"From the wolf to the bear. The clans declare
The time has come to take the throne.
For Rot's creeping. It twists our king.
Heroes rise! Save Armello!"

Each game of Armello opens with this poem, which encapsules the plot of Armello. Armello is a computer board game. Its not a board game like Monopoly or Risk. Its a game like the more obscure Mage Knight or Descent, making it a game with complex rules, multiple victory conditions, and role playing game elements. Armello is set in a game reminicent of C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles. All of its heroes and villains are anthropomorphised animals. The player takes the role of one of these animal heroes, competing against three other heroes to take over the throne from the Lion King, who in his death throes is slowly succumbing to insanity.

The Story

The story behind Armello is relatively simple and unfolds for the most part in the one hour tutorial, which is extremely well done in that it teaches the player the rules of the game while at the same time presenting the lore of Armello. As the player consecutively takes the role of four heroes they learn that the lion king, who united all of the animal clans, is beginning to act eractically. He has been corrupted by a dark magic called the Rot, which is slowly killing him and driving him mad. Unfortunately he begins to see the heroes of Armello as a threat, and they in turn seek ways to replace him, while fighting off his royal guard, avoiding his dark magic, defeating the evil rot beasts which begin to arise across the land, and thwarting their rivals' plans. While this is all presented in text form, and throughs scripted events, it does a wonderful job of making the player feel at home in the world of Armello. Unfortunately the story telling more or less ends with the end of the tutorial. The developer's of Armello try to present "emergent" story telling in the main game by presenting the player with story based quests, but these neither get the vivid presentation they do in the tutorial, nor is the player motivated to make story based decisions, as every choice has apparent gameplay consequences, which discourage making any plot based decision.

The Atmosphere

Armello is a beautiful game. While it doesn't feature the most modern graphics, and its images favour a cartoon style, Armello profits from wonderful art direction. Its game cards look like they could have come straight out of a foil package, Its game hexes look like they could come from a high quality table top war game, and its heroes look like something out of a dark Disney cartoon. In fact the art direction of Armello reminds me of fantasy books like Redwall or Watership Down,  which use animals to tell very human stories of courage, faith, and tragedy, and I'm guessing that this in no coincidence. In any case Armello's artwork is definitely one of game's highlights and makes the whole experience more entertaining, if one isn't turned off by humanized animals. Also the music is well done, as is the U.I.

The Gameplay

The base game of Armello features eight different heroes from four animal clans. Each hero has values in four well balanced stats and a unique special ability. Fight determines how many dice the hero can roll in combat. Body determines how much damage a hero can take before being forcefully removed to his home base. Wits determines how many cards a character can hold in his hand (new cards are drawn after use), and Spirit determines a character's maximum mana.

The base game of Armello offers eight colourful characters with their own stats and unique abilities (My extra four are due to my kickstarter backer tier)

Each character has a total of fifteen stats point at the outset. Armello is played out over 16 rounds, 8 of them being day rounds, and 8 of them night rounds. Every character infected with Rot (including the king) takes one point of damage every day round, which means the king drops dead from Rot on the dawn of the 9^th day, if noone puts an end to his life earlier. Each character starts out with the choice of three qulests. Each succesful quest give the player's character a bonus to a specific stat and a point of prestige. The player can also choose to take an attirbute test (which normally has a 30-60% success rate) to get a special reward. The characters have to travel to the quest location (which normally means going to the other side of the board), which can actually be quite hazardous with Rot monsters, royal guards, the king's dark magic, and other players often getting in the way. Complete four quests and your character automatically gets a fifth which gives him entry to the palace and a chance to confront the king. Completing all five quests with the time alloted is actually fairly challenging, as there are a number of ways the character can be blocked out or die, which sends them back to their home base and that is often far away from one's quest goal.
There are also dungeons which give random rewards (mostly, though sometimes they also spawn a rot monster), towns which a give gold income, magic circles which heal, swamps which injure, forests which stealth a character at night, and mountains which decrease movement speed while adding defence.

All cards in Armello are powered by gold or mana. Mana is renewed each evening (up to the character's spirit value), and a character earns one gold from every town in his control at dawn. Cards can be played at any time, provided the character can pay their cost and are drawn at the start of each turn so that the character has a full hand. Each character also has an inventory which allows them to equip three items and three followers. Cards can be drawn from three decks. Equipment includes weapon and armour, which adds extra dice in combat, as well as consumables such as healing potions. Tricks give a whole bunch of miscellaneous advantages for you, or disadvantages for your opponents. The last deck is spells, which in a way is similar to the tricks deck, except that tricks and equipment are paid with by gold, while spells are paid with by mana.

