by Andrea Robbiani

Written by Andrea Robbiani and Renato Ciervo

ANTS is a competitive game in which players control ant colonies locked in an eternal struggle for dominance over the garden. The game was born in a small, ramshackle car, during a nearly twenty-hour round trip from Milan to Essen...and this is the story of how it came to life.

Why We Made This Game

Renato: When Andrea suggested we embark on an endless car journey to SPIEL Essen in the autumn of 2023, I never imagined that would be just the first step of an incredible adventure. That trip will culminate in October with the release of our game ANTS for SPIEL Essen 25.

Andrea: I had known Renato for a few years. We were both active in the Italian game author scene, and we often discussed game design. Although our design ideas were compatible and we could easily build on each other's insights, until 2023 we hadn't collaborated on any project, so I said to myself: "What better occasion to start a game design project than to kill time on a long car trip? Besides, I was convinced it was one of the few ways to keep myself awake and alert during my endless hours of driving."

Renato will learn this now, but what I sold him as an improvised idea was something I had prepared in the days leading up to it: the proposal for a co-design I knew he couldn't refuse. The idea of a game about ants had come to me a few days earlier, as often happens, quite randomly. When I opened a curtain in the beach house where I had spent the weekend, a swarm of ants poured out! What struck me was the incredibly high number of winged ants that, frightened by the disturbance, were trying to take flight and leave the anthill. Why do ants have wings? I didn't know anything, but that would be the beginning of an obsession that soon led me to spend my free time on the "Ants Italia" YouTube channel, an interesting channel dedicated to divulging information about these industrious insects.

After the first few days of "incubation", I got into the car with Renato with a single key concept to sell him the project: "Eggs, larvae, ants. The queen produces eggs, eggs become larvae, larvae are fed by worker ants and finally become ants themselves: explorers, foragers, and garbagers". We set off on our journey, and even before reaching the Swiss border, we were already walking in the world of ants and discussing the incubation mechanism, the beating heart of the game that never left us.

Flowchart of the initial conceptRenato: Right from the start, we set design goals that would serve as our guiding lights during moments of indecision that were sure to come. We wanted a strategic game with a strong connection to the theme, interesting mechanical ideas within a deep and complex game system that, at the same time, would be able to describe the theme in detail. The game had to be competitive, feature warring factions, control over contested territory, the collection of dwindling resources, and a progressive development of rapidly evolving specialized workforce.

Upon our return to Italy, after almost twenty hours of discussion and reasoning, we had a solid and well-structured idea of what ANTS would become. After months of work and online playtesting, bouncing between endless Excel documents and Tabletop Simulator, we printed the first version of the prototype and presented it at IDEAG, the Italian game authors' convention. The project immediately caught the attention of Simone Luciani, and about a month later, we signed a publishing contract with Cranio Creations. From there, we continued developing the game together with Simone, who by then had also irrevocably fallen victim to the charm of our funny small ants.

The Game

Renato: ANTS is a strategic game designed for experienced players. The basic mechanism is action selection integrated into an open draft system: the player chooses which action to perform and at the same time selects which card to draw from a shared card display. From this concept, it's easy to grasp the game's dual nature. The first one focuses on the player's strategic choices, for which interaction (mainly indirect) is a fundamental part. The second one, instead, focuses on hand management and the generation of card combos, where identifying synergies between cards is the predominant aspect.

Andrea: But let's not forget the adherence of the mechanisms to the world of ants! Beyond the basic mechanism, everything players do and experience within the game is designed to be coherent with the development of an ant colony: garden exploration, foraging (i.e. resource collection), digging the anthill, and fighting external enemies. The fact that our ants are anthropomorphized and super-intelligent should suggest "willing suspension of disbelief" to players, if necessary...

To summarize the fundamental ideas the game was built upon, we can mention:

* The incubation cycle: eggs, larvae, ants
* Ant specialization: Explorers, Foragers, Garbagers
* Card-based engine building: deed, skill, room cards

If you have the patience to stay with us, we'll delve deeper into these points and retrace the highlights of the development we undertook with Simone.

