Nests and Insects – A roguelike tabletop roleplaying game
Hey, everyone! I'm making a game: its title is Nests & Insects and I call it a "Roguelike Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TTRPG)". It is free, as in beer and speech. You can find the rulebook on the game's github repository, linked through the post title. Nests & Insects is a game for 1 to 7 players, one of which takes on the role of the Game Queen (GQ) and describes the game world to the other players. The players control characters who explore and interact with the game world. The players say what their characters do and roll dice to see what happens, then the GQ describes the results. Players'…
In plain words
Nests and Insects is a free tabletop roleplaying game for one to seven players where characters are mercenary arthropods raiding insect colonies. One player serves as the Game Queen, describing the world while others control bug characters from six classes and roll dice to resolve actions. Players explore nests belonging to ants, bees, or termites while completing jobs assigned by a rival Queen. The rulebook is available on GitHub.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey, everyone! I'm making a game: its title is Nests & Insects and I call it a "Roguelike Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TTRPG)". It is free, as in beer and speech. You can find the rulebook on the game's github repository, linked through the post title. Nests & Insects is a game for 1 to 7 players, one of which takes on the role of the Game Queen (GQ) and describes the game world to the other players. The players control characters who explore and interact with the game world. The players say what their characters do and roll dice to see what happens, then the GQ describes the results. Players' characters are mercenary arthropods raiding a Nest on a Job from a rival Queen. Characters belong to one of six classes: Ants (plural), Beetle, Ladybug, Scorpion, Spider and Wasp, all modelled after real-world species. Nests are the nests of eusocial insects: Ants, Bees or Termites. The Job is to assasinate the Queen, or the King, or steal larvae, or aphids, or fungi, etc. Nests & Insects is "Roguelike" because it borrows elements from Roguelike Computer RPGs (CRPGs): hack-and-slash, dungeon-crawling gameplay, with procedurally generated Nest environments, lethal combat, and a hunger mechanic. The rulebook on the github repo above is all text-based, but formatted with ASCII borders, text boxes and tables, etc. I wrote a bit of code to automate the layouting (if that's a word). You can find the code in the codez/ directory in the repo. You don't need to mess with the code to play the game, but some of you might want to eyeball the raw text with LaTex-like markup under the directory /game/rulebook/raw and then look at the layouting code. Or you might want to tweak the characters' stats under codez/data/, or make your own characters. The code is all in Prolog :) Nests & Insects is still a work in progress. The rulebook is about 60% complete. There's rules for rolling dice (oo lots of dice!), action resolution, combat and stats for all six character classes and a few enemies (just Termites). If you've run a few TTRPGs you can probably bash together a quick game session, although there's plenty of stuff missing (Items, procedural generation, other minigames besides combat etc). I'm posting here because I'm eager for some feedback and because I'm hoping to build a small community around the game. I'm in the liminal space between finishing my thesis and actually getting a PhD so I have some spare time, but I plan to keep working on the game until it's finished, anyway. Also: I'm looking for ANSI or ASCII art for the rulebook. Anyone know anybody who would want to contribute, please get us in touch. Have fun!
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