Ant Mania Trophy Challenge: Tips and Hints

If you read Webkinz Newz, then you probably know that there’s an Ant Mania Trophy Challenge coming up this month. The Ant Mania Trophy Challenge lasts from July 28th to July 30th.

I’m not very good at Ant Mania, so I started looking for some tips and hints at how to get a better score. I came across some pretty helpful information, so I thought I would share it with all of you. 🙂 Maybe it will help you get the trophy a little faster!

Let’s talk about the game itself – you’re a large black ant trying to pick up pieces of food on a picnic blanket…while avoiding smaller red ants. The more pieces of food you pick up, the more red ants that appear.

Eventually, after you’ve picked up a certain number of foods, a spider appears. (The number of food pieces that triggers the spider’s appearance varies according to whether you’re playing on easy, medium or hard.

If the spider or one of the red ants touches you, the game is over. You don’t get multiple lives or multiple chances – one touch, and the game is done.

There are three boosters or “Power Ups” that will also appear on the blanket:

To collect a “Power Up,” just run over it the same way you do when picking up a piece of food. Don’t wait too long or the Power Up will disappear. Like collecting a piece of food, collecting a Power Up also adds to your score.

Each Power Up gives you a different type of advantage and lasts only a few seconds. A power bar at the top of the screen shows you how much time you have left with your Power Up. It starts out green when it’s full, then goes to yellow, then orange and finally red just as it’s about to end.

Here’s the snail in action – you can see that it slows down the red ants (it slows down spiders as well):

Now here’s the tennis shoe – it makes the black ant (you) much faster:

Last is the lady bug armor – this protects you from the “enemies,” like a shield. If  you’re wearing the lady bug armor, you can touch a spider or red ant without losing the game:

Now that we’ve covered the basics, here are the tips and hints that I found:

1. The red ants are faster than the black ant, so don’t try to outrun them. Only when you have the tennis shoe/speed “Power Up” are you faster than the red ants.
2. The spider moves faster if you stay still. Once the spider appears, you want to keep moving at all times because the spider’s speed increases when you’re standing still…meaning it can reach you much faster.
3. You can move diagonally. You’re not limited to up/down, left/right. You can move in a diagonal line as well by using two arrow keys at once.
4. When wearing the lady bug armor, don’t waste time trying to hit the ants. There’s no real benefit to purposefully running over the ants while you’ve got the lady buy shield. They’re only stunned for a split second. It’s better to use the time getting as much food as possible.
5. The lady bug armor will start to flash/blink when it’s about to run out. This is helpful because you don’t have to look at the bar up top in order to know when armor will disappear.
6. You get a lot more points per food when you play on hard mode. Playing on easy and medium modes can help you get more comfortable with the game so you can play on hard mode and (hopefully) get a higher score more quickly.
7. You don’t have to run directly over the food. All you need to do is graze the side of the food in order to collect it.

Those are all the tips I have for playing Ant Mania. Do you have any hints for getting a higher score? Are you looking forward to the Ant Mania Trophy Challenge? Let me know in the comments!