Development

The Incubation Cycle
Renato: Let's repeat our mantra together, shall we? "The Queen lays eggs, the eggs become larvae, the larvae are fed by worker ants, and finally, they become ants themselves!" As we've hinted at before, without this Incubation cycle, ANTS simply wouldn't exist.

Andrea: By placing this cycle at the foundation of the project, from the first playtests we managed to achieve:

• Strategic planning: the eggs you produce now will become ants...but only after your next Incubation action. That forces you to think many, many turns ahead, planning your colony's growth with foresight.
• Specialization: you must carefully choose which egg production to boost, masterfully blending tactical opportunities with strategic long-term goals. Why? Because your ants have three distinct specializations (explorers, foragers, and garbagers). It's not just about getting more ants; it's about getting the right ants at the right time!
• Urgency: you absolutely must ensure you have enough food by your next Incubation action if you want to feed those hungry larvae and see them transform into full-grown ants. This creates constant, delicious tension!
• Mid-term tactical goal: if you can also optimize your moves to fulfill the demands of your topmost Incubation tile, you'll snag a useful bonus.
• Asymmetry: to keep things fresh and exciting, we've got four different sets of Incubation tiles, each with unique goals.

The Card Display and the Actions
Andrea: We needed an action-selection system that was interesting but not too brain-frazzling, so it wouldn't take too much energy away from the rest of the game. We had the idea to integrate card drawing with the selection of an action. This was because we wanted a constant source of cards independent of the performed actions.

As players, we had often suffered from complex card games in which you tried to build an engine around a particular card icon or characteristics but couldn't find enough cards of that type during the game. Therefore, card recycling had to be high; players needed to see many cards during the game in order to choose their preferred strategy with great freedom.

Renato: Hence the idea of the display with the double choice: you choose the action to perform and a card to draw from the corresponding row, each containing three cards.

There were various iterations, but the basic concept remained consistent. One of the first versions, for example, featured a display that didn't automatically refill, but refilled only when the current player performed the Incubation action. Each card slot provided a bonus obtained when it was covered with a new card drawn from the deck. This mechanism, although introducing a tactical element related to the Incubation timing, reduced card recycling and added an additional constraint to action selection.

Display Board Rev0. One of the first versions of the action-selection display.
Andrea: The main actions in the game — Exploration, Foraging, Digging — were there from day one because they were tightly linked to how ants specialize into those three roles.

Initially, players would pick an action, then could also play a card from their hand, which, of course, increased downtime. After some tests, we decided to make playing cards a separate action. We then added the Incubation action alongside this structure; it's basically a reset action that kicks off a bunch of automated steps, including getting income. The action symbolized by the two gears in the image above (which lets you activate effects from played cards) didn't make it to the final version; instead, it got rolled into the Incubation sequence. Only much later in development did we add the "Defeat Enemies" action, as it was initially just part of the Exploration action in earlier prototypes.

The Stars
Renato: The Stars mechanism was part of our original idea. It's basically an "achievement system", kind of like the gems in Istanbul or the common objectives in Scythe. This mechanism not only nudges players toward long-term strategic planning but also creates a sense of urgency. That's because earning Stars, besides making up most of your final victory points (VPs), also acts as the countdown to the end of the game – and it's a countdown everyone controls together! Yep, once the common track is filled with enough Stars (which depends on the number of players), the game simply ends.

Andrea: You can grab Stars in three different ways, which are also the main three criteria for scoring VPs at the end of the game. Each criterion has three increasing requirements, meaning there are a total of nine Stars you can earn during a game. (We dare you to get more than six Stars in a single game!)

Renato: When we chose which criteria to use for giving out Stars, we were thinking about our future players! We wanted everyone, no matter their skills or preferences, to feel comfortable trying to win. In ANTS, everyone can strategically choose how to get Stars, and therefore how to shape their whole game.

• The Deeds criteria for Stars was designed to encourage players who love card combos and enjoy medium-to-long-term planning.
• The Anthill construction criteria is there to satisfy players who prefer a more conservative strategy with less interaction.
• Finally, the Pheromones criteria is for players who enjoy map interaction. This last one is the only Star criterion that got tweaked during development: initially, it required defeating a certain number of Enemies, but then we introduced the Pheromones mechanism to boost map interaction and that "race game" feeling.

