Have you ever wondered what would happen if you combined a boardgame like Catan, with quests like Dungeons & Dragons or Risk and just a pinch of Magic/Gwent? Well, you would probably get something in the setting of Armello. Curious? Well then, enter the world of Rot, cursed kings and animal clans all aiming for a different goal.
Studio History:
Armello is a project of the League of Geeks – who in the midst of 2011 decided to embark on creating a digital card and board game that would ensnare groups of friends in the same types of wondrous adventures that we all grew up reading, watching, and playing! One that truly leverages the opportunities offered to traditional tabletop design and storytelling by the digital platform. Over eight months of paper prototyping and 15+ versions later, Armello was ready to begin proper production. League of Geeks is an indie game development collective comprising talented professionals from video game development and multiple other industries. The company is based in Australia and was brought together by a passion for creating highly engaging content and user-experiences. To use their own words: “We’re simply here to make the best possible games we can.”
What began as a Kickstarter project, one which I sadly did not back then, turned into a new way we could play boardgames or tabletops. To summarize: Armello is a swashbuckling adventure that combines RPG elements with the strategic play of card and board games, creating a personal, story-fueled experience.
Armello – The Basics:
You, play as a ‘Hero’ from one of the four animal clans: Rat, Rabbit, Bear or Wolf. Players navigate their fully animated 3D character across the board (procedurally generated from 3D hex tiles) as they quest, scheme, explore, vanquish monsters, perform the Mad King’s royal edicts, and face off against other players, with one ultimate end goal in mind – storming the palace and becoming King or Queen of Armello. Combine this with beautiful handful hand-drawn art and you are looking at something out of a high-grade concept art book from the studios of Bioware or Blizzard.
The game starts off with a cinematic prologue about the situation the land of Armello has found itself in. Something evil, known as the Rot, has taken over the mind of the king and turned him into a mad beast. Once a true lion, fighting for equality in his kingdom – the rot turned the lion into a mad man with a thirst for power and chaos. And guess what, it’s your quest to stop him from destroying the land you love.
Luckily, the game features an extensive tutorial mode, since the game is easy to play but really hard to master. In a way, Armello is an intuitive game, easy to pick up and experience but with deep and emergent strategy. Each tutorial features a different animal clan, which is a nice touch, since all the clans focus on different elements (fight/magic/cunning/wit). When you have completed all the tutorial episodes, you can either start a singleplayer game (with three randomly generated AI players) or try a multiplayer game (locally or online). Both can and will earn you achievements, for completing certain tasks, like winning a game in a certain way, or killing loads of other players.
Armello Artwork & Gameplay
Armello features a gorgeous dynamic world which procedurally generates a new map each and every game, complete with a dynamic quest system ensuring no two games of Armello are ever the same. Combined with the maps is a turn-based day and night cycle. Armello features a fuzzy turn-based system, cycling between Day and Night phases. The fuzzy turns allow you to still play cards and do certain actions when its not your turn, and when it is you use Action Points to move around the hex board. Which makes playing a single player game even promising as an multiplayer one. The fuzzy turns are the turns you can make up a great strategy to bug your opponents.
Each game is about the same length, since the game ends whenever the king is killed (or healed). If you let the flow of the game play out, the game ends when the king dies of the effects of the Rot. The one with the most prestige, gained by completing quests or killing other players, will be crowned king. But there are more ways to win, otherwise you can just go around questing and killing of people, doesn’t sound fun, does it. There are three other ways to win at Armello, which are more multiplayer oriented. They demand alliance-making and stabbing people in the back.
What the game really misses though, and for what it has great potential.. is a story mode of it’s own. Adding some scenario like structure like the tutorial would make this more fun for singleplayer experience. It would also benefit the character backgrounds, since they are only fleshed out in the selection screen and through some of the quests you’ll do ingame. This really made me deduct some points on my final verdict – Even the launchtrailer gives room for this addition:
Conclusion:
The game runs smoothly in handheld mode and docked mode and I can really see this one becoming a new craze with the people who like to take a break from the regular D&D nights. League of Geeks brought a true tabletop to feel to the Switch. It really puts up a high level of expectation for the upcoming releases of Catan. So if you are looking for a nice strategy boardgame on the Nintendo Switch, which you can play with your friends? Armello might be the game for you!
