Picnic Patrol
Hold the line between the anthill and the sandwiches.
What it is
Ants march along a scent trail towards your picnic. You put paper plates beside the trail and load them with things ants hate — chalk, a sugar cube to pull them off course, and worse — then hold the line while the waves come. A map takes about three minutes, and they run from a comfortable start to a park that is a wall.
The wave preview always shows exactly what is coming, and the anthill's countdown can be tapped to call the next wave early for a coin bonus. Different kinds of ant arrive as the ladder goes on, and never more than about eighty are on screen at once, so an old tablet keeps up.
How to play
- Open a plateTap it
- Arm a deterrentTap it, then tap again to build
- Call the next waveTap the anthill's countdown
Speed, pause and sound sit in the corner. On a desktop the mouse does all of it, and every control is a real button, so tabbing reaches them. There is no keyboard play beyond that.
What it keeps
Your sound setting, your stars on each map, and which deterrents you have met. There are no high scores and no leaderboard, and nothing is carried between devices. A shared screen can run it in kiosk mode, which writes nothing at all, plays an attract loop when nobody is there, and never resets in the middle of a wave.
What isn't settled yet
The middle of the ladder is gentler than the end: the early maps are comfortable and the park is the wall, so it is not a smooth ramp. The support tools compete with the guns for plates, which is why chalk and the sugar cube appear on some maps and not others.
Build Log
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Build 7
Ants stopped being worth so much. A player was never short of coins by the middle of a map, which left every other difficulty setting with nothing to push against. What each ant pays was halved, and the first three maps now pay a multiple of that, because they are still teaching.
Credits and licences
No third-party engine — it draws to a plain canvas. The typefaces it does use are embedded under the SIL Open Font Licence, with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Cover art was rendered from the game’s own drawing code.
Picnic Patrol is original work by Launchway Games.