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I have no idea where my old Battle Beasts figures are now – probably at the bottom of some trash heap, or possibly in some collector's possession. Who knows? What I do know is that for the longest time, I wanted to do a game with anthropomorphic warriors locked in combat. I was finally able to do that with Small Box Games' latest game: Tooth & Nail: Factions.
Not my collection, and not my game
I had been bouncing around an idea in my head for a few months: a single purchase, multi-deck, CCG-ish card game. (CCG-ish mechanics-wise, that is, as being single purchase kind of knocks one "C" right out of the acronym.) A game that was ready to play right out of the box with no intentions of being expandable, but one that offered a good bit of flexibility within the components of the game; a game in which the player's score, or life, or whatever you wanted to call it, was his deck. Something that wouldn't be daunting to non-card floppers, would reward clever play choices, and wasn't entirely combo-driven. If you wanted a quick game, it was there; if you wanted to mix it up and combine decks, to make your own deck, you could do that, too.
Sometime in January 2012, the thoughts behind the game started to all come together, and I started mixing and mashing the different ideas and mechanisms, and decided that this would be a perfect chance to use the anthropomorphic idea, Thus, World War Zoo was born.
There would be magic, Egyptian-esque wolves, bent on preserving the use of magic in the world. An ever-growing war machine comprised of savannah animals whose main objective was to unite all of the factions under their banner, while wiping out the magic users. Undead birds who kidnapped members of other factions to use in their experiments. And Native American-inspired dinosaurs, who wanted nothing more than to be left alone. There were other Factions who called this world home, but we were sticking with these four. I've always got a pretty solid theme in mind that I try my best to capture within my card designs, but unlike anything I'd ever done before, I had this rich back story that I was piecing together that drove the design choices for the game's mechanisms and the flavors of the individual Factions.
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My crappy art guide sketches, and the (much better-looking) first four Troops
We wanted the art for this game to stand out. Whether you love the idea of animals with guns or think it's hokey, we wanted the art to be unique. I love John Ariosa's work, and his sci-fi concept stuff is great. I reached out, he responded. He was a perfect fit, and from the first sketch, we knew we had the right guy. When you're dealing with stegosaurus drummers, Boston Terriers with machine guns, and screeching undead birds whose main design influence is Evil from Time Bandits, things could easily go south real fast, but John nailed them all and hit the atmosphere we were looking for dead-on.
World War Zoo was the working title for this game for a while. I loved the name, but it just seemed too corny. We ran with it, though, until we came up with something that encompassed the game and didn't seem quite as hokey. The name Tooth & Nail came to me while thinking about old Tier 1 standard Magic decks. "Fighting tooth and nail" encompassed everything about the game. The name stuck.
Tooth & Nail: Factions was more work, from a design standpoint, than any other game I've ever designed. The theme and Factions had been easy to create and were easy to bring to life, but the rules by which they would play were a totally different story. From the first playtest, the game worked, but it always seemed like it could work better, that there was too much or too little.
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Battling beasts – but not Battle Beasts
A bunch of ideas got added and were then taken away during the initial design process. There was initially a defense mechanism, but it was way too clunky to ever be used. I toyed around with leaders, draftable action cards, and shields; there were so many things that could have been added to the game – or that did get added to only to be removed – but it just ended up being way too heavy and finicky.
As a designer, I strive to make a card game's core mechanisms as simple as possible, allowing the cards themselves – and the choices driving how they're used within those simple mechanisms – to add the depth and weight. I finally found the sweet spot of weight and ease with Tooth & Nail: Factions, and from that point on, the design just hit this stride where it worked fluidly, and everything came together.
As mechanisms changed, individual Troop abilities had to change to fit within the new rules. Once the mechanisms were finalized, adjusting the Troop abilities to fit within the parameters of the game was pretty easy; the basic idea behind each Troop's flavor and ability just needed to be fine-tuned. That left us with forty unique Troops in the game, all with abilities that fit within an inner-theme and style of their respective Faction. Six full Factions and one mini Faction ended up being included in the final design.
The end result is that Tooth & Nail: Factions is a game with relatively simple mechanisms, with cards that can be played a variety of ways, in which thematically and mechanically different Factions, along with many board-state options, add a surprising level of depth. And Boston Terriers. With machine guns.
John Clowdus
These Troops enter play drained
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