by W. Eric Martin

Having now played ANTS five times on a review copy, I'm amused by the minimalism exhibited in the BGG game page description submitted by publisher Cranio Creations:

Seems so straightforward! That description is akin to describing the film Brazil as a bureaucratic effort to fix a typographical error. I mean, that's true, but it also leaves out everything compelling about the characters, setting, and story. Maybe that's a plus for those who need only to hear the word "anthill" to get jazzed about a new game, but others might need more.

As an example of what you're getting into should you play ANTS, here's the playing area at the end of a three-player game:


Yeah, it's a lot, so let's take that description and unpack it, starting with this:

▪️ Expand your anthill, explore the terrain, and mark your path with pheromones.

Each turn, you take one of six actions, three of which are covered in the sentence above: dig, explore, forage. To do these, you need 1-4 grown-up ants, more specifically 1-4 grown-up ants that specialize in the action, although by spending food, you can "retrain" ants to that specialization or "pump them up" to make the action stronger.

When you dig, you add new rooms to your anthill, gaining any bonuses that you cover with tiles. Why do you care about digging? Because of the bonuses, sure, but those are more like wrapped restaurant mints — something nice in the moment, but not an essential part of the meal; a sweetener that makes you feel good because it's something extra...even though it's an embedded part of the restaurant experience and there for a purpose.

You care about digging because if you fill all of an anthill level with rooms, you receive a few points; do it again, and you get more; turn the entire anthill into rooms, and you maximize those digging points.

What's more, in a separate action you can pay leaves and flip a room of the appropriate size to "fill" that space with a room card. These cards give one-time effects, ongoing abilities, incubation-triggered actions (more on that later), and endgame points.

Look at all those icons!
When you explore, you call dibs on a hex in one of six terrains, gaining the bonus you cover (more bonuses!), adding the indicated resources to this hex, and revealing a threat. Only ants that have explored this particular type of terrain can fight threats in it, and to fight threats you need...symbols, symbols on cards that you've played, whether room cards or skill cards. What do you get for removing a threat? You guessed it: bonuses.

To forage, you place ants in a chain through the grass, picking up resources from adjacent hexes or gaining a bonus (yes, again!) by occupying a perimeter space. If a hex doesn't have resources now, your ant will pick up a resource from that hex in the future once that space is explored — unless another ant is faster. If you contribute to emptying a hex of resources, you place a pheromone marker for that terrain; place enough of those, and points will follow.

Occupy the hex center when exploring, and chain your way through the grass to forage. The cubes on the perimeter show evidence of pheromones.
▪️ Gather food and leaves... Lay eggs and hatch larvae to grow your workforce with specialized ants.

Food and leaves are two of three resources, mushrooms being the third; mushrooms can be used as either food or leaves while being neither. You gather resources primarily through foraging, but you also gain food and leaves from a fourth action: incubate.

During incubation, you generate eggs that specialize in digging, exploring, and foraging, then those eggs graduate to larvae. To help these larvae become grown adults ready to take action in the world, you must feed them, so you want to increase food production to maintain a steady supply of adults, while also boosting egg production to then allow larger digging, exploring, and foraging actions.

My player board, showing production on the bottom edge in food, leaves, and three types of eggs
▪️ Evolve your colony to unlock unique abilities and secure supremacy over enemy nests.

Evolution in ANTS takes the form of you playing cards, which constitutes both the fifth action — play up to two cards — and half of the sixth action: play up to one card and fight a threat.

Each card is either a room, a skill, or a deed. Rooms I've already covered above. Skills and deeds require you to meet their listed conditions in order to play them, with skills having a range of requirements and an even broader range of rewards. Many times you need the symbol(s) from one room or skill card in order to play another skill card, which will then pave the way for a third.

ANTS includes 158 cards, and you'll see only a portion of those each game — which provides variety and surprises from one game to the next, but can also bring frustration if you need, say, four pink symbols to play a highly desired card such as "Pheromone coordination" and those pinks remain elusive.

Sample skill cards
Deeds have a wider variety of requirements than skill cards, but they're more straightforward in that they provide only an instant bonus and no symbols.

Why do you want deeds then? Because if you hit deed thresholds in your holdings, you'll earn points, as when digging rooms and placing pheromones. These three scoring systems serve as a clock for the game, with each token being scored advancing players toward the end of play and a final scoring.

Sample deed cards
Each time you dig, explore, and forage, you draft a new card into your hand, joining the four initial cards you chose. Every little bonus, ability, effect, or scoring condition — whether from played cards, foraged tokens, defeated threats, and covered anthill spaces — combines into larger results, with everything cascading over time.

A single promotion in, say, "explore" egg production will lead to stronger explore actions, giving you better foraging opportunities, stronger bonuses, and the ability to fight more threats, with all of those activities snowballing as well. Sometimes cards mesh with current plans, sometimes they create new plans — and with experience, you can peer into the future and realize how you can meet the requirements of a card twelve turns from now and incorporate its effect into further growth.

In the games I've played, I've repeatedly realized that if only I had done X earlier, I would have boosted production or put an incubation action into play prior to the incubation that just ended — and that production or action would have compounded. Missing that link in the action chain kept me running at a low gear compared to opponents, with the winner of my first game nearly doubling my points.

Even a two-player game requires a decent amount of space
Over time, I've become better at not holding on to cards forever and trying to do everything, instead ditching cards for bonuses and card effects in order to focus on a more immediate plan, although whatever you're doing will require adaptation thanks to the constant flood of new cards, that is, new tools to place in your anty mitts.

This combination of processional Eurogame resource management and decision making with the steady, chaotic drip of new card offerings is potent, providing players a lot to consider should they be able to stop frantically waving their antennae and make plans for the future.

For an overview of gameplay with much more attention paid to explaining rules and giving examples of how everything works, watch this video:

Youtube Video