Build a thriving hive in free bee management game Hive Time

Do you think a beehive just happens? No, in the world of PC games at least, it takes planning, and building, and researching, and gathering, all of which you've been surely learnt after playing countless management and strategy games. Hive Time is a bee colony management game where you have to expand your hive, manage it, and defend it from nature's biggest jerk, the wasp.

It's a refreshing theme, letting you get away from pesky humans and their constant organisational problems. Not that bees have it any easier, of course. While your workers are out foraging, you have to decide which rooms to construct in which cells, research new bee tech, and raise new generations of bees, in this attractive, approachable strategy game.

Hive Time is available on a pay-what-you-want basis, as is the soundtrack, and if you pay for the latter, 50 percent of the proceeds will go towards the Bumblebee Conservation Trust.

For more great free experiences, check out our roundup of the best free PC games.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.