About

The Bee's Knees is an MCP service on the DPYC network. Every motion your bee makes is a tool call priced by the operator, paid from a pre-funded balance in satoshis — no accounts, no card, no interruption mid-match. Your identity is a Nostr key, not an email address.

See every fare →

Because it is an MCP service, an AI agent can play it as readily as a browser can. The board, the rules and the clock all live on the server; a client only asks what the board looks like and says what it wants to do next.

Underlined words carry a short definition — hover one, or tap it on a touch screen.

How it is played

Your bee begins in the meadow outside the wall, and has three things to do in order: reach a flower that still has its pollen and take it, carry it home through one of the few doorways in the hive wall , and then work inward through the comb until it reaches the queen . The first bee to her takes the round.

A flower you have taken turns purple and is no use to anybody after that — so the meadow empties as the round goes on, and the bee that dithers walks further for its pollen than the bee that did not. still has pollen · already plucked

Yours is the one wearing a halo . Everybody else's looks like , and on a screen with sixty of them that ring is the only thing you need to find.

Choosing where to go

You do not steer a bee one cell at a time. Tap where you want it to end up — a flower, a doorway, the queen, or any cell on the way — and the board works out the best route it can and draws it as a dotted line from your bee to that spot. Then you press the button, once per move, and your bee takes the next step along it. Tap somewhere else at any time and the line is redrawn; nothing is committed until you press.

The route is the best one through what is there at that moment, not a promise. Somebody else's bee can take the cell in front of you, or bring a tunnel down behind them, and the line will change on the next look. That is the game rather than a fault in it.

The three things you can do

Fly: — move through open air outside the wall, or along a tunnel somebody has already cut. Fast, and it costs the least.
Crawl: — cut fresh comb where there is no tunnel yet. Slower and dearer, and the cell you cut is open to everybody behind you from then on.
Mound: — fill an open tunnel back in. It sets back whoever was going to use it, and a bee has a body, so the one stuck behind it is a wall for everybody behind them.

The button says which of them the next press will do, and the two-way switch beside it is where you change your mind.

Two rules stop the obvious exploits. A bee may not move inward twice in a row, so nobody simply drills a straight line to the middle; you make ground, then you make room. And a bee acts once per cooldown, measured on the clock rather than on your balance, so no amount of spending buys a faster bee. What spending buys is interference.

How we know it is a game

Designing something playable is not the same as designing something that runs. A board can obey every rule it was given and still be a lottery — and you cannot tell by playing it, because a handful of rounds looks the same either way. So the rules were measured before any of this was monetised, and a small seeded batch now runs on every commit — a change that flattens the skill gap fails the build rather than reaching a player.

The board was tuned before the service existed: The rules were written as a standalone simulation first and thrown at batches of four hundred rounds, with bots playing to fixed strategies: one that cuts its own shaft, one that rides other bees' work, one that seals, one that bores straight in, and one that moves at random. If the strategies land near each other, there is no game — only a lottery wearing a board.
Skill has to beat a coin, and it does: On the shipped rules, the digger takes about 37% of rounds against a uniform share of 20% — roughly 1.9 times its share, and about 2.4 times the straight-line borer's 16%. The bee that moves at random wins nothing at all: not rarely, but zero times in four hundred rounds. Good play is rewarded and bad play is punished, which is the whole test.
Two rules exist only because measurement demanded them: The hive wall was cuttable at first, and 80% of bees simply chopped their own hole rather than fly to a door — which made the doors decoration and removed the chokepoint the middle of the game depends on. Separately, bees that had crossed a door kept stepping back out: over 1,218 measured crossings, 52.6% did, every one of them already carrying pollen with no business outside. Neither was visible by playing. Both were obvious in a batch of four hundred.
The cohort size is a finding, not a preference: Sixty bees racing to one queen is close to a lottery, because first past the post among that many near-identical racers is an extreme-value draw, and those are decided by variance. Five hives of twelve puts the judgement back: winning your own hive is skill-weighted, and which of five leaders arrives first is an unbiased second stage that does not erode the first.
A round ends, and ends in time: Every round in the batch reaches a queen rather than stalling, and the median runs about three and a quarter minutes. The winner's path inside the comb is 67 moves with 15 reversals of direction — it genuinely changes its mind — and a collapse lands in 398 of 400 rounds. The mechanics are used, not merely available.
It is a build step, not a report: The batch runner is in the repository and draws every default from the same rules module the game plays by, so it cannot describe a board nobody plays. A short seeded version of it runs with the tests: it does not pin today's exact win rate, which would fail on any honest tuning, but it fails if judgement stops beating a heuristic or if a bee moving at random starts winning.

What it raises

Every pot is split 80% to the beneficiary, 10% to the winner and 10% to the operator, and the integer remainder always falls to the beneficiary rather than to the house. A winner may take their share over Lightning or pass it on; a share nobody claims goes to the beneficiary too.

What is proven about the money is narrower than it sounds, and worth stating exactly. The pot holds what was actually charged, not the list price — a bee playing on a full-discount coupon adds nothing to it, which it did not always do, and the operator briefly owed the beneficiary eight satoshis on one satoshi collected. The three shares sum to the pot with nothing lost to rounding. A refused move returns exactly the fare it took. Each of those is a test rather than an assurance.

Whether it is profitable is arithmetic, not a claim, and it waits on two numbers. One is the price of a motion, which the operator sets. The other is how many people are playing, which nobody sets. The simulation supplies the multiplier in between: a bee that plays well spends about 89 tool calls to win a round, and one that plays badly spends 140 to 220. The operator's own share is the smallest of the three on purpose — this is not built to maximise it.

The technology

A game is an unkind thing to build this way — shared state, many writers, and a second is a long time. That is most of why it is worth building.

It is tools, not screens: Every motion is a named tool call on an MCP server, so an agent plays it exactly as this page does — same calls, same prices, same rules. The interface is one client among several, not the game.
It can be played blind: Nothing about a move requires seeing it. The board comes back as data — which cells are open, where every bee stands, whose turn has come round — so a program with no screen competes on equal terms. The simulated bees that fill a thin hive are exactly that.
The service remembers nothing: It is stateless. Every board, bee and fare lives in serverless Postgres, and each request reads it fresh, so two calls a second apart can land on two different machines and neither can tell. Between rounds the whole thing costs nothing to keep running.
The state is shared, and contended: Fifty bees writing to one board is the hard part. Every move is a single fenced statement that either wins the cell or does not — no locks, no transaction, and no way for two bees to occupy the same cell because both were told they could.
Your name is a key: Identity is a Nostr npub, generated by you and proven by a signature. There is no account to create, no password to lose, and no KYC — a key is enough to play.
Money is bitcoin, and it moves: Fares are satoshis from a balance you top up in advance. The pot is split when a round settles and paid over Lightning: to the beneficiary, and to a winner who chose to keep their share rather than donate it.
The hives are kept warm on demand: A scheduled service seats simulated bees when a hive is thin, so somebody who arrives alone still gets a race. They hold their own keys, pay their own fares, and play through the same public tools as anyone else — they are opponents, not scenery.