Ant Empire

Ant Empire is an idle colony drawn as a cross-section of the ground. Above the line there is a picnic blanket with crumbs on it, a fallen apple and a meadow that turns from spring flowers to summer seed heads to autumn leaves to snow. Below it the soil is layered in warm browns, threaded with roots, pebbles and little pale mushrooms, and your nest spreads down through it as you grow. Tap anywhere on the surface and foragers pour out of the mound to fetch what you found.

Food buys ants and ants need somewhere to live. Ten jobs hire in turn, from the first forager through diggers, nurses, soldiers, scouts, leafcutters, builders, honeypots and winged drones up to the royal guard, and every tenth, twenty-fifth, fiftieth and hundredth ant of a job doubles what that job brings in. Chambers are what make room for them: pick one and a digging crew hollows it out in front of you, throwing soil as they go, and the new hall fills with eggs, seed piles, fungus combs or a queen the size of five workers. Royal upgrades stack on top, from stronger mandibles to scent trails to a warm nursery.

The meadow does not sit still. Seasons turn every few minutes and change how much the foragers find, so a full store matters before winter. A beetle turns up at the gate now and then and your soldiers meet it, though tapping the beetle yourself gets it gone faster. Rain floods a tunnel and then leaves the soil easy to dig; somebody drops half a sandwich and the whole colony rushes out. The nest keeps working while the tab is closed, up to eight hours' worth, and a card tells you what came in. When the colony has grown past what one queen can manage, a winged princess flies off to found a new one and takes royal jelly with her, which makes every colony after that quicker than the last.