Review of Armello (Part 1)

Posted bytherealgmanreviewsPosted inReviews, Video Game Reviews
Armello Wallpaper

I know this is now an old game as it was released in 2012 but I haven’t done a review of it so I thought I would. Now for those who don’t know while Armello is a video game it plays a lot like a board game.

Now the objective of the game is obviously to win but what makes this game a little interesting is that there are potentially 4 different win conditions, before I go on about that I will talk about the premise of the game.

So essentially Armello I believe is the name of the kingdom which is a kingdom of intelligent sentient animals that are ruled by a Lion that is the king of the land. Now the objective of the game is to become the new King/Queen of Armello and there are multiple routes to doing this.

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How do you win?

The first and the most obvious is to slay the King in combat but he is quite the tough opponent however because he is corrupted he loses one life each morning (the game has a day and night cycle) so there are only a limited number of turns to do this and he gets easier to kill as the game goes along.

One other option is to win by prestige which happens if the king dies or the king is killed in battle, but he also kills his attacker, then the player with the highest prestige wins. You get prestige by killing other players, killing banes (monsters that spawn at night and roam around and fight players and take over settlements) and completing quests most of the time.

The other option is to get four spirit stones and cleanse the king. This can be quite hard to do without a concerted effort which is why when I normally go after this victory condition I’ll also go after a rot victory.

Now a spirit stone victory is better for characters that are spell casters as once they have four spirit stones they can defeat the king without having to fight a battle against the king and they are coincidentally great for going after a rot victory at the same time which leads into the discussion of rot.

So essentially you can get something called a rot victory which happens when you fight the king and you have more rot than the king and win the fight against the king. Now rot is an interesting mechanic in that when two characters with rot fight each other the character with the highest rot gets extra fight dice equal to the number of rot the character in the battle with the lowest rot has.

This means that if you start down the rot path you need to get as much rot as possible and you always want to have more rot than the character you are fighting you also get rot for killing banes when you are corrupted which happens once you reach five rot.

The king also accumulates one rot each evening so if you’re going after a rot victory you need to be attaining at least one rot per turn to beat the king so when you fight him you have the higher rot so you get more dice to fight with (which can work against you which I will talk about later)

So that covers the win conditions so now I will move on to the basics of the gameplay.

How the game plays:

Now at the beginning of the game, you get to pick a character and give them a build consisting of a ring and amulet. Now depending on which clan and character you pick belongs to will determine which 6 rings you get access to while each character gets access to the same amulets.

These rings and amulets essentially give you special powers in addition to the power that each character has allowing you to experiment with different combinations.

After you select a character and start your game you end up in one of the four clan grounds on the map with the other 3 players ending up in their clan corners on each other corner of the map and you begin your game.

Now at the start of the game, you are roaming around and trying to get to locations to complete a quest. Now at the beginning of the game and for another 3 quests, you have to choose one of three quests.

Each quest will improve one of your stats by one but also gives you a chance to win a reward which could be a treasure (an item you can equip and you get 3 equipment slots), a follower(which you can also equip in the three follower slots you have) and a spirit stone (which helps you contribute to getting a spirit stone victory).

Now these are chosen at random and you can only pick one quest so sometimes the decision is easy because you will see one quest for improving a stat that you want to improve but also giving you a chance to get something good like a treasure you want for instance but other times you will have to choose between improving a stat or having a chance to get something good.

This means right at the beginning of the game you need to possibly make a hard choice and strategic choice and if you go for a quest for treasure your stat will improve but when you get to the quest location you will have a choice of just improving the stat or if you want to improve the stat and get a chance to get another reward.

Now your chance to get this reward improves the higher the stat you’re trying to improve is at. So essentially what happens is you play Russian roulette where you have the choice of 10 things to pick and depending on what your stat is it will determine how many of the choices are good and how many are bad.

For instance, if you have a 6 spirit stat and you go after a quest to get a reward to improve your spirit you have a 60% chance of selecting the correct pick with the treasure and a 40% chance of getting something bad like minus prestige, gold, health or one plus rot.

Essentially with 6 spirit for a spirit quest, there will be 6 good options and 4 bad ones, and you choose at random.

Tiles

Now if that was all the game was then it would probably be pretty dull but random things will happen as you go around the board. There are a few different types of tiles and you spend 1 action point in most cases to move into a tile and each character has 3 action points (ap) per turn most of the time.

The tiles are as follows:

  1. Plains (nothing special)
  2. Forest (provide stealth at night)
  3. Mountain (cost 2 ap to move into and you get one shield for being there)
  4. Settlement (gives you one gold for the daytime phase)
  5. Dungeon (random chance for reward or fight)
  6. Swamp (lose 1 life to move into)
  7. Stone Circle (heal one life and randomly generate spirit stones)

Plains

Nothing special except for certain characters/rings/treasures (mainly the bunny clan) that get special benefits on plain tiles

Forests

Forest are great as they provide stealth at night which is awesome. Essentially how stealth works are that you can’t be targeted by spells and strategy cards (in most cases) while under stealth(more on this later) and if a character moves into your space they are ambushed (which I will cover later in the battle section).

There are also certain characters/cards/rings (mainly bear clan) that get special benefits in forests.

Mountains

Mountains are more of an annoyance for the most part as while they do provide a shield if you are on a mountain when you are attacked they massively slow you down and normally you’re trying to avoid going through these and normally want to go past them.

