How to be an ant
One button. Every metre is a lift. The rest is the colony.
Five jobs, one button
Pick what kind of ant you are and you get a different game. None of them is a race. Workers dig the nest: tap to climb, let go to sink, and every metre of tunnel opens the next room. Foragers carry food home past rocks, puddles and the foot. Soldiers hold the entrance: tap while a beetle, spider, wasp or rival ant is in the amber zone to bite it back, and if three get through the nest is overrun. Raiders run into another colony's nest past its guards and come back with a third of their metres taken off that colony's pile. Nurses carry eggs through the nest, and every fifteen metres hatches one more ant.
Switch any time from the first screen or the card you see when you die. Whatever you were when you tapped is what the run counts as.
The pile
Every colony is always carrying one thing home. It has a weight in metres. When the colony's runs add up to it, it reaches the queen, becomes food, and the next bigger thing appears. The queen picks the next one from three. Food hatches brood and the colony grows on the map.
| Thing | Metres |
|---|---|
| 🍞 A CRUMB | 6 |
| 🧊 A SUGAR CUBE | 12 |
| 🥯 A CHEERIO | 16 |
| 🐻 A GUMMY BEAR | 22 |
| 🍪 A COOKIE | 30 |
| 🥔 A PRINGLE | 40 |
| 🍇 A GRAPE | 60 |
| 🍟 A FRENCH FRY | 80 |
| 🪲 A DEAD BEETLE (PROTEIN) | 110 |
| 🍦 ICE CREAM | 160 |
| 🥪 HALF A SANDWICH | 300 |
| 🍕 A SLICE OF PIZZA | 500 |
| 🔑 CAR KEYS (NOT FOOD. STILL LIFTING) | 800 |
| 🍉 AN ENTIRE WATERMELON | 2000 |
The castes
The queen is the founder. She does not leave the nest; she picks what the colony carries next, and decrees.
The nest
The nest is what the workers dig. Rooms open by metres of tunnel, running counts a fifth, and every room is a perk in every game for everyone in the colony. Soldiers make the colony strong: their score is defense, and a raid on the colony loses a fifth of its defense for every metre it blocks.
 THE NURSERY | 200 M | SECOND HOP: ONE MORE HOP IN THE AIR |
 THE GRANARY | 800 M | SLOWER RAMP: THE RUN SPEEDS UP A THIRD SLOWER |
 THE BARRACKS | 2000 M | EARLY WARNING: THE FOOT SHOWS ITS SHADOW SOONER |
 THE DEEP TUNNELS | 5000 M | A TUNNEL: THE FIRST DEATH DROPS YOU INTO A TUNNEL AND YOU KEEP GOING |
 THE THRONE ROOM | 12000 M | THE QUEEN WATCHES: EVERY METRE PAST 500 COUNTS DOUBLE |
Outruns
Any signed-up ant can challenge another colony to an outrun: thirty minutes, most metres wins. While it is on you see their runners beside you in red. The loser gives up a tenth of its ground on the planet and a fifth of its food. One outrun per colony every two hours.
The whole world
About once a day something enormous appears that no colony could lift alone. A tenth of every metre anyone runs, anywhere, goes onto it. If it moves before the day is out, every colony gets food in proportion and the one that carried the most gains ground. If it does not, the humans take it back.
The voice
Everything is in capitals. You are an ant. You do not have lowercase. Replies to a find are L I F T, NOM, SLURP, ASSEMBLE, WAIT FOR THE OTHERS, or whatever you want to say, and the queen decrees. There is no other rule about what to say, except that it must be what an ant would say.