How late in the design process were badgers replaced with raccoon? Was the decision to make Gruul's mechanic expend already made by the time the swap was decided on? Or did market testing show the audience's preference before any of that was locked in?

The change was made mid vision design. I’m not sure when expend first got added. It was there at the handoff, although unnamed.

Hello Mark! I’m loving Bloomburrow so far, but have only one nagging question scratching at my brain;I love mustelids, so the separation of weasels, otters, and badgers all into their own creature types without being able to really play them together with typeal synergy bothers me immensely. This feels like the hound/dog/wolf problem but like a 100 times worse for me specifically :( Do you know why it was chosen to make them all separate? And, if it was the body shape/habitat thing, might I suggest making martens a creature type, since they’re tree dwelling mustelids, and a lot lankier and longer limbed than ground dwelling weasels?

We tend to use words people are more familiar with, and “mustelid” doesn’t reach that bar.

I really love animals and how many different species there are. When you started talking about Bloomburrow's mechanics not being directly typal, I was hoping that there'd be a lot of one-off animals. But almost all of the cards revealed so far are one of the main 10 animals, with the main exceptions being the calamity beasts.Was there ever a point in development where the focus was more on showcasing a lot of different animal species rather than selecting a smaller number that act as draft archetype groups?

I talked about this in my first Bloomburrow preview column. Here’s a snippet:“Once it was on the schedule, I did a little advance work on the genre to familiarize myself with it. I realized that there were two ways it’s traditionally done.Take #1 – Animals represent groups of people. These people are mice, those people are badgers, and these people are otters. Each animal type has qualities that are consistent among that group, usually things that feel resonant with the real-world animal. In this version, the setting is usually a biome, and all the animals in it are ones who would live in that biome. The animals are roughly proportional to what they would be in the real world.Take #2 – Animals represent individual people. This person’s jumpy, so she’s a frog. That person’s sneaky, so he’s a fox. This other person rushes into things, so they’re a rhino. Each animal is used to represent personality qualities. In this version, the setting is usually something more human in structure, often a city, and the variety of animals is much larger. The animal selection here is not limited by biome, so you can have animals living together that normally would never see each other in the real world. The animals are loosely related in size (a racoon is smaller than an elephant), but the scope of scale is compressed.Take number one is easier for worldbuilding. There are less unique types of animals, and they’re organized by creature type. Because animals are used to express groups of people, they tend to act more similarly to traditional species creature types, like Elves, Goblins, or Merfolk. This pushes us more toward a factioned typal theme.Take number two is easier for design because the designers have access to a lot more animals and can make more individually cool designs. The twelfth Mouse card, for instance, is a lot harder to make different than the first Giraffe. This approach pushes us more toward mechanics that tie into a larger animal theme. It’s more likely we’d create an environment that was about a lot of different animals working together, putting the focus more on individual top-down card design.Aaron was more interested in doing take number one, while I was more interested in doing take number two. So, we did a bunch of market research. It came back exactly even. Half the people we polled preferred take one, and half preferred take two. In a tie, Aaron’s original vision won out, so we did take one. (Also, I believe more people internally wanted to do take one.) I do want to stress that both takes would have allowed us to make a cool set. They just head down different paths and would have ended up in very different places, mechanically and creatively.”

Mark, I am a huge fan of the animal fantasy genre stories (Redwall was a favorite growing up) and particularly of Badgers, and I got really excited when Hugs was shown in the first batch of previews. I was somewhat heartbroken to find out that the Red-Green tribe was Raccoons rather than Badgers. I understand that Raccoons are likely a more popular creature, but I wanted to both express my love for Hugs specifically and a desire to give him more friends.

Badgers started as our choice for red/green. Part of our research was to look into market research on other animal choices and Raccoons scored very high, so we made the swap.