Armello - It's Like A Game Of Thrones, But With Furries

[tgb]

This can be a great game by the time it's finished.

Armello is a board game with cards and dice.  The premise is that the King of the Forest (a lion, natch) has come down with something called The Rot, a disease of body and soul, and has 9 days to live.  Four woodland creatures are vying to take over the throne.  The 4 currently in-game line up with RPG archetypes - the wolf (fighter), rat (thief), rabbit  (mage), and bear (cleric).  All have different attributes and all play a little differently.  There are 4 more animals that are supposed to be available when the game is released.

Each day is split into a day phase and a night phase, so the game is at most 18 turns, and, once you learn the ropes, takes about an hour to play solo (I haven't tried multi player yet). Each turn you spend AP's moving around a procedurally-generated game board fighting each other, solving quests, exploring dungeons, and trying to increase your stock of gold, mana, and prestige. Oh yeah, and playing cards to really screw with the other players.

There are 4 ways to win, 3 of which involve getting past the traps in the castle to the King himself (not easy).  You can cure his case of Rot with Spirit Stones, infect him further by spreading the rot yourself, or just outright kill him in battle. If nobody has won by the end of the last day, the player with the most Prestige is declared winner.

One thing worth noting is that the game is gorgeous.  The cards are all individually animated, and the characters and board look like something out of Ralph Bakshi or Don Bluth.  It's currently in Early Access, and pretty pricey at $25.  There are still technical issues, as I've only been able to play one game to completion - the rest have been plagued by CTD's.  Other people have reported no problems so if you feel lucky, punk, go for it.

[FarAway Sooner]

I nominate this thread for Best Title of the Week!  The game looks intriguing, assuming that they get the game play sufficiently solid and don't focus overly  much on the cutesy aspect.  The cutesy aspect can actually be novel and fun, it just needs solid game play even more than other games to avoid being annoying.

[PanzersEast]

Das does a LP...

[Nefaro]

Das does a LP...

If that's his first vid in the series, then he will probably just be reading the game settings and setup aloud for 30 minutes. 

[PanzersEast]

Das does a LP...

If that's his first vid in the series, then he will probably just be reading the game settings and setup aloud for 30 minutes. 

lol yea... he does finish his first game in subsequent videos... but yea fast forward!  :D

PE

[Toonces]

Goddammit, I wish I had thought of this idea for a game!   >:(

Looks awesome...I gotta keep an eye on this.   O0

[JasonPratt]

Early Access where? Steam?

[tgb]

This is officially out today.  I've been playing a bit this week and the AI seems solid.  Here's a look at 1.0:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwgKKLohMv0

[FarAway Sooner]

This one did look interesting to me.  I'd love an early report, from anybody who's had a chance to play.

[Nefaro]

Despite my aversion to the 3D character art, I was intrigued with the gameplay and I'm a sucker for these tabletop style games.

The gameplay is pretty damn fun & engaging. 

I have a couple graphics complaints, although I've only played it on my notebook with the GT640M card in it.  When the game first started, it was both windowed & offset to the side.  I had to ALT+ENTER a few times, and cycle the in-game resolution once, to get it properly centered and full screen.  After that, it's been fine.

My second issue is that the highest map zoom levels have some useless ass fog & blur, which makes it almost impossible to make out details on the map underneath.  Think of Total War Rome 2's level of clouds (on full zoom out) floating over the whole damn map, and that is comparable.  I wouldn't complain so much about this if I could zoom out a reasonable distance in order to examine a wide area on the map at once, but at the x768 resolution I can only fit about four hexes wide and three high.  And you get 3 AP every turn, which is three regular terrain hexes, so you can get an idea of how much map scrolling I have to do for planning my moves ahead.  That layer of zoom out fog & blur is just useless as tits on a bull and actually frustrates me when I'm trying to formulate a movement plan.

Those bitches aside, I definitely enjoyed my first full game.  The characters each have their own flavor, but are still flexible enough to achieve most or all of the numerous game winning conditions.  There are numerous different mechanics that provide varied choices every turn on how you want to approach that victory.  I'm not sure exactly how balanced the different characters are, but with all the options that come up during the game it shouldn't be bad if it's even an issue at all.   There's a lot more going on in the gameplay than I originally expected, and that's a good thing.  Well worth the $20 I spent on it.

[tgb]

The developers sort of answered the issue of the fog when the camera is pulled all the way out. The short answer is they don't want people playing zoomed out that far, and feel the game is best played zoomed all the way in and using hot keys to find you way around the map (space to zoom toyour character, q to the next quest location, and so forth).

This of course raises the question of why put it in in the first place. People on the Steam forum are yammering for an option to turn it off.

[Bison]

I hate these sorts of effects in a game unless they are expressly used to create fog of war.

[Nefaro]

The developers sort of answered the issue of the fog when the camera is pulled all the way out. The short answer is they don't want people playing zoomed out that far, and feel the game is best played zoomed all the way in and using hot keys to find you way around the map (space to zoom toyour character, q to the next quest location, and so forth).

This of course raises the question of why put it in in the first place. People on the Steam forum are yammering for an option to turn it off.

For creating a very tabletop-like game, they practically force you to play it with your nose touching the game board.  Goddamn ridiculous, the justification put forth.  ::)

It's playable, and even pretty enjoyable.  Just a terrible design decision that not only fails to add anything to the experience, but is detrimental to it.

[JasonPratt]

But not TOO CLOSE to the board. Because then everything around the hex you're currently looking at goes out of focus. Instead of all the hexes blurring out if you zoom out even slightly.

The zoom issue is one thousand percent annoying, and absolutely not needed for the fog of war BECAUSE THERE'S ALREADY A FREAKING MECHANIC SPECIFICALLY DEDICATED TO CREATING FOG OF WAR!!

It's an artistic effect? Fine. Make it optional. I have hope they'll do this pronto.

Played through the tutorial, not entirely sure I understand all the relevant mechanics, but close enough. Might do a DAR on a new campaign.

[Nefaro]

But not TOO CLOSE to the board. Because then everything around the hex you're currently looking at goes out of focus. Instead of all the hexes blurring out if you zoom out even slightly.

The zoom issue is one thousand percent annoying, and absolutely not needed for the fog of war BECAUSE THERE'S ALREADY A FREAKING MECHANIC SPECIFICALLY DEDICATED TO CREATING FOG OF WAR!!

It's an artistic effect? Fine. Make it optional. I have hope they'll do this pronto.

Indeed!

Played through the tutorial, not entirely sure I understand all the relevant mechanics, but close enough. Might do a DAR on a new campaign.

The biggest thing the Tutorial scenarios didn't get into was the effects of gaining 'Rot' points.  But you can look that up on the in-game help files for the details & hard numbers.