When a Portland jeweler listened to a friend talk about ants

In 2012, Tim Eisner was a jeweler at the Portland Saturday Market in Oregon. He crafted pieces by hand, one by one, and was burning out. "Burnt out on handmaking each piece that I sold," he would later say in an interview. He was looking for a new entrepreneurial adventure, something that wasn't the same gesture repeated a hundred times a week.

Tim wasn't a novice when it came to games. He had designed his first card drafting game in 2003, wrote house rules for Risk for fun, and had played D&D and Magic the Gathering forever. A hobby cultivated for ten years, never taken seriously. His brother Ben did what brothers do when they see wasted talent. He convinced him. The word Tim uses to describe that moment is less than diplomatic. My brother inspired/tricked me into starting a board game design company. He inspired me and tricked me.

Tim opened Weird City Games with a very simple idea. Even if I don't make money, learning to design games will be fun. He spent the first two years seriously doing what he had been doing for fun for a decade. He studied, prototyped, redesigned.

Tim fixated on that phrase. In 2014, he launched a quirky Kickstarter about evolving ants and gathered 1,691 backers. It wasn't an explosion; it was a spark. But it was enough to build an entire catalog upon it. Canopy, The Grimm Forest, Leaf. Each game a piece of the forest, FSC-certified materials, plastic reduced to a minimum.

Ten years later, in 2024, Tim and Ryan return to their first ant. Tenth anniversary. Two years of work. This time, zero plastic in the box, zip bags become paper envelopes. The Kickstarter starts with a goal of ten thousand dollars. It raises $339,797 from 5,415 people. Three times the backers of the first time, ten years later.

On the game's cover, two ants of different species face each other. One is red, large, cutting a leaf. The other is light brown, slimmer, with outstretched antennae. These aren't team colors. They are biologically different species, and you decide that difference during the game.

In March of the Ants, each colony evolves through 33 distinct cards, divided into three body segments: head, thorax, abdomen. You stack them on your nest mat. A stack of heads makes you fiercer in battle, one for each card. A stack of thoraxes gives you extra reaction actions at the end of each round. A stack of abdomens allows you to feed more ants with the same food ration.

Tim tells it this way. You can end up with flying and symbiotic ants, capable of appearing in other players' territories and gaining points without fighting. Or you build predators with heavy mandibles and accumulated ferocity. Or patient colonies, capable of surviving on little food and accumulating numbers when others are already exhausted.

It's not a build choice. It's a character choice. What kind of living being do you want to be, in this meadow, for the next ninety minutes.

In 2007, two Stanford researchers published a study in Human Communication Research that would become famous. It was called The Proteus Effect, named after the Greek god who changed shape. Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson placed volunteers in virtual reality environments and assigned them different avatars. Some tall, some short. Some attractive, some less so.

The result was clear. Those wearing a tall avatar negotiated more aggressively. Those wearing an attractive avatar approached closer, talked about themselves more freely. Behavior conformed to the creature worn, not to real character. And the effect persisted even afterwards, when the headset had already been removed.

Psychology

Proteus Effect In March of the Ants, the exact same thing happens, in real time. You build a colony with predatory heads and heavy mandibles, and you find yourself attacking even when a peaceful move would give you more points. You build a flying and symbiotic species, and you find yourself seeking alliances when aggression would be the winning path. You are not playing the ant. The ant is playing you. Yee & Bailenson · Stanford · 2007

That's why the tenth anniversary of a game about evolution, redesigned without plastic, made by a jeweler who was tired of repeating the same gesture, makes sense now. Tim and Ryan's ants are not a metaphor for playing to win. They are a metaphor for becoming something different every time you sit down at the table.

March of the Ants Tim Eisner Ryan Swisher Weird City Games Evolution 4X Mechanism Frogames