Notes on Every New System I Play this Year #4: Honey Heist

Disclaimer: I encounter many of these systems for one-shots at meetups, where I sometimes won't even know what I'll be playing going in. Because of this, I'll often only have taken a deeper look at parts of the book that relate to character creation, and flipped through the rest. But I'll always have played them!

Played/Mastered on 25.01.2026 for 7 players excluding me.

Honey Heist is the little one page RPG that could. Created in 2017 by Grant Howitt, it has since become what the (co-)designer of huge, emotionally resonant games like HEART and DIE, almost comically well-produced ones like Eat the Reich, and 100(!) one page RPGs, is perhaps best known for. It's been played by Mystery Quest, Friends at the Table, Adventure Zone, Critical Role, and many more. What a legacy. What a life.

It's so well known, in fact, that I seriously considered not wasting time with writing what it's about and jumping straight to my thoughts. It kind of feels like telling you what Dungeons & Dragons is about – and not only because it also has a very descriptive name.

Honey Heist is a game in which you play a bunch of washed up bears with a criminal background like "Driver" or "Hacker", who try to steal honey from the humans at "Honey Con 2017". That's it. That's the game. If you like, you can roll on a table with cool hats. Then it's honey stealing time.

Like in John Harper's 2013 classic Lasers & Feelings , your bears have only two stats: "Bear", and "Criminal". To do something a Bear would do, you try to roll equal to or under your Bear stat. To do anything else, you try to do the same for your Criminal stat. Success and failure shift points between the two, and if you ever reach 6 in either, you're out. Becoming either the raging animal you are, or starting to feel a bit too comfortable in your life of crime and betraying your crew.

That this post is already almost as long as the text of Honey Heist itself tells you something about the incredible efficiency with which Howitt communicates his crackpot game concepts. (In one of his latest one page games, you play a young, female goat on its birthday . In another, gym bros on a treasure hunt .)

I found this succinctness to work pretty well for the player-facing part of the rules. But as the GM, I had wished for a tiny bit more structure. But that's not only true for the game's rules, but also the session we played it in.

Because, you see, we played Honey Heist because we had guests at a time when we would've normally played our weekly round of 5e. So, we were 7 players in addition to me as the GM. Also, among those 7 players there were 2 couples with 1 baby each at the table, both of which frequently had to tend to their child's needs, leading to 4 players frequently leaving and re-joining the game. Also, we started way too late, so 4 players wanted to get the game over with as fast as possible. 2 of the guests didn't really like RPGs. And 3 were essentially new to RPGs altogether.

Considering these circumstances, the game actually held up remarkably well. Seeing how we were pressed for time and, again, 7 players, I decided to play this as mostly just short prompts and questions for the players to riff off of. Most of my input wasn't longer than "You see the place where the honey ceremony will be held. What do you see and do?"

Even like this, the amount of speaking time each player had was pretty small. But the heist still came together in a reasonably satisfying way I think, allowing one of the player's bears to actually choose life and replace a human security guy like the Bug replaced Edgar in Men in Black, going so far as to turn on his crew to be more believable in his new role as an upstanding citizen of the human world.

Still, the game doesn't give you much to build your heist around, and it's surprisingly hard to come up with appropriate twists when a roll fails, considering the bears are well... bears, and can't speak, for example. This is because despite appearances, silly conceits are actually not the easiest to play in a satisfying way. You can go completely off the rails of course, but I think the most fun is in taking the concept seriously enough to still build something that is recognizable as a story around it. And doing so in a setting that is so unfamiliar can be a challenge to improvise. The supporting structure of the heist genre helps, but still.

Despite all of this, my players did an amazing job of bringing their characters and, through them, the whole game to life. There were just moments where I wished that it was easier for them to do so. Some kind of structure they could use as inspiration. The game actually has a seedling of this in the skills each of the bear types possesses. But more of these would have been helpful. Wait... do I actually want Honey Heist with tags ?

Overall, I can highly recommend playing Honey Heist at least once. It's funny, quick, and pretty much impossible not to have a good time with. And I do think that if you were to build some kind of curriculum on the history of the medium, Honey Heist should probably be on it. So go educate yourself!

Loved it. | Liked it. | Didn't care for it.