In like a lion, out like a lamb.
By Rowan Kaiser
Armello never seems better than its beginning, with a lush animated video of animals in a medieval fantasy world. A wolf warrior holds a bloody sword, a lion king descends into darkness, a bear priestess awakens. It looks as good as a digital board game should, and beyond that its rules are clear and its tutorial is an effective introduction. But it lacks a driving purpose; it has no strategic hook. More damning, though, is that Armello doesn’t encourage enough interaction between its players – and that’s a huge problem for any board game, digital or physical.
The premise is a good start for both politics and adventure: both the king and kingdom of Armello have been corrupted by the magical Rot, and four heroes set out to take the crown. It’s the follow-through that’s lacking. Because while there are four supposedly different and balanced victory conditions, they don’t work effectively. In practice it works like this: be the first to assassinate the king, or get a prestige victory by having completed every quest and won the most battles. Yet prestige wins are thoroughly dominant — it took me over a dozen games before I saw another victory type.
Fantastical creatures, such as chivalric rabbits and sultry wolves, are Armello’s biggest strength.
That’s in spite of its eight different playable animal heroes who run around an attractive map, fulfilling quests and (temporarily) killing one another. The characters include such fantastical creatures as chivalric rabbits and sultry wolves, and they are Armello’s biggest strength. Each is distinct both visually, with the superb style of the intro video carrying over to their character models and animation, as well as mechanically — each has a specific passive ability that makes their playstyle different, like an especially stealthy assassin rat, or a bear that gains combat power for every spell cast. There are a lot of other numbers and mechanics at work, though, adding detail but not necessarily depth. Each character has four attributes, like Body (hit points) and Spirit, and four resources, like Coins and Rot (a scale of their corruption). There are also cards that can build a character’s inventory, cast spells, or play tricks on other players. This may sound complicated, but it’s all reasonably straightforward — Armello’s systems rarely combine in interesting ways.
That’s partially because you’re rarely given a chance to use them on or with other players. Armello uses individualized quests to grant each match its form, but these end up pushing players down their own paths instead of into conflict with each other. Each player picks between three quest options, each of which offers a different permanent buff to an attribute, as well as a possible item. But because other players normally can’t see these quests, either text or location, the first two thirds of a match tends to be made up of players running to opposite ends of the map, interacting with one another only if they’re randomly pushed into the same area.
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This lack of player interaction is arguably Armello’s biggest issue. Other players can get in your way, and they can be annoyances, and at the end of the game they might force a clash. But limits on movement and spell range (and no “house rules” options to adjust these) mean that the vast majority of the time any direct interaction you have with another player is typically “who’s within range of what I happen to have” as opposed to the result of a long-term plan.
Exacerbating this problem is the lack of general chat. Like Hearthstone and certain shooters like Splatoon, Armello offers only a few preset phrases as methods of communication. This is great for keeping its aesthetics consistent and showing the personality of the various heroes, and maybe it works in card or action games where player roles are clear. But for a strategy game where you might want to create some kind of relationship with other players across the entirety of a match, with alliances and betrayals and human interaction, lack of communication is a disaster.
Waiting for all the dice to roll can be an exercise in boredom.
And other human players being irrelevant is a best-case scenario in Armello. Playing a turn-based game with other people can be incredibly slow, especially given the rather large amount of information on-screen. If it’s not your turn, then you’ll have nothing better to do than watch three other players and two AI factions spend their time reading cards, trying to decide which path to take, or worst of all, engaging in combat. Waiting for all the dice to roll can be an exercise in boredom, as matches that take half an hour against AI are extended out to an hour or longer, with five-minute waits between 30-second turns — almost all of which is dead air.
In a physical board game, of course, slow players can be compensated for by chatting and camaraderie. Armello doesn’t just lack this, it actively removes it as an option. With no way to discuss the match, form alliances, or just entertain yourself, there’s nothing left. Nor is there much point in watching other players take their turns, because the diverging player quests mean that someone else across the map is functionally irrelevant to your goals. As much as I wanted to like Armello, I regularly found myself grabbing my phone to play other games while I waited for my turn.
Based off my experiences, I’m not alone. In one game, I started off with three other human players online, and watched as they dropped off one by one. It seemed like it was shaping up to be a relatively boring match to me, so I assumed they rage-quit. But then I realized that I had no way of knowing if they were bored or not. Moreover, continuing to play the game, I honestly couldn’t see any difference between the behavior of AI characters and human characters – except that the AI moved faster. With no communication or ability to see if long-term goals were being achieved, other humans may as well have been computers. That’s not a good sign.
To be fair to Armello, any turn-based multiplayer game struggles if the players you’re competing against are slow or incompetent. The big problem is that even when it works smoothly, there’s nothing special about Armello beyond its style to elevate it beyond passable. But if anything goes wrong, and its limited communication in multiplayer makes it far too likely that something will, Armello has no safeguards against becoming incredibly boring due to isolating its players from each other. All the murderbunnies in the world can’t salvage that.
