March of the Ants: Evolved Edition celebrates 10th anniversary of modern classic board game

March of the Antsan early success story of the modern board game renaissance, is a high-concept strategy game brought to life via crowdfunding in 2014. The hard-charging team leveraged its modest success to launch a new publishing company based in Portland Rare city gameswhich now offers a full catalog of board 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 on Tuesday and Polygon recently spoke with founder Tim Eisner to find out more.

“March of the Ants started with my friend and fellow designer Ryan Swisher,” Eisner recalled. “He had an art exhibition about ants. (…) One of the main things that stuck with me is that he said that ants are like a Bronze Age civilization. Some of them are into agriculture, some of them are into medicine, some of them are into their buildings, and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s cool!’”

The end result of their collaboration is a 4X-style strategy game, cast in the style of classics such as Risk, Twilight EmpireAnd Eclipsebut with a much faster playtime. Instead of trying to take over the world or a star cluster, the ants in this game simply try to eke out an existence in a quiet meadow. But danger lurks around every corner. As hungry millipedes stalk the shadows, other ant colonies gobble up resources and attack their neighbors. Only by evolving themselves and their offspring can players compete and win.

“We have a fun relationship,” Eisner said of his partnership with Swisher. “We kind of call it ‘a game of games,’ because we’re trying to figure out what the structure of the game is going to be. He’s more into the big ideas, crazy, really powerful, exciting stuff, and I kind of hammer it in and shape it and make sure it runs smoothly and doesn’t go too far off the rails.”

The most interesting part of March of the Ants are those crazy evolutions. Each queen ant is divided into three parts: a head, an abdomen, and a thorax. These three parts, collected from real-world examples, can be mixed and matched between different players. The result is an exotic mix of mechanics, with multiple different play styles all vying for the same resources in the meadow.

Some ants will evolve as expected, into aggressive or defensive species that can easily gain or hold territory. Other ants may become more symbiotic, and even benefit from sharing territory with other ants in the game. Some are more focused on building nests, hiding in their burrows and storing resources for a rainy day. And still others have even rarer and more sought-after abilities — like the ability to grow functional wings.

“There are 33 different evolutions, and they all combine in different ways,” Eisner said. “So you can be like, Ooh, (…) my ants have a flying evolution, so they can travel really far and they are symbiotic, so they will just appear on the players’ territory wherever they are (and score points)! There are so many different roles you can take on.”

The upgrades for this anniversary edition are numerous. The ant-shaped meeples should be a hit, for example. Elsewhere, the art has been completely reworked. Weird City Games originally did all the illustrations in-house, mixing macro photography with line art and digital overpainting. For Evolved Editioninstead they called in the professionals. The couple Mr. Cuttington (Brass, Santorini) is responsible for the pasture map and overall graphic design, and helps generate maps and other items that are much easier to read at a glance. Meanwhile, E. “Els” Dovingtona digital illustrator And a biologist, is illustrating all the ants.

Unlike many other modern board games that are crowdfunded, Eisner said we shouldn’t expect too much pressure from FOMO (“fear of missing out”) over games that aren’t available in stores.

“We like to keep our crowdfunding relatively simple,” Eisner said. The base version of the game will cost $49, while a collector’s edition with an expansion will cost $65. Shipping is expected a year from now, in September 2025.

Where does Weird City Games go next? Eisner said he’s encouraged by the success of other nature-themed board games, such as Elizabeth Hargrave’s best-seller WingspanHis company hopes to continue using ethically responsible materials and expanding its catalog in the coming years.

“I want to move slowly,” Eisner said, “so that we’re supporting our games that are out there, putting out enough new stuff to spread the word and keep people interested, but not trying to do too much and grow too fast. … There are a lot of great other people running companies, and they’re very supportive and encouraging. It’s an exciting time. It feels like we’re still growing.”