A dark fantasy board game inspired by Redwall
In the kingdom o f Armello, the mad lion is king. That might sound like bad poetry, but Armello is a strange game – hugely familiar, but also extremely unusual. It’s a board game, definitely, but one that’s been developed just as a computer game, so it can do things board games never could.
You take control of one of four characters, leaders of factions in the peaceful kingdom of Armello. Well, it used to be peaceful. The king has been infected by a disease called the Rot. He’s slowly dying and succumbing to madness at the same time, and – like in The Fisher King legends – the realm is also suffering, with dungeons opening up across the land, spitting out winged banes that terrorise the towns of the world. The King’s Guard is struggling to contain them.
Your task is to save the kingdom – either by curing the king, or killing him, or being the most prestigious faction leader when he succumbs to the Rot. Oh, and all the characters are animals. Beautifully animated, wonderfully drawn cute animals. The king’s a lion, the guards are dogs and the banes are vultures.
You get to choose between a wolf, bear, rabbit and rat. Each has a different play style and different levels of strength, body, wit and magic, so they specialise in the various interactions around the world. The wolf is an out-and-out killer, hunting down other animals. The bear can kill the banes with ease, but is poor at combat. The rabbit is best at exploring dungeons. And the rat is best at dirty tricks and making money.
The world is hex-based, built around the king’s palace, and each character moves around it slowly, grabbing treasure, pursuing quests, defeating banes, exploring dungeons, capturing towns and stumbling into perils. The depth of the world is comparable to King of Dragon Pass or Pillars of Eternity, a tightly described world shown off in delightfully animated card designs.
Each player has a hand of cards that gets refilled every turn. Each card can either be used as is, to give you treasure or to cast a spell or to summon a peril, or discarded to give you a bonus during combat or a peril. Certain actions or outcomes give your character the Rot, too, which slowly kills them. When a player dies, they return to their starting position and lose prestige.
All these systems gel really well together, leaving a tight virtual board game that feels like Small World, but is asymmetric, so players are each striving to win the game in a different way. After a couple of goes, you’ll really understand how the game works – and have also unlocked some new items that modify how it plays, too.
It has to be admitted that, despite having this joyous world to play in, the single-player option does get a bit, well, samey. It’s also very slow. The solution is to concentrate on playing multiplayer with friends (the game is sold as a four-pack for that reason), vary which character you play as, and to grab the four new characters when they’re released, which will add much more variety to the game.
Despite that, Armello is as mart, beautiful game that’s small enough to understand easily, but complex enough that it’s hard to master. Play it with your friends! – DANIEL GRILIOPOULOS