Bites

Bites is commodity speculation disguised as an ants-at-a-picnic game.

If that sounds like faint praise, it’s not meant that way. But it’s probably worth being aware that there’s a small disconnect between the colourful presentation and the thinky, inscrutable game beneath the hood. Before play starts all the food tokens are laid out randomly to form a path: the wooden ants are placed at the start of the path, and the anthill at the end of it.

Play is ostensibly simple. On your turn you move an ant – any ant; players don’t have a specific colour – to it’s next matching-coloured food token. The yellow ant moves to cheese, the red ant moves to apple and so on. Once you’ve moved the ant, you can pick up the food token either just ahead or just behind it (if any spaces are occupied by other ants, you ignore them and take the first vacant token you come to). If there are no matching tokens, move the ant onto the anthill instead, where its position will define how much its matching food tokens are worth. If the red ant is placed on the highest level of the anthill, every apple token is worth 4 points. Ants arriving later will have their matching tokens worth increasingly less (the last to arrive scores zero!).

The twist is that, in our example above, you want to pick up as many apple tokens as possible, but you also need to get the red ant to the anthill before the other ants. But moving the red ant effectively blocks the apple pieces, because it lands on them! So the game is really about navigating that slightly weird space of the two complimentary things actually getting in each other’s way.

There are two food pieces that don’t have a matching ant: chocolate can be cashed in on a subsequent turn to pick up two food tokens instead of one, and wine will score you a point for every different type of food token you have in your possession at the end of the game – when the last ant arrives at the anthill. Players total up their points, and most points wins.

The game comes with a deck of cards that redefine the parameters of play – we’ve described the basic version here but you can mix these in to change how things score from game to game.