A cozy, casual ant farm

A red plastic tank, a few centimetres of sand, and one queen with her first few workers, just breaking out to the surface. You give them sugar, protein and a little water. They do everything else. There is nothing to win and nothing to lose, and no clock but the ants' own. It is the ant farm you had as a kid, except for one important difference - this colony has a queen, allowing you to see the full lifecycle of this wonderful creature.

Watch a nest grow

The colony starts sealed in a single chamber. The first workers cut their way up to the light, carry the sand out grain by grain, and heap it beside the door. Then they dig: a staging room under the entrance, nurseries for the eggs, the larvae and the cocoons, a larder for the food you bring, a royal chamber for the queen, and a midden for what is left over. Every room is dug to a plan the colony made when it was founded, and every tank's plan is its own. When those rooms are full, the ants keep digging. Keep playing long enough and the whole tank is honeycombed.

Real ants, doing real things

These are black garden ants, Lasius niger, the ant of every pavement and garden wall. The colony follows the real life cycle: a founding queen feeding her first brood from her own body, the small pale first generation, eggs and larvae carried to the damp end of the nursery, cocoons stacked where it is dry. Workers walk on whatever they are standing on, slip, fall, turn at the speed an ant can turn, and stop to touch antennae when they meet. The care booklet in the corner of the tank tells you what you are looking at, and where the game bends the biology, it says so.

Three tools

Sugar keeps the workers running. Protein grows the colony. Water goes where you put it, and the ants nest where the water is. That is the whole toolbar. You shape the world; the colony decides what to make of it.

It lives on your desk

The tank keeps going while you work, and it keeps going while you are away. Come back after a weekend and the colony has been busy. Leave it for a fortnight and the nest goes quiet, not dead.

What is in the tank today

• One species, the black garden ant, with its full caste table: queen, the first small workers, workers and callows.
  
• A nest laid out at founding and built in order, then a nest that keeps growing until the sand is honeycombed.
  
• Sand that is conserved: every grain the ants cut comes out of the door and goes on the heap.
  
• Water that falls, beads on the surface, soaks in and drains, and a colony that moves its brood to follow it.
  
• The care booklet: a species sheet, the colony's story so far, and an encyclopedia of the species to come.