Finishing up the recent Digital Tabletop Bundle from Humble, Armello (Steam store link) was the other game in the bundle I had been eyeing for a while.
This is a board game that only exists digitally, as it uses some stuff that would be difficult to implement in a physical game, mostly the âstealthâ attribute, but also a few other things like the guard movements. Other than that, it looks and plays like a board game, mostly using cards and dice to play the game.
The king of Armello is corrupted by the rot, and every night he gets more corrupted and every day he dies a little. The goal is to become the new king/queen of Armello, by either beating the old king in battle (regular or while being higher in corruption), by collecting four stones to cleanse the corruption, or by having the most prestige when the king dies any other way.
The game is always four players, and while there are a few benefits of working together at times, mostly you play against each other trying to reach one way to become the new ruler of Armello. Each turn alternates day and night, and has different aspects going on. You have four different stats that you can increase by doing quests, and you have 3 inventory and 3 follower slots to which you can play cards to affect even more stuff and increase stats. There are also other cards like perils and spells. And then I havenât even mentioned the dice yet, which have 6 symbols which act differently depending on day/night, whether youâre corrupted or not, or which items/followers you have. Oh, and each card also has one of those six symbols and you can burn the cards to guarantee roll that symbol. Oh, and each character you can play as also has a completely different skill.
Yeah, thereâs a lot going on, and I havenât even explained the rot properly, nor the guards and the banes and the tiles like dungeons.... It takes more than a few games to really start understanding this game.
Now. I generally like complex board games like this. And I think my time play shows this, Iâm already past 30 hours... So I would say this is a finish. To me, the game feels a lot like Talisman, another board game I quite like and have spent digitally over a hundred hours on. The different characters with different skills, the multiple stats you can (and have to) slowly increase to stand a chance. The combination of cards and dice and the high RNG both have. The sometimes working together but mostly attacking each other. No way they didnât take inspiration from Talisman when making this game. But at the same time, it plays completely different and has a lot of other things that change it up. Which is good and what makes it stand out and be enjoyable on its own.
That said, I have more than a few complaints though. There are more DLC characters than there are base game ones, and half of them are more powerful than the base characters. I wouldnât be upset about this (Talisman has a similar issue) if there was an option in multiplayer to only play with base characters (like Talisman does.) But there isnât, a multiplayer becomes close to impossible to enjoy as people keep using the overpowered DLC characters.
Multiplayer has other issues as well currently, most notably you cannot just play a game with specific people (including your friends.) You are put in queue and just play against whoever is online at that time. This is dumb for a board game, where most of the people usually want to play with friends. Apparently the option existed before, but people ganged upon other people so they got rid of it. Thereâs talks theyâre working on a different solution, but right now, multiplayer is no fun.
And BUGS. So. Many. Bugs. The game will stop playing properly half the time. If you quit a single player game halfway with the intend to play later, you are most likely not gonna be able to restart that game. And then there are hundreds and hundreds of other issues being posted on the bugs discussion board that I havenât encountered myself. The devs acknowledge the issues and are working on some of these, but seem to focus more on trying to get money by releasing skins and loot boxes. Yes, this game has loot boxes... You can get... fancy digital dice. -_-