There are certain follower cards/treasures that get special benefits for them which I will cover because there aren’t many anyway.

There is a follower card called the miner that gets you one additional shield and 1 gold whenever you move onto a mountain which is not normally that useful anyway cause like I said you will be avoiding mountains anyway if you can.

Lastly, there is a treasure card called The Winged Boots and the Celestine ring (for the Wolf clan and Bandit clan) which have the same effect on mountains which is you now only cost 1 ap to move into a mountain which is a significant advantage but that’s pretty much all that happens on the mountain (or maybe there is more you’ll have to play the game to see).

Settlements

Now we get to the good stuff which is settlements. They normally only cost 1 ap to move into but when you move into a settlement you claim it until another player moves into it or a bane moves into it which makes it count as terrorised.

Now when you move into a settlement you get 1 extra gold at dawn for each settlement you have claimed plus for every settlement, you have passed the first claimed you get a 1 gold discount on strategy cards (which I will explain later) so generally, you want to claim as many of these as you can.

Now if a settlement is terrorised you all get one plus prestige for claiming it as well.

Dungeons

Now dungeons are also interesting in that when you go to a dungeon you auto-explore the dungeon and will find something.

This could be a reward for a certain number of gold, magic, a treasure card, a follower card, getting teleported to somewhere else or fighting a bane (which is more likely to happen at night).

Amber a character from the bunny clan gets bonuses for exploring and there is an equipment card called The Torch that gives you 1 gold every time you explore a dungeon.

Swamps

Swamps are essentially nothing special except it costs 1 life to move into a swamp. There are certain treasure cards and a ring (for the Dragon Clan) that stops you from losing a hit point when entering a swamp but apart from that nothing really special just an annoyance.

Stone Circles

These are very interesting. If a non-corrupted character moves into one of these, they will recover 1 health but if a corrupted character moves in they will take damage based on how much rot they have.

Also at night one of these on the map will generate a spirit stone and you can tell this by looking at it during the day if you see wisps of lights next to one that means at night time it will generate a spirit stone and you want to be there to take it from someone else or to help you win.

Day/Night cycle

Now we will cover the day and night cycle. At the start of the game, you will start at the first-day cycle which means you start with your starting gold and cards in your hard equal to your wits (I will go into the stats later) and when you end your turn the first night phase will begin.

You will start with 3 action points at the start of each turn for the most part and what normally happens is at the beginning of the day cycle you get 1 gold plus 1 additional gold for every settlement you have claimed.

Also, if you are infected with rot you lose 1 life (and so does the King). Now you keep any magic you have accrued from the previous night phase and that is pretty much all there is to the day phase.

At night you get magic equal to your spirit now what is important is that even if you have more magic than your spirit would allow you to generate in the previous day phase you will lose that extra magic as your magic will reset to the value equal to your spirit stat.

So if your spirit stat is 4 once nighttime hits your magic will become 4 irrespective of whether it’s higher or lower in the previous day phase.

Also, forests at night provide stealth.

Stats

Now we will cover the stats. There are 4 main stats that you have which are fight, body, wits and spirit.

Fight

Fight determines how many dice you roll when attacking someone in battle by moving into their tile or how many dice you roll when you are attacked. Essentially the higher your fight is the better your character is in combat.

Body

The body is your health. When this runs out you die but luckily in this game death isn’t permanent but you do lose one prestige when you die and if you are killed in battle by another player or by a spell or trap cast by another player they will get one prestige (more if you have a bounty on you).

Wits

Wits determine starting number of cards you start the game with but also how big your hand size will be each turn. At the beginning of your turn except for at the start of the game you draw cards from one of three decks which are the equipment deck, spell deck and strategy deck until you have as many cards in your hand as your wits allow.

One great thing about this game is that if you get more cards in your hand than your wit stat would allow you can keep those cards but you can’t draw any more cards until you have fewer cards in your hand than your wit stat.

Your wits stat does two other things. When you encounter a trickery peril you use your wits stat to determine the number of dice you get to roll to defeat the peril and also your wits stat when evading(I’ll go into that later in the combat section).

Spirit

Your spirit determines the amount of magic you get access to at night so the more magic you have the more spells or more expensive spells you can cast. Now spirit also counts as your explode stat (until you are corrupted).

The way that explosion works are that if any time you roll a wild symbol in a battle or peril it counts as a wild symbol but it also generates extra dice to roll (called explosion). The new dice being generated can happen up to the number of times equal to your explosion stat which is determined by your spirit.

Gold

Gold gets its section because it can be used to do multiple things. It normally costs gold to equip an equipment card(mostly) or use one-off cards that can heal or damage other characters, raise a stat temporarily etc but it also costs gold to use trickery cards which are very powerful but also thus costly to use.

What do you do in you in your turn?

So now with that, all covered we can go through basic turn order. So basically, whether you are playing single-player against 4 AI opponents or Multiplayer against other humans this is how a basic turn would go.

  1. If at night generate magic equal to your spirit stat
  2. If your hand size isn’t full draw one card from a choice of either three decks which are the item, spell or trickery deck
  3. Decide how you will use your three action points to move normally plotting the quickest path to your quest but maybe taking a longer route if it will benefit you in some way.
  4. Ending your turn once you have used up all your action points.

This is a very simplistic view as a lot is going on in this game during your turn and when you play multiplayer the interaction between players is what makes this game interesting we will discuss more in part 2.