expand as you add more letters. In a way, it's easier to make longer words here compared to other games. But it's also easier to get buried if you aren't careful. It can be difficult to sift through all of the possibilities quickly. And on the hard level you start out with a LOT on your board! And those letters fall faster and faster!

Gah!

If you fill the jar with honey then you'll earn a jackpot spin and be moved to the bonus round. It's pretty simple. Just spell three 5-letter words before the board fills up! You work on the same board (but with new letters) and if you fail, it's no biggie. But it's a great feeling when you find some long words in there! ^_^

Geezer  *Snorts with laughter*

Tumble Bees is a progressive jackpot game, with a max pot of $4,999. You can earn only one JP spin per game, and you will always get *something.* Odds are that it will just be a few tokens, but that's better than nothing!


Tips and Tricks

Instead of clicking on each letter you can hold down the mouse key and move it to the letters you want. This is what Pogo recommends, but sometimes I picked up extra letters without meaning too. A quick way to "clear" your word and start over is just to click on any letter that is out-of-range for your word.

Also, you can use the right-click button on your mouse to submit any word. That's a lot faster than clicking the SUBMIT button each time.

And unlike most word games, Tumble Bees will accept two letter words! But since you don't earn any honey for those, only use them to free up space or to help move a letter into place for the Buzz Word.


Final Rating

As I've mentioned before, I *like* word games but I'm not very good at them. That influences my ratings a bit. ^_^ But I would say this is a solid 4 star game. It's quick to play, challenging, and runs smoothly. I'm not sure how often I'll come back to it, but it's a good game nonetheless.


Off Topic Info

Did you know that honey is awesome? It's pollen season where I live, which is also known as allergy season. One treatment is to take 1 tsp of local honey each day. Local honey contains traces of pollen from the area around you. It's a painless way to build up your tolerance for the pollen.

My allergies aren't that bad, but I thought that was really neat and wanted to share. ^_^