You can draw your cards from three decks. You should weigh in your amount of gold, mana, and what you have equipped before drawing

There are four ways to win Armello. The first is to have the most prestige when the king dies. Prestige is collected by completing quests, slaying rival characters, and destroying rot beasts. Prestige is lost by dying or slaying royal guards. Some cards also reduce or raise prestige. The second way to win is to gather four soul stones and then confront the king. Soul stones appear at random in magic circles in the evening, and they also can be gained in certain quests. There is also one spell which lets you create a soul stone. The third way to win is to slay the king without dying, which is a daunting task as the king is a combat monster, and if one slays the king and dies, then the prestige leader wins. The last way to win is to get more Rot than the king, and then confront him.
Rot can be gained when the character is slain by a rot monster, or by casting some spells and by using some items. I found gathering rot extremely luck based and I often got more rot when I didn't want any than I did when I actively tried to collect it. Also Rot damages the character every morning and being killed by the Rot or a rot monster is an active hinderance to fininshing one's quests, which makes it a hard victory condition to attain. While having four victory conditions is great they are not at all balanced. Winning by being prestige leader is by far the easiest condition, as one can win without completing all 4 quests, and by squashing high prestige rivals. Collecting soul stones requires completion of all 4 quests and a little luck, but is still easier than trying to kill the king, which in turn is easier than collecting rot, which requires a good deal of luck with the cards. At least in the single player game, I was able to win fairly easily by concentrating on prestige, and the only games in which I lost to the A.I. were when one of my 3 A.I. opponents managed to win a prestige victory.

Victory and defeat in Armello is, like in many board games, often a matter of luck. The cards you draw are all not equally useful. Where a quest or soul stone spawns can be a great benefit or hinderance to you. The outcome of risks you take in quests are totally luck based. Where a royal guard moves or a rot monster spawns can completely foul up your possibility to solve quests and win the game. That's not to say that there is no planning or skill involved in Armello, but its certainly possible to play better than your opponents and still lose due to no fault of your own.

One of the good things about Armello is the fact that the game length is utterly predictable. The king's slow deteriation and the need to complete five quests to end the game early means that a single player game almost always takes about an hour, while a multiplayer game takes about 10-20 minutes longer.

Luck has a great impact in Armello, for example here my hero enters a dungeon and awaits a randomly generated outcome

Single and Multiplayer

Board games are by their nature multiplayer games, where most of the fun is to be had by playing with a group of friends with some chips and beer. Cursing a bad die roll or the elation of drawing just the right card at the right moment is severly dampened when sitting alone in front of a computer. Also most board games lack long term motivation (which is provided in real life by friends and the fact that one only plays occasionally). For this reason most attempts to computerize board games have not turned out well. One would think that the developers of Armello, who were producing a computer game in the style of a board game would have done what other developers of computerized board games failed to do in the past. Unfortunately this really isn't the case. Outside of the tutorial there is no campaign and once one has tried out a few different characters and play styles the game becomes increasingly dull, as it plays out more or less the same each time as one gets familiar with all the cards and mechanics. I played eight games after completing the tutorial, but after the first four my motivation to continue dropped increasingly.

Armello seems perfect for local multiplayer. My daughter, for example, loved the art style and would have been up for a couple of rounds. It would be great to play with the family or a partner in the living room. But unfortunately Armello has no local multiplayer. And there is a reason why it won't be so easy to implement. The developers implemented a stealth mechanic, which makes players invisible in forests at night. In addition one character and a number of cards increase stealth or detect stealthed characters. While this does add a little complexity to the game as it stands , I think it would have been a much better decision (economically speaking) to have implemented local multiplayer.

As it is, one can only play against opponents online. I found finding online opponents to be little trouble. Online opponents react more intelligently than their AI counterparts, making the game more challenging, but the game takes a bit longer and requires a bit more patience between turns as all battles are rolled out manually. One can also set up a game with friends, which I think would be the ideal way to play Armello in its current form.

Conclusion

Armello was touted as a single and multiplayer computer game, and my rating reflects this in all of its facets. As a single player game, its fun for a few hours, but quickly grows boring because of its limited content. However, if you know other people who own Armello and can play online, than I think you can have a lot of fun with the game. Also if you are a fan of computer board games or just want a game you can occasionally play and finish in a hour, then you should definitely give Armello a look. For other players the downsides of Armello could definitely outweigh the positives.