March of the Ants, an early success story of the modern board gaming renaissance, is a high-concept strategy game brought to life through crowdfunding in 2014. The scrappy team leveraged its modest success to found a new publishing company, Portland-based Weird City Games, which now offers a full catalog of tabletop games. Now the company is back with another Kickstarter project, this time for a newly revised version of the insect-inspired game that started it all. The campaign for March of the Ants: Evolved Edition went live Tuesday, and Polygon recently sat down with founder Tim Eisner to learn more.
“March of the Ants started with my friend and co-designer Ryan Swisher,” Eisner recalled. “He had done an art show about ants. […] One of the main things that stuck with me is he said that ants are like a Bronze Age civilization. Some of them do agriculture, some do medicine, some do their buildings, and I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s cool!’”
The end result of their collaboration is a 4X-style strategy game, cast in the mold of classics like Risk, Twilight Imperium, and Eclipse, but with a much faster playtime. Rather than trying to take over the world, or a cluster of stars, the ants in this game are just trying to eke out their existence in a tranquil meadow. But dangers lurk around every corner. While hungry centipedes stalk the shadows, other ant colonies gobble up resources and attack their neighbors. Only by evolving themselves and their brood are players able to compete and win.
“We’ve got a fun relationship,” Eisner said of his partnership with Swisher. “We call it kind of ‘a game of games,’ because we’re trying to figure out what the structure of the game is going to be. He’s more of a big ideas, zany, like really powerful, exciting stuff, and I kind of tamp it down and shape it and make sure it all runs smoothly and doesn’t go too far off the rails.”
The most interesting part of March of the Ants are those zany evolutions. Each ant queen is divided into three parts — a head, an abdomen, and a thorax. Those three parts, gathered from real-world examples, can be mixed and matched between the various players. The result is an exotic blend of mechanics, with multiple different play styles all competing for the same resources in the meadow.
Some ants will evolve as expected, into aggressive or defensive species that can either gain or hold ground easily. Other ants can become more symbiotic, and actually benefit from sharing territory with other ants in the game. Some are more focused on nesting, turtling up in their warrens and packing away resources for a rainy day. And yet others have even more rare and sought-after abilities — like the ability to grow functional wings.
“There’s 33 different evolutions, and they all combine in different ways,” Eisner said. “So you can be like, Ooh, […] my ants have this flying evolution, so they can move very far and they are symbiotic, so they’re just going to pop into players’ territories wherever they are [and score points]! There’s a whole range of different roles that you can take.”
The upgrades for this anniversary edition are many. The ant-shaped meeples should be a hit, for one. Elsewhere, the art has been completely reworked. Weird City Games originally did all its illustration internally, mixing macro photography with line drawings and digital overpainting. For Evolved Edition, they’ve instead called in the professionals. The husband-and-wife team Mr. Cuttington (Brass, Santorini) is handling the map of the meadow and the overall graphic design, helping generate cards and other items that are much easier to read at a glance. Meanwhile, E. “Alder” Dovington, a digital illustrator and a biologist, is illustrating all of the ants.
Unlike many other modern board games that go the crowdfunding route, Eisner said not to expect too much pressure from FOMO, or the “fear of missing out,” on things that won’t be available at retail.
“We like to keep our crowdfunding relatively simple,” Eisner said. The basic version of the game runs for $49, while a collector’s edition that includes an expansion will go for $65. Delivery is expected in a year, by September 2025.
Where does Weird City Games go from here? Eisner said he’s been buoyed by the success of other nature-themed board games, like Elizabeth Hargrave’s bestselling Wingspan. His company hopes to continue using ethically sourced materials, and to keep growing its catalog in the years to come.
“I want to move slowly,” Eisner said, “so that we’re supporting our games that exist, releasing enough new stuff to get the word out and keep people interested, but not try to do too much and grow too fast. […] There’s a lot of awesome other people who are running companies, and they’re very supportive, encouraging. It’s an exciting time. It feels like we’re still growing.”