Traditionally, customizable card games share many similar traits. They are expandable – if you want more cards, you just go buy them, and you can spend a ludicrous amount of money expanding the game. They are customizable – you can mix and match the cards to build decks that do whatever you had in mind. And usually, they are collectible – you pay a few bucks for a packet of cards without having any idea what might be inside.
However, the trend of the collectible card game is beginning to see something of a rebellion. The gaming industry as a whole continues to crank out new collectible card games, but increasingly, publishers are creating what they call expandable card games. These games are not 'collectible,' in that every player who purchases a particular set of cards gets the same thing, but they can still be customized. A huge number of publishers at GenCon were selling their games as, 'expandable, but not collectible.'
Nature of the Beast, by Eye Level Entertainment, fits the standard of expandable, but not collectible. Buy the two starters that are available now, and you'll have all the cards that are made for the game so far. Each starter includes enough cards for two players, each with a complete deck. These are not the 'complete decks' you might find in a starter for a CCG, made out of half the normal number of cards and only playable against each other. These are consistent, coherent decks with internal synergies and balanced construction, so that anyone can sit down and be competitive with a deck fresh out of the box.
However, the game also includes specific rules for building your own deck, so Nature of the Beast is also customizable. And where many games that claim to be expandable have only a few interesting themes, Nature of the Beast provides for a vast range of play styles. Further discussion of the expandability and customization properties of Nature of the Beast will have to wait until after a discussion of the game itself, but for now, it is enough to know that when this game says it is expandable and not collectible, it fits the bill perfectly.
Nature of the Beast is a game about a struggle between groups of animals. This is not a battle of man versus animal. This is city rats and sewer gators versus suburban raccoons and family dogs. Charming pigs and cunning goats take on noble stags and wild grizzlies. The winner claws his way to the top of the evolutionary food chain.
The essential goal of Nature of the Beast is to fill a three by three grid with recruited animals. Each animals has a number of statistics that help achieve this goal. Rank determines the importance of an animal, and the cost to recruit it. Clout is the ability of an animal to recruit others. Combat is fairly straight-forward, as is Cunning. Every animal has a special ability that can be used to promote the cause of its army, and several can take advantage of things like their size or special movement capabilities (leaping frogs or flying eagles, for instance).
Of course, there is more to recruiting nine animals than simply paying for them, or this would be a very disappointing game. As you bring in your own creatures, other players can attack your troops and send them yelping to the discard pile. Human beings can be recruited to help out, providing more resources, protecting from attacks, negating enemy benefits, and otherwise being useful. Locations like sewer grates and quiet groves can grant benefits to those animals who stay there, and items like smoke grenades and bullhorns can be purchased to augment your growing army.
Simply attacking your opponent's army to dust is not really an option, however. Each player tracks favor (sway with humans, used to pay for items and some special abilities) and fury (the amount by which the animals appear to be a threat to mankind). Favor can be depleted all too easily, by spending too much money on goodies with no concern for frugality. Fury, on the other hand, goes up every time you attack, and when you get to ten, the humans arise to put you down for good (oh, and you lose the game).
Possibly the most interesting aspect of the game, and one that could almost go unnoticed, is the concept of vectors. Each animal card has small circles placed around the edges and corners, for a total of eight. Each animal has arrows in some of those circles, but not all, and those arrows indicate the animal's vectors. Animals can provide combat support, move, contribute to claiming land, and more – as long as the affected space in the field is along one of their vectors. The game becomes fascinating when you are carefully planning each movement of an animal to take advantage of its vectors.
The rules for Nature of the Beast are quite a bit more complex than most card games. Each player, on his turn, gets three actions. Actions include recruiting animals, moving them, declaring battle, and more. However, some actions do not count against this total, like claiming locations or hiring humans. There are lots of options every turn, and players need to be able to remember which ones are free, and which end your turn. The game can be learned without too much trouble, but it will take several plays before a player really understands how everything works.
Each deck is divided into two kinds of cards – troops and tricks. Troops are the animals, who must be summoned to win the game. Tricks, on the other hand, are everything else. Locations, humans, events, items – all these are tricks. Players must balance having a healthy number of good tricks versus the need to populate the field and block opponents.
Creating new decks for Nature of the Beast can be challenging, because there are so many options available. For instance, the Farm deck includes a good number of nasty tricks, and the player must have high Fury to use them. The City animals have access to a good array of helpful items, and the Suburbs deck focuses heavily on cheap recruits. The most imposing and straight-forward deck, the Forest deck, has many powerful combatants combined with a healthy dose of helpful locations. Players can mix and match deck concepts – do you try for a lot of items, to boost your animals, or do you focus on heavy-hitters? Do you look for advantages through human allies, or concentrate on recruiting as quickly as possible?
I have already stated that Nature of the Beast is not collectible. Purchase each of the two starters, and you've got all the cards made so far. But if you are serious about making your own decks, you might want to consider buying more starters, just to get the extra cards you might want. Particular awesome animals, called legends, only appear once, so if you want to stack your deck in favor of finding them, you'll need multiple copies of the game. The same concept applies to most of the cards – there are a lot of different cards, and to have multiples you will need to by multiple starters.
The art in Nature of the Beast is a little choppy. It's expressive enough, and the cards are quite attractive, but for pure aesthetics, it does not really stand up against some of the bigger hitters. That's fine in my book – I would rather see a great, playable game than an expensive art show.
The new wave of 'expandable-but-not-collectible' games show a lot of potential. Not all of them are particularly impressive, but Nature of the Beast does a fine job of leading the way to a trend. Nature of the Beast is a complete game, ready to play out of the box, with great opportunities to expand and customize it without bleeding your wallet dry. Plus it's a heck of a lot of fun.
Style: 4 – Attractive and well-designed, but the art is not big leagues.
Substance: 5 – Balanced, strategic and deep, Nature of the Beast delivers exciting game play in a fun theme.
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