Tooth and Tail

Tooth and Tail is a real-time strategy video game designed for use with gamepads and keyboard-and-mouse setups. The game has single-player and multiplayer modes. In the single-player mode, the player progresses through the story by completing levels of increasing difficulty. Each level features objectives with varying degrees of onerousness, depending on the player's advancement.

To complete each level, the basic objectives must be met while "heroic" ones—usually more arduous—are optional. Multiplayer mode can be accomplished through ranked or unranked online matchmaking and local multiplayer split screen. Up to four players may play at once, either as teams of two or compete to be the last one standing.

Tooth and Tail is set during the 19th century in a society where anthropomorphic animals are facing chronic food shortages. Many animals decided to resort to cannibalism to overcome the shortage. The Civilized, led by Archimedes, created a lottery system that ultimately controlled who was eaten. This way of life sparked controversy throughout the nation; the Commonfolk liked neither the idea of being eaten nor the high cost of food.

The son of the wealthy merchant Bellafide was selected to be eaten; he revolted, intending to reshape the food-selection system into one based on some version of a meritocracy. The Commonfolk—led by Hopper who wanted to impose a voting system to replace the lottery—also revolted. To overthrow the Civilized, Hopper and Bellafide joined forces despite their different ideals.

Following the success of Pocketwatch Games' 2013 video game Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine, the development of Tooth and Tail was announced on March 11, 2014. The game was loosely based on a design Andy Schatz, the founder of Pocketwatch Games, and roommate Tom Wexler had made during college, called Dino Drop. As with the development of Monaco, many games with similar mechanics were prototyped. Schatz told Jim Rossignol of Rock, Paper, Shotgun about Dino Drop, which he described as "a split-screen strategy game with autonomous units".

Schatz and co-designer Andy Nguyen heavily developed this version of real-time strategy towards the end of Monaco's development. Originally developed under the working title Armada—stylized as [ARMADA]—the game was advertised as a real-time strategy (RTS) game without the necessary micromanagement and high quantity of actions per minute, an issue he attributed to the StarCraft series; Starcraft and Command & Conquer were credited as influences on Tooth and Tail.

Prior to Tooth and Tail's release, the game received substantial media coverage because of the development process being made public and the release of alpha play tests. Many writers compared Tooth and Tail to the novels Animal Farm and Redwall. Reviewers including Adam Smith of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Kyle LeClair of Hardcore Gamer and Tom Marks of PC Gamer praised the game for redesigning the concept of the real-time strategy genre. In March 2017, Marks described the single player campaign as being similar to "a bite-sized StarCraft campaign." The art style was also praised prior to release.

Tooth and Tail was released to positive reviews from critics, garnering "generally favorable reviews" on both PC and PS4 according to review aggregator website Metacritic.