WallaBee is easily the most addicting game I’ve ever played. It took me a while, however, to understand everything that was going on, so I’m going to try to explain the basics here and then get into some of the more advanced topics later on.
The object of WallaBee is to collect items. They’re released in theme sets like the BBQ set and the WallaBee Express train set, one day sets for events like St Patrick's Day, and story-based sets like Little Red Riding Hood. At the time of this writing, there are more than 90 sets comprising more than 1500 items. New items are released each day (on average, so some days you might see no new items or you might see two or three). To make the game fair for people playing around the world, they can be released at any time of the day or night. If you’ve allowed push notifications, the WallaBee app will alert you when a new item is available. Items are consecutively numbered in order of when they’re obtained. Many players choose to collect low numbers, so those are typically more “valuable” than high numbers. Each item can be obtained in one of three ways: foraging, purchasing or mixing.
Foraging is the simplest way to get items. You visit the Places tab within the app, choose a nearby “forageable” spot and tap the forage button. Each place has a range of several hundred meters, so you may need to move around in the real world to enable foraging at certain places. (Still no places nearby? You can add new ones as long as they fall within WallaBee’s place guidelines.)
You’ll be rewarded with either an item, Honeycombs (WallaBee’s inapp currency) or nothing each time you forage. The items you can receive are determined by the type of place you’re foraging. Places are broken up into eight major categories (grouped by the color of the ring surrounding the place icon, like blue for education, pink for shopping, etc.) and each item is assigned to one or more of those categories and can only be foraged at those locations. Foraging at the same place multiple times is allowed, but beware that your odds of finding anything drop the more times you forage in a row.
Some items can be purchased in the WallaBee stores. There are (currently) five stores, each with a different theme, accessible from the Stores tab of the app. Items rotate in the stores on a regular basis. As mentioned above, Honeycombs are the inapp currency of WallaBee. They’re used to purchase items in the store. Items typically range in price from around 75 to 2,000 Honeycombs.
The most challenging items to obtain are those that are only available by mixing two items together. Little Red Riding Hood, for example, is only available by mixing together the Red Hood item and the Food Basket item. When there are two items in your pouch that can be mixed, the “Mix” button at the top of the screen will light up. Tap it and then tap the items you’d like to mix to select them. A second tap of the Mix button performs the mixing and creates the new item. Both of the original items are destroyed when they’re mixed, with no way to retrieve them, so only mix items you’re OK with giving up. Both itembrowser.com and the Honeyblend app maintain a list of the recipes for each of the mixes.
When you first obtain an item, it’s placed in your Pouch in the WallaBee app. The pouch is meant to be used (more or less) as temporary storage for items and as such is limited in size. Once you have an item, it’s usually best to save it to its set by opening the item and tapping the Share button at the top right of the screen. You can quickly tell which items you already have saved to your set by a small checkmark in the upper left corner of the items in your pouch. It will stay in its set until you decide to remove it or swap it with a different number of the same item later on. After you’ve saved all the items from a particular set, you’ll “complete” the set.
There are hundreds of items to collect and they get released at all times of days. You'll probably need some help. While is it completely possible to go it alone, it's easier with friends. Tap on the Friends button to search for friends. WallaBee Staff and BeeKeepers (helpful fellow players) are good candidates for your first friends. Tap on a player and then the Action button in the upper right to “Send Friend Request.”
There are some great resources in the app to get quickly up to speed. There are Forums that have Official Updates and other chats you can join in on. The Activity thread can be a great place to see where everyone else is finding items and what mixes they have discovered. The popular section is a great place to catch up on newly released items. Once someone has accepted your friend request, you can start a conversation from their profile and follow up on it in your Inbox.
Got all that? It’s time to move on to WallaBee 102
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