Cloud 9 Tabletop’s Honey Heist Review

January 28, 2019

Honey Heist Review

Honey Heist is a 1-Page RPG by Grant Howett and the intro tag line from the rules says it all:

It’s HONEYCON 2017. You are going to undertake the greatest heist the world has ever seen.  Two things:

One – You have a complex plan that requires precise timing

Two – You are a GODDAMN BEAR.

This super lightweight game plays amazingly well as a one-shot.  Great for mixing up the game on your regular rotation, or just an impromptu game night.  I ran my first session of Honey Heist just last night, so I’ve got some fresh perspective to share in this Cloud 9 Tabletop review.

About the Game

A free download of the full 1 page rules ( including a 2nd page if you’re the game master) can be found here.  However, here’s a quick and dirty cliffs notes version of how the game plays

  • Players start with three random d6 rolls that determine their Descriptors, Bear Types, and Roles.
    • Descriptors: Rookie, Washed-Up, Retired, Unhinged, Slick, Incompetent
    • Bear Types: Grizzly, Polar, Panda, Black, Sun, Honey Badger
    • Roles: Muscle, Brains, Driver, Hacker, Thief, Face
  • You then finish off your character with a sweet hat!
  • Your bear has 2 stats, each starting at 3. 
    • BEAR for mauling, running, climbing, shrugging off damage, scaring people and generally doing bear stuff.
    • CRIMINAL for doing anything not directly related to being a bear.
  • Action rolls are made by rolling a d6 with anything lower or equal to your appropriate bear or criminal score resulting in a success.  If you are performing an action that corresponds to your role (like mauling stuff as the muscle) you roll two d6 and take the lower result.
  • If you do well and succeed in your plans, your characters stats move more into criminal… and if your plans are failing, you get frustrated, moving your stats more into bear.  If you ever reach 6 in bear or criminal, it’s (hilarious) bad news.  6 points in criminal means you are overcome with greed and you betray the party, living out a life of crime for the rest of your days.  6 points in bear results in you going completely feral, hulking out, and losing control of your character.
  • It’s important to know that you’re bears in a human world.  You can communicate with each other just fine, and you can try to communicate to the humans, but it comes out like mangled bear speech.

My Review

I won’t leave you in anticipation very long here.  I want to open by saying I really, really loved the concept of this game when I first learned about it.  Running it around the gaming table live did not disappoint.  There’s a lot of interesting points to unpack here, so let’s get into it:

Why Honey Heist (Pros)

The elegance of Honey heist is in its simplicity.  This is literally the simplest game system I’ve come across.  And the premise of the game is hilarious from the moments you start reading the rules, until the metaphoric credits reel starts rolling after your characters heist completes.  Super easy to pick up and play.

Any drawbacks (Cons)

I was challenged to think of drawbacks when reflecting on Honey Heist.  A “downside,” for some I suppose, would be the lack of depth to the system, and premise.  While it makes for an amazing one-shot, it does not seem like it would lend itself well to an ongoing campaign, or even a series of repeated one-shots with the same group.  However, I’ll say that while these make it a not great longstanding game, these characteristics make Honey Heist an amazing one-shot.

Who is Honey Heist Good for?

This one-shot is very universal.  I’d recommend that you could successfully run this with family-friendly / kids tables, and across the spectrum to the more grizzled veteran power gaming groups and so many groups in between.  The simplicity makes the game extremely accessible, yet the novelty and comedy make the game engaging even for those that are used to a more complex game.

Review of Honey Heist Play Through

I sat down with six friends to play through Honey Heist.  I was the GM… and of course I referred to myself as the “B”M for the evening.

Prep Before the Game for me as the “B”M (Bear Master)

Prep was very easy, and minimal.  I spent 5 minutes rolling on the random tables on the GM sheet to create the structure where / what was being heisted, as well as security features and personality quirks of the main convention organizer NPC. Then I spent maybe 45 minutes googling images of hotels, and convention center floor plans to wrap my head around what the area was like that I was going to immerse the players in.  We wound up in a location I called Hubai… a city that looks JUST LIKE Dubai… but located in Sunny California.

Character Creation

I printed up character sheets from here. Character creation was simple, intuitive and fun.  I allowed mulligans for roles that the players didn’t care for… and it wound up that we had one of every role in the party (Muscle, Face, Brains, Hacker, Driver, Thief).  The hats and unique bear types added a nice flavor to each character and made for interesting character introductions.

Playing Out the Heist

The simplicity of the system lead itself to an easily facilitated game.  I had a general structure for how I understood the convention to be going on, and what security measures were in place, and kind of just let the players engineer a plan for how to solve their heist problems.  Initial obstacles were that they were outside of a convention center and needed to get in… tickets were $500 a pop and they did not have any.  They wound up having the Honey Badger thief stealing a pass from a visiting patron milling about, and then sending in their Black Bear face in through the front door, sneaking in the party through a back door.

As the heist continued, the inevitable hilarity ensued.  Our party of bears had zany encounters that included bathroom brawls with a team of security guards, hijacking a DJ’s (that looked a lot like Lucio from Overwatch) sound system, succeeding in a hot honey eating contest put on by Macho Man Randy Savage, creating a huge distraction by getting themselves, and some kids from the convention swimming in a honey fountain, finding themselves behind the scenes with swiped key cards at the top secret vault containing the prize, wrestling the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, and narrowly escaping via the Good Year Honeycon blimp.

Improv Comedy Gold

So little of the evening’s shenanigans were planned ahead of time.  I merely set up a framework with some challenges for these bumbling criminal bears to get past, and the players provided so much of the off the wall creative ideas and comedic encounters.  As a GM, one of the areas that I’m trying to grow in is being better at improvising on the fly and going with the flow of unexpected player decisions.  The one-shot, non-serious nature of Honey Heist made it very easy to laugh, say yes to player’s schemes and just roll with it.  The end result was a great, belly laugh filled evening for both me and my players.

Post-Game Reflections

As our adventure completed, and our bears rode off into the sunset on their honey blimp, everyone at the table felt like playing Honey Heist was time well spent. In hindsight, this was the first one-shot I’ve participated in that literally completed in one-shot… a single 3-hour session.  All other one-shots for me spanned a usually unplanned 2nd or 3rd evening to come to some closure.

The consensus around the table was kind of a shared expression of… “Wow, that was great.  OK so what should we play next week?”  The premise of honey heist does not lend itself well to repeated play throughs with the same group of players and same GM.  For me, enjoyable additional Honey Heist sessions would have to be played with a shuffled group of players, or at minimum, keep the same group but switch up the “B”M so that the heist has a different feel.

Summary

If you’re thinking of playing an evening of Honey Heist at your table, stop thinking about it and just play it!  It really is so good.  Overall, I’d rate Honey Heist a score of 9.8 out of 10. The Only thing that would bring up that score to a perfect 10 would be to have a way to make replaying with the same group of players more interesting.  Maybe introduce some sequel adventures or schemes?  Now I will say that Critical Roll has done an awesome job into creating a viable resurfacing one shot in their three videos below, so there’s that.

Resources

Here are some resources to get you started playing Honey Heist

Rules

Videos

Podcast Episodes (These links open in Spotify)