Armello is one of the most visually charming games I’ve ever seen. It presents a medieval, animal world with various factions with different powers and relations to their lush world. There are wolves, rats, bears, and rabbits, and each of those species is a particular manifestation of the different qualities that those animals can represent in the weird, wild world of symbology. The rats are sneaky! The wolves are warriors! The bears are strong! The rabbits… rabbits. It’s a beautifully complete conceptual package from design to implementation, and it forms the core of a very complex board game that spirals out from that point.
Sadly—and I literally mean that it makes me sad, that it hurts my feelings to have to say this—that strong core concept of animal factions with characters who do things just does not gel with the rest of the digital board game that is Armello.
The general conceit of the game is that the various animals and their factions are competing to usurp the dying king of the realm. The king is infected with The Rot, a fantasy disease that makes one both decay and go mad, and there are several win conditions that are dependent on the king, his Rot, and the players themselves. One could fight the king and take the throne. One can wait for the king to die and ascend to the throne based on political prestige. One can cure the king. To get to any of these victory conditions, one needs to race other players who are trying to accomplish their own (opaque to you) goals.
The board is hex-based and your moves are limited by the number of action points you have. The way you move, and what your optimal moves could be, is based on your faction and character. You also have cards that can deliver positive, negative, or value-neutral effects to other players or yourself. The Rot system interacts with all of this, limiting your moves and your health in ways that can either help you press an advantage or keep you from getting very far. And, of course, there’s a complex dice-based combat system. All of these different systems use different resources like gold or spirit. They are also dependent on buildable-stats like Wits and Body.
You’re not wrong to think that all sounds confusing. In playing several long games of Armello (each game takes about an hour), I had to repeatedly look up what the various interactions of different stats, resources, and cards might be. The game is probably more simplified than your average Euro-style board game, but it certainly doesn’t feel more simple. Trying to figure out the best play of any given hand in a particular board state takes quite a bit longer than I would prefer, and even then an optimal play doesn’t ever really feel ‘optimal’. Instead, it just feels like I’m barely keeping up. Armello puts you into a cruel world.
