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Today I sat through a short presentation on Eye Level Entertainment’s "Nature of the Beast" card game.  I walked away from this short presentation with a pretty good understanding of this game and thought I’d share it with you.

Nature of the Beast is a card game for two players.  Each player has a playing field in front of them onto which "animal" cards can be placed. The object is to fill your playing field with animals before your opponent does.  Animals can recruit other animals to join in the fight, they can acquire allies to help them, and get weapons to make them fight better.  Each animal can only move in certain directions on the battlefield.  While it might seem that a good strategy would be to attack your opponent’s animals with impunity, this probably won’t work in practice.  Attacks generate fury.  Get too much fury, and you open yourself to sneaky, evil forms of retribution by other players.  Each player can also accumulate and use "favor", which is sort of the opposite of fury, in that it’s hard to get and easy to use up.

Nature of the Beast is NOT a collectible card game, though its play style is similar to one.  When you buy one of the two currently-available sets (priced around $12.50) you get two decks and enough to play for two people.  Buying a second set gives you more cards and options to work with, but isn’t essential.  There are no "rares" or "random distributions".