Ant Trail: a close look, tips and whether it is worth your time
If you like tuning systems rather than steering them, this game is for you. Below is the gist, the controls and the habits worth having before the first level.
What this game is
Ant Trail is a game about indirect control. You do not command the ants: you draw a pheromone trail, and they follow it on their own, find food and carry it back to the nest. Every new cell of trail costs ink, and the supply on a level is finite, so the trick is not to draw more but to draw where it actually matters.
An ant only sees the nearest couple of dozen pixels: it sniffs the pheromone in three directions and turns toward the stronger scent. With no trail nearby it wanders. That is where the craft lives: a single line from the nest works beautifully, while a fork confuses the column because the ants start splitting between branches. Water stops them completely, so a pool has to be walked around — and the trail has to go around it too.
How to play, briefly
1. Ant Trail is a puzzle of indirect control: you draw the trail instead of commanding the ants.
2. Drag with a finger or the mouse from the nest toward the food: ink is spent on new cells only.
3. The erase button refunds the ink of the cells you rub out, so experimenting costs nothing.
4. A level lasts forty-five seconds, holds one to three pieces of food, and the ants leave the nest in batches.
A few parting tips
- Draw to the farthest piece of food first and the nearest one last: a fork right at the nest splits the ants between two branches and slows the whole column.
- Give pools a wide berth: an ant slides along the water edge and loses time whenever the trail runs right into it.
- Do not hoard the erase button: leftover ink earns a bonus, so a short tidy trail ends up beating a long one.
The perfect way to kill ten minutes — and then miss an entire hour. Ready to try? Ant Trail: draw the path for the colony