Questions, answered.

Why I made Critters

Critters began 3 years ago as a passion project. I wanted to make a fun little card game to play with my friends. I made the game purely with blank cards, coloured stickers and my own terrible handwriting. But I quickly found that despite how unreadable and noisy the game was at that stage, my friends were getting immersed and having fun solving unique strategies.

So I decided to challenge myself to make this a real game. I've hired artists and graphic designers, printed several versions of the game, and really refined Critters into what it is now, 3 years later. An awesome deck-builder with a huge amount of depth, replayability, and beautiful art.

Seeing now how much more engaging the game is to playtesters with all of these visual elements, I am more confident than ever that we have created something worth putting out to the public.

What makes Critters different

Aside from being a deck-builder where all the cards are included in the box, I think the Market really makes Critters stand out. There are 4 different decks of cards in Critters, and each of these decks has a row of cards in the Market for you to buy. There are Farm cards that you can buy for your own deck, Favours that let you do instant actions such as Selling cards or Refreshing other cards in the Market, Work Orders that require different combinations of crops to complete, and Rewards that you get for completing Work Orders and give you powerful passive bonuses for the rest of the game.

Having these 4 axis of variance really makes each game of Critters unique, and because the Market is shared between the players, you get this really interesting gameplay of competing over the cards in the Market, such as racing to buy a card before another player, or Refreshing cards out of the Market to disrupt a Strategy that a Rival is building towards.

My favourite thing about the game

I've worked really hard to make the game approachable to a wide audience, from people like my partner who have never played a card game before, to people like myself who have a wide ranging experience in other board games, TCGs and Deck-Builders.

Meeting that mark has been challenging. The mechanics and concepts need to be simple enough to feel rewarding on your first game, but there crucially needs to be depth and complexity that reward experience and investment over many games.

So my favourite thing about Critters is seeing how different players with ranging experience are able to pick up the game, try out some crazy combinations of cards, and just have a lot of fun, whether they win or lose.

My favourite character

My favourite character has to be Price Hiker.

Rats are definitely my favourite animal, and it was crucial that they would be represented in this game. Early on I knew that I wanted the Rats in this world to be Shopkeepers working at the Market, and that their in game mechanics needed to reflect this.

I had played around with a lot of Rat characters, but once I implemented the Discount mechanic into the game, which makes cards in the Market cheaper over time, I wanted to create a Rat merchant that could interact interestingly with that mechanic.

And so, Price Hiker was born. The name started as a bit of a pun about "hiking the price" through removing discounts, but then the concept of this travelling merchant and the story implications behind him started to blossom.

So he is absolutely my favourite character, and honestly, it has been hard for me every time I've had to "nerf" him throughout the design process.

Influences

Gosh, there are so many. I've loved card games for a very long time, so there are elements of many games that have been mixed together to create Critters.

Star Realms and Hero Realms were definitely the first point of influence, with other games like Catan, Hearthstone, Pokemon and Slay the Spire shaping the theming and mechanics too.

On top of that, I got really into an Auto-Battler called The Bazaar while I was developing Critters, and that game had a huge influence on how I've tried to design the "journey" that you go on while buying cards and building your deck.

And then through play-testing over the years, players have referred me to other games that I've looked into and adapted my game against, such as Clank!, Magic the Gathering, Dominion, and many others.