Eternity RPC Board
It has recently come to my attention that I have yet to not know butts about the game I’ve been playing most as of late. Of course, as everyone can probably guess, that game is
Armello.
I’ve actually been debating doing one of these for Armello for a while, but I was pretty lost on how I’d review it given that it’s just such a different game from everything else that I play — essentially, I’m comparing a [digital] board game to a video game. I wasn’t sure if I could use the same set of metrics or even the same rating system. My fear was (and honestly, after going back and reading through what I’ve written here, still is) producing more of a how-to guide than an actual review. Eventually, with some gentle coaxing from Seperallis, I decided a game is a game, and I would go ahead and attempt to review it. Before we jump into this one, I guess there are a couple things to note about how I reviewed/rated this one compared to how I’ve done my past games:
1. I ended up using the same Overall Saljective™ Rating System for this as I did for all the other games I’ve reviewed thus far, but
2. Much more weight was placed on game mechanics, functionality, and graphics because, literally, that’s all there is. It’s a board game. There’s no story (outside of some DLC/seasonal collectible thingies, but those have no bearing on my review), so I can’t consider what doesn’t exist.
So when you look at my final rating, just keep those things in mind.
Now leggo!
Title: Armello
Official Site: https://armello.com
Developer: League of Geeks
Initial Release Date: September 2015
Genre: Board game, RPG
Price: $19.99 (base game only)
![[Image: AsMDTBQ.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/AsMDTBQ.jpg)
The king of Armello has been corrupted by a powerful and insidious evil, and now he is dying. It’s your turn to prove yourself worthy to take the throne and become the next ruler! But be careful — there are those who seek the throne for themselves, and they won’t allow anything or anyone to stand in their way.
Armello is a turn-based game for up to four players that combines a number of mechanics including dice rolls and card draws. There are several ways to win the game — using brute strength to slaughter everyone, avoiding death and accumulating enough prestige to win a war of attrition, gathering enough magic to banish the evil from the palace, becoming even more evil than the most evilest evil, etc. You’ll use your character’s combination of stats, equip items, cast spells and perils (traps), and complete quests to make your way to victory.
![[Image: ib1iLZy.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/ib1iLZy.jpg)
The board itself is a combination of tile types - settlements to claim and generate revenue, dungeons to explore which may yield treasure or traps, swamps that sap your health, mountains that sap your energy, and forests to hide in when night comes. The palace sits at the center of it all and is heavily guarded by traps and soldiers.
There are nine days and nine nights - eighteen rounds - to the game. During the day, the king’s guards go on their rounds looking for criminals to apprehend. At night, monsters called banes rise from the dungeons and wreak havoc on Armello’s settlements. At the dawn of the tenth day, the king will die. You have that much time to win.
Oh, and you’re an animal. Because duh.
Without the DLC, you have four clans: Wolf clan, Rat clan, Bear clan, and Rabbit clan. Each clan has its own gameplay style, and if you were to relate each one to your standard role play class, you would — respectively — get Fighter, Rogue, Magic-User, and kinda-sorta-Rangers (I find Rabbits harder to classify, but think exploration-based equipment-dependent types.) The Bandit Clan DLC adds a fifth clan which is... well, the Bandit Clan. But it’s more of a hodge-podge of characters than one cohesive group like the others. Within each clan, each character has its own unique play style and set of stats. For instance, all Wolf clan members are Fighter-type, meaning they’ll naturally have higher strength stats and lower wits, but you have your swordsman, your shield maiden, and your archer to choose from who all offer different abilities. Usurpers and Rivals DLC both add one additional character to the original four clans.
![[Image: cildZjo.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/cildZjo.jpg)
Me as Hargrave, corrupted and thus unable to enter the tile which holds my quest, which has a king’s guard on it anyway, surrounded by banes, with a bounty on my head and heck-all in my hand. The only royal status I won in this game was becoming royally screwed.