The Cards
Andrea: In our minds, ANTS was primarily supposed to be a card game with combos, one of those games in which hand management and building your own personal "engine" are key, even though it's mixed with other strong indirect interaction elements.

Renato: Knowing how crucial cards would be to the game's whole structure, one of the first design challenges we tackled was creating the card deck. These cards needed to be unique, with diverse effects, all special and interesting — but we also wanted players, as they explored the deck game after game, to be able to spot specific strategic paths, synergies, and unique chains of effects that, if perfected, would let them build super-performing game engines.

Andrea: Drawing inspiration (of course!) from legends like Magic: The Gathering and Terraforming Mars, we set up a scientific distribution of cards into nine groups, each marked by its own icon describing the capabilities and quirks of different ant species. Each icon, when present on a card, triggers a specific type of effect:

• Communication icon, good for progressing on the Nuptial Flight track and synergizing with releasing Pheromones on the map. This icon describes how ants communicate and co-ordinate through pheromones.
• Aphid icon, useful for generating food and collecting aphid tokens. This icon describes ants' ability to farm aphids for honeydew (a sugary, nutritious substance).
• Agriculture icon, useful for generating leaves and collecting sprout tokens. This icon describes the ability of some ants to cut leaves and bring them to the anthill to use as a substrate for growing mushrooms.
• Construction icon, important for building rooms in the anthill, which are essential for room cards.
• Intelligence icon, helps with more flexibility in your workforce.
• Strength icon, useful for drawing more cards.
• Constitution icon, good for getting aggression tokens and synergistic with deed cards.
• Poison icon, useful for getting mushrooms.
• Aggression icon, absolutely essential for dealing with enemies.

The Aggression and Communication icons are the most common in the game and represent two opposing aspects: the tendency to dominate other colonies versus developing social structure.

Right after those, in terms of quantity in the deck, come the Aphid, Agriculture, and Construction icons, which all work together to help you build your game engine.

Finally, the Intelligence, Strength, Constitution, and Poison icons are rarer but essential for defeating enemies.

With this structure, cards with two (or more) different icons trigger one or more effects that make sense with the characteristics of each icon present. In our vision, the mix of icons and played cards should push players to experiment in every game with new synergies and emerging strategies, making for a significantly different gameplay experience each time.

Renato: To ensure variety and give each card a distinct identity, we structured the deck to separate cards into three categories, which differ from each other in terms of purpose and effect:

• Deed cards, no icons, no cost, but with varied requirements. Great for getting VPs and earning Stars.
• Skill cards, few icons, a leaf cost, and sometimes an icon requirement. Mainly useful for immediate effects.
• Room cards, many icons, a small leaf cost, and the requirement of having specific-sized room tiles in your anthill. Mainly useful for continuous or end-game effects.

Deed, skill, and room cards
The Anthill Board
Anthill board Rev0Renato: The anthill board, which is the players' private board, pretty much stayed the same through various versions. During development, we made only small tweaks to it.

The player board's main job was to manage the growth of your workforce, i.e. the Incubation cycle – that's the heart of the ANTS experience. For that, we came up with a simple, intuitive mechanism that would automatically turn eggs into larvae and larvae into ants. We originally marked these growth stages in three different zones on the anthill board: eggs, larvae, ants. These were later replaced by Incubation tiles, which let us recreate that automatic growth mechanism with just a single move from the player. It was a simple idea, but it made the gameplay much smoother and quicker.

Andrea: During playtesting, we came across a tricky point that worried us, even though most testers didn't flag it: players were drawing more cards than they could play during the game, so they always had too many cards in hand! This slowed down the game flow because too many cards in hand confused players with too much information and too many choices.

