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First Impressions for March of the Ants: Evolved Edition

Most of the time on this blog I write about tanks, battalions and moving lines of the front. But every now and then a game comes along which has nothing to do with war and still scratches exactly the same itch – the itch of expanding, competing for territory, and squeezing the most out of limited resources. March of the Ants: Evolved Edition is one of those games.

A full 4X game – explore, expand, exploit, exterminate – that fits on a normal table and finishes in about 90 minutes, played not by starfleets or panzer divisions but by ants? (Yup, Ants!) That is exactly it! What is more, I have the Evolved Edition together with all the expansions, so there was plenty to dig into during several plays. Below you will find a short overview of the game and its expansions, a session report(s), and finally my early impressions. Enjoy the read!

About the Game

**March of the Ants: Evolved Edition – the box with all the expansion content. Behind the colorful cover hides a genuine 4X strategy game.**

March of the Ants: Evolved Edition – designed by Tim Eisner and Ryan Swisher, published by Weird City Games – is a revised and upgraded version of the original 2015 title. It supports 1 to 5 players and plays in roughly 60 to 90 minutes. Each player controls an ant nest competing with rival colonies for the Meadow: you explore its unknown reaches, evolve your ants into new species, and fight for control of the Great Tunnel.

All four Xs are present and each of them actually matters. You explore by placing new hex tiles and moving into them, which also opens the race for hexes around the Great Tunnel. You expand by hatching eggs and larvae and pushing more ants onto the board – but every ant needs feeding, and a colony that outgrows its food supply simply starves. You exploit through the card play, and especially the Evolution cards, which are the closest thing this game has to a tech tree: each evolution gives you a new ability and often scores points on its own. And you exterminate by fighting rival colonies and the centipedes wandering the Meadow. On top of that sit the Colony Goal cards, which can score every single round if you keep fulfilling them – get them out early and they add up fast, while also giving your whole strategy a focus.

Compared to the original edition, the Evolved Edition brings reworked artwork and graphic design, revised and rebalanced mechanics, new Resting cards and Great Tunnel Battles, and wooden ant meeples in place of the old cubes.

The full set of available content includes also those expansions:

Predator and Prey – the large expansion, which combines the best elements of the first edition Minions of the Meadow and Empire of the Earth expansions into one box.
Tiny Titans – a mini expansion of 7 new cards adding strategy and intrigue around the wormholes in the Meadow.
The Deluxe content – full art food tokens, thick 2mm punchboard Nest Mats and Major Worker boards, and the deluxe box that holds the base game and expansion together.

Session Report

So far I have played three full sessions – the first one to learn the systems and see all the moving parts, the next ones to check how the game plays once everyone knows what they are doing. Presentation of the colonies, the Meadow and the situation is best done visually, so please enjoy my picture-rich session report! And feel free to click any of the below images to expand them in new window for more details.

Session 1. Discovering the Meadow

The first session was all about discovering the game. The opening turns of March of the Ants are deceptively calm: everyone hatches larvae, digs tunnels and explores the nearest hexes, and the Meadow slowly grows outward from the Great Tunnel in the center. What is more, in first Turn there are no combats. But the calm does not last long – the moment the first colonies meet on the same hex, and the first centipedes start blocking the juiciest foraging spots, the game shows its teeth.

The score and season track. The colonies VP markers creep along the scoring track while the season marker works through four turns. Note the centipede size track along the top: as the Meadow fills up, the creatures roaming it get bigger.

As the session progressed, the different layers of the game started to interlock. Evolutions changed what each colony was capable of, Colony Goals pushed us in different strategic directions, and the food economy quietly punished everyone who expanded too enthusiastically. The centipedes proved to be more than just decoration – fighting them for control of key hexes quickly became one of the most entertaining parts of the evening (although not always with the good result – then the fun was for opponents of poor fellow who was eaten by those ants arch-enemies).

