Bites Review

Picture this – it’s a nice sunny day, playing at a park or going on a hike, and you find a shady spot to sit down and eat a picnic lunch. As you enjoy your meal, so do a handful of other creatures…..ants! A couple of crumbs here or there make for quite the feast for those little critters. I bet you’ll never think of picnics the same way again after you play Bites.

Bites is a game of set collection and commodity speculation in which players are trying to score the most points by using ants to collect various food tokens. Here’s how it works. First, randomly draw one card from each of the 4 decks – these cards will determine the rules for the game, scoring conditions, etc. Place the Anthill on one side of the play area, and place 1 of each of the 5 food tokens by the Anthill. Take the remaining food tokens and create a single-file path that ends at the Anthill. All Ant meeples begin at the start of the trail, opposite the Anthill. Pick a starting player, and you are ready to go!

On your turn, you will perform 2 actions: move an ant, and collect a food token. You may move any ant that you want. Select an ant and move it forward on the trail until it reaches the first food token of its matching color. Place the ant on that food token, and then select either the token ahead of or behind that ant to collect to your personal supply. That’s it! Chocolate tokens that are collected can be spent to utilize the special power of the Chocolate card selected at game start. Any Wine tokens collected affect end-game scoring based on the Wine card in play. If there are no more matching tokens ahead of the ant you choose to move, that ant then moves onto the Anthill, placed on a tier as dictated by the Anthill card in play. Players continue taking turns until all ants are on the Anthill. Tally up points from tokens collected and cards in play. The player with the highest score wins!

For me, one of the best things about Bites is that it is quick and easy. It is fast to teach, fast to play, and the gameplay is nice and relatively simple. There is a hint of strategy involved that raises the gameplay to the next step. The value of the food tokens all depends on where their corresponding ants end up on the Anthill. The higher the tier, the more points it scores. So at the beginning of the game, it really is all up in the air. You can’t just focus on collecting one single food token, because if the timing isn’t right, it could end up on the lowest tier and score no points! You have to make sure you’re collecting all sorts of tokens, while also looking ahead on the trail and trying to anticipate which ant might be worth the most points. Another great strategic element is that any player can move any ant. So maybe you have a plan in mind, but an opponent moves the ant you wanted and throws off your strategy. You always have to be thinking ahead, and thinking of multiple strategies for each individual ant. It’s a great element of player interaction, though it is not directly confrontational.

On the other hand, one drawback I’ve found is that it does not seem to work too well at higher player counts. With more players, the movement of the ants and collection of tokens is more chaotic and drastic, which makes it more difficult to strategize a game plan. It feels like a more luck-based game since there are so many more people affecting the ants/trail. Lower player counts lends itself to more strategy and thought-out play than just scrambling for any tokens. Other than that, it’s a great little game. The different card decks offer lots of variability so no 2 games will be alike. And the creation of the food trail is all random as well, so even if you do draw some of the same cards, the food tokens placement is different and thus will play differently.

Moving on to components, I have to say that they’re great! The ant meeples are nice and chunky, while being cute and recognizable. The Anthill is sturdy, and the cards are large and clear. The food tokens are my absolute favorite! They are all dual-layered cardboard and look like they have had a bite taken out of them. They are nice and thick, and the dual-layer makes them unique and fun to handle. So solid work on the components of this one!

So how do I feel about Bites overall? It’s a quirky, fun little game that is entertaining and engaging. I think it’s a perfect introductory game or a great filler between some heavier games. It plays quickly and easily, and there is just enough strategy to keep players on their toes. Is it one that I will pull out at every game night? Not necessarily. But it is definitely high on my list of games to pull out whenever there are newer gamers at the table! Purple Phoenix Games gives Bites a hungry 8 / 12.