ANTS

ANTS is a deep strategy game for 2–4 players about building, feeding, specializing, and expanding an ant colony in an intensely competitive garden ecosystem. Develop an underground nest, hatch eggs into specialized workers, explore a shared hex map, establish pheromone-linked gathering networks, battle hostile insects, and evolve your colony around the unique abilities of your Queen. Worker management, spatial planning, resource production, tableau building, and asymmetric development all overlap in a game where an individual ant is tiny but absolutely nothing about your decision tree is.

For the Colony. All 400 Decisions of It.

ANTS gives you two interconnected worlds to manage. Underground, your nest is growing room by room as eggs become larvae and larvae become specialized workers. Above ground, the garden is opening up into a contested network of resources, enemies, supply routes, and spaces your opponents would very much prefer you did not control.

The satisfying part is how tightly those worlds feed one another. Better workers make stronger actions. Exploration creates opportunities for gathering. Gathering feeds incubation. New rooms improve your engine. And every improvement gives you another tempting direction in which to stretch a colony that cannot possibly do everything at once.

How the Game Works

On your turn, choose one of six main actions: Dig, Explore, Gather, Incubate, Play Cards, or Defeat Enemies. Most actions require specialized ants, and committing between one and four workers determines how powerful the action becomes.

Diggers expand the anthill with differently shaped room tiles. Explorers reveal new garden hexes containing resources and threats. Gatherers form connected supply networks that collect food and leaves while laying down pheromones across the board.

Incubation drives the colony's life cycle. Eggs develop into larvae and larvae into ants, with diggers, explorers, gatherers, and flexible wild workers feeding your future action economy. Completing enterprises and developing your colony can also trigger production and other rewards.

There is no single route to victory. Nest construction, territorial reach, worker development, enemies, cards, resources, and endgame objectives all provide ways to turn a functioning colony into the dominant one.

Why You’ll Love It

• Different worker types make worker management about both quantity and specialization.
• Your underground anthill and above-ground garden network create two interconnected spatial puzzles.
• Asymmetric Queen abilities encourage different strategic priorities from the beginning of each game.
• The egg-to-larva-to-ant life cycle makes growing your workforce feel thematic as well as mechanically important.
• Multiple scoring paths support architectural, territorial, economic, developmental, and tactical strategies.
• High player interaction comes from competing for the same garden rather than merely optimizing separate personal boards.

Game Details

🧩 Players: 2–4
⏱️ Playtime: About 90 minutes
🎂 Age: 13+
🗂️ Genre: Heavy strategy, worker management, civilization development, exploration, spatial engine building
🎯 Complexity: Medium-heavy — interconnected action, worker, resource, spatial, and development systems reward long-term planning
🔁 Replayability: Very high — asymmetric Queens, variable setup, extensive card variety, contested exploration, and multiple victory paths produce very different colonies
🎮 Great for fans of: Barrage, Rats of Wistar, dominant-species-style competition, heavy worker-placement games, and strategy games where your engine physically spreads across the board

What's in the Box

• 1 Modular Game Board
• 2 Garden Tiles
• 6 Leaf Tiles
• 29 Enemy Tiles
• 8 Special Object Tiles
• 120 Base Cards
• 8 Queen Room Cards
• 30 Starting Cards
• 52 Room Tiles in Four Sizes
• 45 Food Cubes
• 20 Leaf Cubes
• 10 Mushroom Cubes
• 25 Aggression Tokens
• 10 Mutation Tokens
• 5 3x Tokens
• 5 -3 VP Tokens
• 4 Anthill Boards
• 4 Reference Tiles
• 4 Double-Sided Anthill Tiles
• 1 First Player Marker
• 12 Incubation Tiles
• 8 Queen Tokens
• 9 Queen Tiles
• 160 Player Discs
• 44 Player Cubes
• 36 Star Tokens