***Session 1: close-up on heavily centipedes infested area. What is interesting, you can also score Colony Goals for coexisting with them on the same hexes. But usually they will simply eat you.***

Session 1: The final tally. Michal (red) 35, Kuba G (blue) 33, Adam (purple) 33, Kuba J (yellow) 21. Two points between first and joint second – and that in a game everybody was learning as they went. Note the red colony massed around the Great Tunnel in the center, and the purple push along the whole eastern edge of the Meadow.

Summary: Michal 35, Kuba G 33, Adam 33, Kuba J 21. Two points covering the top three, in a game every one of us was learning as we went – and that is already a good sign for a design. A first session does what a first session should do: it shows you where all the moving parts are and how they connect. The lesson I took away was about the food economy – expansion here is never free, and a colony that hatches faster than it forages will grind to a halt on its own, without any help from the opposition. Everything else – the Evolutions, the Colony Goals, the scramble for the Great Tunnel – sits on top of that foundation. Get the feeding wrong and none of the clever plans above it matter.

Session 2. Up to Speed

The second session, some two weeks later, was a different experience entirely. With the rules internalized (at least by part of the players), the game accelerated – turns flowed quickly, the strategies were sharper from the very start, and the fight for the Great Tunnel and the richest hexes began much earlier. This is where March of the Ants really shows its quality: the same box, the same rules, and yet a noticeably different game once everyone knows what they are chasing.

Session 2: The final situation. Michal (red) 34, Kuba G (purple) 29, Jarek (blue) 23, Lukasz (yellow) 18. A fully developed Meadow after a much faster, much sharper game – purple spread across the north and east, blue dug in to the west around the Breeding Grounds, red working the center and south. A wider spread than the first session, and the difference experience makes in this title is significant.

Summary: Michal 34, Kuba G 29, Jarek 23, Lukasz 18. Almost the same winning total as the first evening, but a much wider spread behind it – and the game got there considerably faster. The Colony Goals are the real engine: taken early and played toward consistently, they quietly score round after round while everyone else is busy contesting hexes. The Great Tunnel is the obvious prize and draws attention accordingly, but it is the Goals that fill the score track. That is the lesson I took here.

Two sessions, two quite different experiences – and both ended with the same reaction at the table: let us play this again soon, but with more expansions to see also those. For a game that sets up and finishes within an evening (or sometimes even faster), that is exactly the reaction you want!

First Impressions

Let me share my impressions, observations, things I liked after these first plays, and elements I found less impressive. Let us see:

This is a real 4X, hiding under beautiful and colorful animals. That is the thing which surprised me most. The theme is cute, the meadow is full of friendly-looking bugs – and then you sit down and realize you are exploring, expanding, exploiting and exterminating exactly like in any serious 4X title. All four Xs are there, all four matter, and the strategic decisions have real weight. Do not let the ants fool you.
Beautiful components. The Evolved Edition simply looks great on the table. The artwork, the large hex tiles, the wooden ant meeples, the deluxe punchboard Nest Mats – all of it is a pleasure to handle and to look at. This is one of those games where setting it up is already part of the fun.
Great replayability. The modular meadow, the Evolution cards, the Colony Goals and the asymmetric species mean that no two games start the same or develop the same. There are many paths to victory here, and you can chase quite different strategies from game to game.
Fighting centipedes is a lot of fun. I did not expect this to be a highlight, but it is. Sending your soldiers against the creatures roaming the Meadow gives the game a completely different flavor than just fighting rival colonies – and it is a genuinely enjoyable, thematic part of every session.
It scales great with the number of players. This is not something you can say about many 4X games. Whether you play at lower or higher player count, the game holds together and delivers a similar quality of experience. That makes it much easier to bring to the table than most titles in this genre.
Now the downside – without the expansions it can get a bit repetitive. The base game is good, but after a few plays you start to see the same patterns coming back. Predator and Prey and Tiny Titans are what keep it fresh over the longer run. If you enjoy the base game, treat the expansions less as an optional extra and more as the natural next step.

So, do I recommend March of the Ants: Evolved Edition? Yes. It is a beautiful, clever, genuinely strategic 4X that respects your table space and your evening, and it works across the whole player range. Just plan to add the expansions sooner rather than later – that is where this game really opens up. Recommended!

See you in another review!

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