Pros: There is a good selection of characters to fit every play style, and even if a class tends not to be your thing (I, personally, am not a good Magic-User), there is probably at least one character from each clan that is workable for you, especially with the DLC. Although my craptop is too lappy— wait, I mean my laptop is too crappy to render anything high quality, I’ve seen the game played at maximum graphics settings, and it is gorgeous. Especially with the Seasons DLC which is purely aesthetic and which adds seasonal flair to the game board tiles - snowy winter, flowery springtime, etc. The combination of mechanics is nice and I like the randomization of the board tiles with each new game. Minor things: I actually quite like the Steam achievements for this game; they essentially just add personal challenges for you as you go about your usual king-killing business. Some of them are character-based while others are more task-based. There are collectible dice, so that’s pretty fun. Some of them are really pretty, and a lot of them make unique sounds (ceramic, wood, bone, etc.) when you roll them.
Cons: There are definitely some glitches, and new ones seem to pop up after each update. Really major ones, like things that would have been noticed after the most basic of UATs, which makes me wonder if any UAT did happen. There was an issue, for example, of cards being played out-of-turn freezing before going into effect, so essentially you wouldn’t be able to put them to use, but also they would still be taking up a space in your hand — which can be critical if you are using a low-wits character; one card may account for 25% of your hand. Some of the equipment and characters have undergone stats or abilities changes after past updates, and I haven’t been a huge fan of all of them, although in general I concede that they have made the game more balanced overall. I’ve found that some of the vanilla characters are useless (cough Amber cough) and, if facing a DLC character, they hardly ever stand a chance without getting hella-lucky in the equipment card draw department. That’s not surprising to me considering that paying real world money to get something better that’s a more surefire win is a pretty commonplace business strategy in the video game industry. It gets kind of pricey when you start investing in DLC, but looking at the cost of traditional hard-copy board games like Catan and others, Armello is pretty typical. Minor things: I found the tutorial a bit weak and think there are ways it could be improved. Some of the inter-gameplay bits around the turn of dusk to dawn/dawn to dusk are really annoying with how they force the camera to pan around and prevent you from playing out of turn until that’s over.
![[Image: kVNviNZ.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/kVNviNZ.jpg)
My Overall Saljective™ Rating: 8/10. It should be no surprise that I really like this game based on how often you probably see my little Steam dialogue pop up on your screen saying “pipartuuli is now playing Armello” and whatnot. It’s a nice meshing of RPG and board game style play and it’s something you can sink some time into without realizing.
Armello.
I’ve actually been debating doing one of these for Armello for a while, but I was pretty lost on how I’d review it given that it’s just such a different game from everything else that I play — essentially, I’m comparing a [digital] board game to a video game. I wasn’t sure if I could use the same set of metrics or even the same rating system. My fear was (and honestly, after going back and reading through what I’ve written here, still is) producing more of a how-to guide than an actual review. Eventually, with some gentle coaxing from Seperallis, I decided a game is a game, and I would go ahead and attempt to review it. Before we jump into this one, I guess there are a couple things to note about how I reviewed/rated this one compared to how I’ve done my past games:
1. I ended up using the same Overall Saljective™ Rating System for this as I did for all the other games I’ve reviewed thus far, but
2. Much more weight was placed on game mechanics, functionality, and graphics because, literally, that’s all there is. It’s a board game. There’s no story (outside of some DLC/seasonal collectible thingies, but those have no bearing on my review), so I can’t consider what doesn’t exist.
So when you look at my final rating, just keep those things in mind.
Now leggo!
Title: Armello
Official Site: https://armello.com
Developer: League of Geeks
Initial Release Date: September 2015
Genre: Board game, RPG
Price: $19.99 (base game only)
The king of Armello has been corrupted by a powerful and insidious evil, and now he is dying. It’s your turn to prove yourself worthy to take the throne and become the next ruler! But be careful — there are those who seek the throne for themselves, and they won’t allow anything or anyone to stand in their way.
Armello is a turn-based game for up to four players that combines a number of mechanics including dice rolls and card draws. There are several ways to win the game — using brute strength to slaughter everyone, avoiding death and accumulating enough prestige to win a war of attrition, gathering enough magic to banish the evil from the palace, becoming even more evil than the most evilest evil, etc. You’ll use your character’s combination of stats, equip items, cast spells and perils (traps), and complete quests to make your way to victory.
