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AFRAID OF CREEPYCRAWLIES?
ANTICS
Don’t panic – these ants are wooden ones!
Antics is the seventh game from the Lamont Brother’s workshop for creating games. In each of those seven games animals take up the center stage. We have had – in chronological order – frogs, sheep, rats, stags, huskies and ostriches – and now we arrived at ants.
Kindly set aside your Myrmecophobia (= Fear of Ants), that you might be afflicted with, and open the nice green box with the cute ant-eater on the cover. Besides the pretty game board, which definitely needs getting used to, the wooden ants and the action markers looking like the men from a game of Ludo, also made from wood, you find some really thick card board parts that represent all you might yet need in the game.
Background:
Each player represents a colony of ants that wants to go on expanding the ant hill to have more and more choices available from actions of higher value, depending on and in relation to the level of the hill. The most successful ant colony, that is the player who has brought most of the prey into the ant hill or has placed the best leaves onto the best tasting fungus, that is the fungus on the highest level, wins the game and is named new Queen of Ants, regardless if male or female! There is no King of Ants!
Set up and start:
You look for the spots on the board, where green and brown leaves and prey in the guise of different insects are pictured and place the corresponding tiles on those spots. At one end of the board you will note the numbers 1 to 6. There you place, take care, on the table, the ant hill tiles, vertically, three in a row. For this you fish the parts one by one out of the black bag and place them according to the rules. The parts showing yummy fungus, are placed first on position 5, if you draw more than 3 of them, then also on the 4, and so on. All others are placed on position 1, then on position 2 and so on. On position 6 three hungry ant-eaters are waiting, they have been placed first.
Then each player chooses a color and takes all ants and action markers for this color, plus a circular tile, called MagnificANT ( the English rules are teeming with puns on the word ANT = Ameise), the German rules call them hero ants = Heldenameisen. Furthermore each player receives a basic tile for his ant hill and one of the starter ant hill tiles, which are somewhat lighter in color.
For a chance, the oldest player may start the game. For his first turn the starting player has one action, the second player has two actions and from then on each player has three actions that he can use.
Possible actions and progress of the game:
Five possible actions are available. The higher the level of the ant hill the higher also the action level and the more often you can implement the action. Should you be missing one action symbol, because you built over it, or should you be in need of one more action, then there is the ultimate MagnificANT, which you can use to implement and level 1 action.
1) Taking ant hill parts: For each level you can take one of the three tiles from the corresponding row and place it into your stock.
2) Build: In this action, too, the level determines the number of tiles you can place. You can use tiles in the turn when you built them and the hill cannot grow higher than five levels.
3) Hatching: For each level point you place one ant into the nests, if you place two or more you must place the first two into the same nest.
4) Ants: Again the level determines the number of ants you may transfer from the nests onto the paths. Ants may only be placed on those paths that have the same color background as the nests in which they did hatch. Soldier Ants are a special variety of ants, they hatch in the red nest and safeguard a trail, protect your own ants and your prey, build bridges over chasms and can steal other players’ prey.
5) Heave: Again depending on the level of your hill you may pick up one insect prey or a leaf and may carry it part of the way up the ant hill. You may only collect each kind of prey only once and must place it immediately on a part of the hill. One heave carries the loot to the next ant. Leaves are set aside for the time being. When the last prey of a kind is taken, you mark this with a „prey exhausted“ marker.
When your actions have all been implemented, you remove the action markers and return any surplus ant hill parts (you may retain three) to the bag. Then the ant hill parts in stock are moved towards position 1 and replenished at the back. Thus the ant-eaters in good time reach the first row and then eat up either prey or ants from the nest.
In each turn you are presented with the dilemma if you should concentrate again and furthermore into the construction of your ant hill to have more actions to implement in turns to come or should you surprise other players with grabbing the nearest tidbits and carrying them back into the ant hill. But if you cannot manage to carry prey or leaf home to your hill, opposing soldier ants might be able to steal it and carry it to their hill! You continually face the challenge of “what do I do, what do I do?”
End of game and Scoring:
When one of two conditions for ending the game is met – ant hill tiles cannot be replenished any more as required and/or there is only one or no “exhausted” tile for prey – each player, including the one you induced the end of the game – has one more turn.
Then the prey tiles are scored, you square the number you collected, you your maximum score for prey can be 36. If you can place leaves onto fungus symbols now, you score points corresponding to the level of the fungus, and green leaves score two extra point.
Resumé:
Antics is a wonderful game, if you love optimizing. It plays equally well with three players as it does with four players, despite the flow of the game being somewhat different in a game of four, as the number of ant hill tiles in the game remains the same. Confirmed ponderers will love Antics! But that is also its danger, because some might not like the game just because it invites pondering and the playing time can get out of hand. But you can plan your moves well while the other players implement their action. In case of being the victim of a little nastiness, because your opponent has realized which tile you might need and has stolen it from under your antennae, or someone has stolen a piece of prey or a leaf from your back or lured an ant-eater to the nest, where your own babies are hatching and waiting to swarm out, you can counter this rather quickly by reorganizing your move.
I like this ant-hill building mechanism by which I can do the chosen action the more often the higher up I built this action in my hill. At this point you realize why the parts where made of such thick card board: So that you can easily recognize which level the action belongs to.
The overall atmosphere of Antics I do like just as well. The ants swarming out of the central hill!, if you can forget that the opposing ants do the same. But the painstakingly cut out wooden ants when the start for home with prey or a leaf, or the ant-eater which get nearer and nearer, lured by the ants looking for parts for their hill, that is simply nice and makes me feel part of nature.
And that leads me to one small point of criticism, which is the art of the game board. In my opinion this is a bit of a failure because you cannot easily spot the locations where you must place prey or leaves. It is also hard to assign colors of the ant-eaters to their prey or the nests of the ant babies. In modern games one usually has a symbol corresponding to a color. And finally, there is a slight color problem with the white and brown ants which are very hard to distinguish. But for this the designers offer a solution, send them a mail to the address on their website, they will send you a replacement set of ants and markers.
Despite these few points of criticism I think Antics is a well-made, felicitous, challenging game which is worth your while to take off the shelves. I am already looking forward to the animals of 2011.
Spieler : 3 - 4
Alter : 10+
Dauer : 60+
Autor : Fraser und Gordon Lamont
Grafik : Judith Lamont
Titel engl : ident
Preis : ca 35 Euro
Verlag : Fragor Games
Genre : Optimizing and placement game
Zielgruppe : With friends
Sprache : uk de
Regeln : uk de
Text im Spiel : no
Kommentar:
Good rules
Easy to grasp game sequences
Well-working mechanisms
No element of chance
Good ratio of Price/Quality
Vergleichbar:
Taluva
Meine Bewertung: 5
Christian Huber
A quickly grasped optimizing game with an animal topic and a lovely feel to it!
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