John Yianni’s creepy-crawly strategy game is the smash success

that almost never was, until a mixture of luck, faith and eort

brought it out of the woodwork

Words by Owen Duffy

42 February 2019

HIVE

2

001 release Hive is a phenomenally

successful two-player game

created by London-based designer

John Yianni. Abstract, simple

and strategic, it plays without a

board and hands players control of armies of

insects and arachnids, challenging them to

claim victory by cunningly manoeuvring their

collection of creepy-crawlies.

In the years since its release it’s proven a

rm favourite with fans, racking up impressive

sales around the world and earning a

prestigious Mensa Select award in the process.

But the story behind its success is an unlikely

one: its creator isn’t a fan of abstract games,

forgot about its design for almost two decades

and had never even heard of the tabletop

hobby until he was almost 40. Here’s how Hive

improbably became one of the biggest gaming

hits to come out of the UK in years.

EGG PHASE

John Yianni has fairly typical memories of his

early gaming experiences.

“I was born in London, from a Greek

Cypriot heritage,” he says. “As a young boy

with no real experience of hobby gaming,

I only ever played mainstream games like

Monopoly and Risk. But I was always designing

and making my own board games for fun, and

I played them with my friends and family.”

It’s at this point that most game designers

talk about the releases that introduced

them to the world beyond mass-market

titles – classics like Dungeons & Dragons

or Cosmic Encounter. Yet, in the era before

a widespread online gaming community,

Yianni was never exposed to the subculture

of gaming geekdom. Instead, he continued

working on his own designs, including

the one that would eventually become his

biggest success.

“I had the idea for Hive when I was about 18

years old while watching a lm on TV,” he says.

“e main characters were two old friends who

met daily in a park to play chess. ey would

each bring one half of the board and half of the

pieces. I don’t remember the name of the lm,

but I do remember that it inspired me. Looking

at the unused empty spaces on their chess

board, I wondered whether I could design a

game that had no need for a board, so it could

be very portable, but still kept the essence of

what made chess so appealing.”

Like chess, Yianni’s concept revolved

around dierent types of pieces, all of which

moved in their own distinct ways. Rather than

shuing across a square-grid board, his pieces

began the game in contact with one another,

manoeuvring around and across each other in

set patterns.

“I started experimenting with a design

using pieces of card with symbols showing

rats, dragons, stones, kings and pigs,” Yianni

explains. “ey were all squares, because I was

still thinking in terms of a chessboard, and all