Not wanting to reduce the number of cards drawn, we tackled this by adding various effects (on cards, abilities, and the anthill board) that would encourage players to discard cards for different benefits, but we made sure these effects were always optional. We wanted the decision to reduce the hand size to be a strategic choice for each player. For ergonomic reasons and to make your own game engine easier to read at a glance, we decided later in development to add small tracks that showed your production capacity (for resources and eggs).

Anthill board Rev5
The Map and the Enemies

First version of the garden mapAndrea: From the beginning of our design, we wanted ants to be present not only in their anthill but also in the surrounding environment — the garden. After all, it's their primary hunting and foraging ground. The map was meant to represent this outside world, where ants would venture to find resources, face dangers, and spread pheromones to control areas.

Renato: At first, the map was more abstract, a grid of hexes that ants could explore where they could place pheromone tokens to show their presence and exert control. Over time, however, we realized that to capture the theme, we had to put more detail into the garden. Different areas needed to give different rewards, as in nature: flowers for nectar, aphids for honeydew, sprouts for leaves, mushrooms, and so on. That gave us a lot more flavor and helped players feel immersed in the theme.

Andrea: Another crucial element we added to the garden were the enemies. From spiders to beetles, they act as natural predators and obstacles to the ants' expansion. Initially, enemies were static and simply blocked access to certain areas, but that wasn't enough. We wanted them to feel dangerous, alive, and threatening, so we made them spread out dynamically during the game. Whenever you revealed an enemy, it created immediate tension on the map, forcing players to react quickly and allocate resources and ants to deal with the threat.

Enemies board with enemy cards Rev0
Renato: We tied enemies closely to the Aggression resource, so that fighting them was never free but always required careful preparation. This choice not only made the fights feel more epic but also integrated perfectly with the theme of the colony having to muster strength and unity in the face of danger. The combination of resource management, timing, and area control around enemies quickly became one of the most intense parts of the game.

Enemy board Rev1
Andrea: In the latest versions of the prototype, enemies also became a key way to interact with the map. By defeating them, players could unlock valuable rewards, clear strategic areas, and gain advantages over rivals. They turned into an active and dynamic element that constantly pushes players to adapt their strategy.

Enemy cards and board Rev5
Replayability

Renato: One of our constant design goals was to ensure that ANTS offered very high replayability. We wanted each play to feel different, with players exploring new strategies, synergies, and interactions every time.

Andrea: To achieve this, we worked on multiple layers of variability:

• The Incubation tiles, which come in different sets, each with unique goals and bonuses.
• The card deck, built to provide a huge number of possible combos through its icons and synergies.
• The garden map, which can be set up differently each game, ensuring new spatial challenges and opportunities.
• The enemies, which appear and spread in unpredictable ways, constantly creating new threats to adapt to.

Renato: We also designed the Star system to reward diverse approaches. Whether you prefer focusing on cards, digging and building your anthill, or spreading across the map with pheromones, there are always multiple viable paths to victory.

Replayability factors of the game
Thanks

We really want to thank Simone Luciani here, who put his experience and enthusiasm into serving the colony! He always told us he jumped into a project that was already 80% developed, but we're firmly convinced that the percentage we developed together was essential to get to what we believe is the best version of the game.

A special thanks also to all the playtesters who played a fundamental role in the project's development. Thanks to a test with Tommaso Battista, we thought about the possibility of speeding up larvae growth. (That's the current effect that lets you instantly turn a larva into an ant.) Thanks to a test with Federico Pierlorenzi, David Spada, and Daniele Tascini, we thought about Incubation as an additional action, making it asynchronous for players and moving from a round-based structure to a more fluid and satisfying gameplay experience. Finally, thanks to our group of passionate testers on Tabletop Simulator, we collected an incredible amount of data that proved essential for the final fine tuning.

After this long journey, we can't wait to hear what you think of our little heavy game!

A Little Spoiler for the Future...

A year after that fateful Milan-Essen round trip, we decided to do it again for SPIEL Essen 24 and...we fell for it again: we've got a new project cooking! New trip, new game. Anthropomorphic little animals are still the theme, and cards are still one of the central elements. Who knows, with a bit of work and a sprinkle of luck, maybe the rest will be revealed to you soon!

Tiny creatures still require a lot of space...