The board itself is a combination of tile types - settlements to claim and generate revenue, dungeons to explore which may yield treasure or traps, swamps that sap your health, mountains that sap your energy, and forests to hide in when night comes. The palace sits at the center of it all and is heavily guarded by traps and soldiers.
There are nine days and nine nights - eighteen rounds - to the game. During the day, the king’s guards go on their rounds looking for criminals to apprehend. At night, monsters called banes rise from the dungeons and wreak havoc on Armello’s settlements. At the dawn of the tenth day, the king will die. You have that much time to win.
Oh, and you’re an animal. Because duh.
Without the DLC, you have four clans: Wolf clan, Rat clan, Bear clan, and Rabbit clan. Each clan has its own gameplay style, and if you were to relate each one to your standard role play class, you would — respectively — get Fighter, Rogue, Magic-User, and kinda-sorta-Rangers (I find Rabbits harder to classify, but think exploration-based equipment-dependent types.) The Bandit Clan DLC adds a fifth clan which is... well, the Bandit Clan. But it’s more of a hodge-podge of characters than one cohesive group like the others. Within each clan, each character has its own unique play style and set of stats. For instance, all Wolf clan members are Fighter-type, meaning they’ll naturally have higher strength stats and lower wits, but you have your swordsman, your shield maiden, and your archer to choose from who all offer different abilities. Usurpers and Rivals DLC both add one additional character to the original four clans.
Me as Hargrave, corrupted and thus unable to enter the tile which holds my quest, which has a king’s guard on it anyway, surrounded by banes, with a bounty on my head and heck-all in my hand. The only royal status I won in this game was becoming royally screwed.
Pros: There is a good selection of characters to fit every play style, and even if a class tends not to be your thing (I, personally, am not a good Magic-User), there is probably at least one character from each clan that is workable for you, especially with the DLC. Although my craptop is too lappy— wait, I mean my laptop is too crappy to render anything high quality, I’ve seen the game played at maximum graphics settings, and it is gorgeous. Especially with the Seasons DLC which is purely aesthetic and which adds seasonal flair to the game board tiles - snowy winter, flowery springtime, etc. The combination of mechanics is nice and I like the randomization of the board tiles with each new game. Minor things: I actually quite like the Steam achievements for this game; they essentially just add personal challenges for you as you go about your usual king-killing business. Some of them are character-based while others are more task-based. There are collectible dice, so that’s pretty fun. Some of them are really pretty, and a lot of them make unique sounds (ceramic, wood, bone, etc.) when you roll them.
Cons: There are definitely some glitches, and new ones seem to pop up after each update. Really major ones, like things that would have been noticed after the most basic of UATs, which makes me wonder if any UAT did happen. There was an issue, for example, of cards being played out-of-turn freezing before going into effect, so essentially you wouldn’t be able to put them to use, but also they would still be taking up a space in your hand — which can be critical if you are using a low-wits character; one card may account for 25% of your hand. Some of the equipment and characters have undergone stats or abilities changes after past updates, and I haven’t been a huge fan of all of them, although in general I concede that they have made the game more balanced overall. I’ve found that some of the vanilla characters are useless (cough Amber cough) and, if facing a DLC character, they hardly ever stand a chance without getting hella-lucky in the equipment card draw department. That’s not surprising to me considering that paying real world money to get something better that’s a more surefire win is a pretty commonplace business strategy in the video game industry. It gets kind of pricey when you start investing in DLC, but looking at the cost of traditional hard-copy board games like Catan and others, Armello is pretty typical. Minor things: I found the tutorial a bit weak and think there are ways it could be improved. Some of the inter-gameplay bits around the turn of dusk to dawn/dawn to dusk are really annoying with how they force the camera to pan around and prevent you from playing out of turn until that’s over.
My Overall Saljective™ Rating: 8/10. It should be no surprise that I really like this game based on how often you probably see my little Steam dialogue pop up on your screen saying “pipartuuli is now playing Armello” and whatnot. It’s a nice meshing of RPG and board game style play and it’s something you can sink some time into without realizing.