The premise was to create an RTS game without micromanagement or the necessity of high quantities of actions per minute.

Before its official release, the game's developers proposed a launch on Steam's Early Access platform, though this did not occur.

The game was positively received and won two awards in 2016; "Best Character Design" at Intel Level Up and tied with Giant Cop for "Guest's Pick" at Media Indie Exchange.

Many comparisons with other games and media were made; mostly with the novel series Redwall and the novella Animal Farm.

Tooth and Tail is set during the 19th century[2] in a society where anthropomorphic animals are facing chronic food shortages.

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.

Quartermaster, the shady and pragmatic head of the late Tsarina's K.S.R secret police, seized control of military elements and supported Archimedes and the Civilized for the time being.

As the armies fight each other to the point of destruction, the pigs revolt, revealing they had a plan to overthrow the Tsarina and get revenge for the slavery and eating of their kind.

A horde of pigs then ambushes the final standing army, destroying it and leaving the fate of the commanders and the rest of the meat-eating animals ambiguous.

Tooth and Tail is a real-time strategy video game designed for use with gamepads and keyboard-and-mouse setups.

Once all players have chosen their units, they control a commander of an army and must build structures, such as farms, to gather required resources.

Schatz told Jim Rossignol of Rock, Paper, Shotgun about Dino Drop, which he described as "a split-screen strategy game with autonomous units".

[11] 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.

[17] This comparison was drawn as Schatz expressed admiration for the ability of Blizzard Entertainment, the developers of Hearthstone, to simplify complicated game genre mechanics for a wider audience, using Hearthstone as an example for card games and Heroes of the Storm for multiplayer online battle arenas.

[11] At this stage, it was planned to have around thirty units and structures to interact and build, and while this was not yet definitive, it was estimated players would be able to choose six-to-eight of them per match.

Around this time, Polygon reported a tentative release date of "sometime in 2015"[17] In August 2015, the game received its official name: Tooth and Tail.

[21] In July 2017, Tooth and Tail's official release date of September 12 was announced for PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux.

[24][25] Critics, such as Eric Van Allen of Kotaku,[37] praised the game's ability to be inviting to newcomers to the real-time strategy genre while also appealing to veterans.

[39] Polygon writer Charlie Hall compared the game to StarCraft and wrote "the initial learning curve right now is simply too steep for most players".

[42] Chloi Rad at IGN wrote that because of the combination of these elements, it was an "arcade-like strategy game experience like no other this year".

[38] Kotaku's Alex Walker praised Pocketwatch Games for their ability to create "truly, truly beautiful" artwork without spending "millions of dollars teams of artists".

[6] Tooth and Tail won the award for "Best Character Design" at Intel Level Up 2016[30] and tied with Giant Cop for the 2016 Media Indie Exchange's Guest's Pick.