Mutant Pizza

I’ve been working on a one-page weird drawing game for about four weeks. I playtested my first prototype of it recently. Come along with me on a journey of ants.

Yes, My Queen! is a one-page one-player one-hive one-mind sort of game. It’s common to think of these sort of one-page games as RPGs but it’s not really an RPG, so I’m trying to stay away from that taxonomy. You play as a newly cristened queen ant, post nuptial flight, settling down in your own, brand new hive. Your former queen takes your departure personally, vowing—as much as an ant can make a vow—to send an army to your doorstep within six days. You must prepare for war.

Hivemind

The key element to this game is how you expand your hive. You’ll start with some basic chambers, but it’s up to you to make new ones. You’ve got to build food and waste chambers, but other than that you can draw a chamber, connect it with tunnels, and give it any antly purpose you like. There’s just one catch, you’ve got to draw the initial chambers with your eyes closed.

You start with a few chambers and some ends of tunnels, as you can see in the photo above. To make them useable, you’ve got to connect them with chambers and tunnels to one another by drawing these things with your eyes closed.

During your day, you’ll assign ants to actions, taking Exhaustion. When you assign a chamber to something related to its purpose, you’ll take 1 Exhaustion; otherwise, take 2 Exhaustion. You can only assign a chamber to one task per day, but multiple chambers can be assigned to the same task (like battling a big creature). This means you’ll want to make chambers for “Diggers” to take less Exhaustion when expanding your hive, or “Scouts” or “Soldiers” to take less Exhaustion when scouting the surface world or battling.

Logistics

Your hive needs to battle something on the same day that you dig a food chamber, and the hive needs a certain number of food and waste chambers per other chambers. As long as you have those things secured, you can build any other chambers you want, giving them any purpose you can think of. There are also requirements for making any chamber useable. All of this is currently to prepare for the queen’s onslaught in six days.

As long as your upkeep is kept up, you’ll be able to expand your hive rapidly and thrive.

How does it actually work?

Here are screenshots from my debut playtest.

In my playthrough, I scouted a few times and encountered some antlions (called Pit Monsters) and some corpses for food. I missed the water sources, which let me take an action for free. It was difficult to get my hive up and running on the first day because of the disconnected starting chambers. I had to draw and fix (you can fix with your eyes open by spending Exhaustion) a bunch of tunnels and chambers to make them useable. But once I got up and running, it was great.

Scouting is similar to digging, where you have to put your pencil down on a spot, close your eyes, and draw a line for as long as you like. The last symbol your line crossed through before you stopped is the encounter you face.

I also dug quite a few chambers to prepare for my rival queen’s assault, where a bunch of ants enter my hive and work their way through the chambers, battling all of my ants inside. If too many swarms get to me (the queen), then I lose. Otherwise I survive and win, my hive has a future. I describe what happened in the Aftermath section and end the game with hope for my ant colony.

Overall, the playtest went better than expected for this being my first prototype. I’m pleasantly surprised. There’s still work that needs to be done, but I’ve hit the ground running with this.

What does the next prototype need?

I have a lot of notes on what I think this game needs, I’ll summarize them in a tried-and-true bulleted list:

• Starting chambers should be connected so you don’t have to waste time drawing tunnels, maybe with gaps and open tunnel branches to give you launching points to draw.
• Battling is awkward, I need to rethink it but I’m not sure how right now…
• I didn’t get to use Mutations, which are event-based unlocks that make the hive stronger, need to keep an eye on that and maybe make the events easier.
• Need more spread out and underground encounters.
• You should be able to move ants around, especially during the Queen’s Assault, but I need to articulate how that works, as assignments are done by chamber for ease of use; meaning you don’t have to draw and assign something to a collective of ants, just a chamber.
• Lots of little things that I need to specify and rearrange in terms of the explanation text and layout on the front page.

Ruminations

I have thoughts on tweaking this game, too. I made up the “Queen’s Assault” to give the game a definitive end point. This worked well for this playtest, as it gave me a solitary focus to build towards. But I’m wondering if I can take this game to the next level, and possibly make it an endless game where you play for as long as you like. There wouldn’t be a “Queen’s Assault” but instead another encounter table with big events that you face day-by-day as you build up your hive. I’d want to test this out, as taking away the “main quest” of the Queen’s Assault could take the wind out of the game. I’ll probably build this endless game idea into my next prototype to see how it works.

Okay, that’s all I have on Yes, My Queen! for now.

Until next time…