Armello Board Game All

Armello released on 9-1-15 and it's pretty good. Maybe let's talk about it and set up some games?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/290340/

Played through the tutorial and a first game. Managed to squeak by as the one of the bear clan with a prestige victory.

I like it but I think it would really shine with actual people.

I'm hoping to give this a go this weekend played locally. Maybe, kinda depends on if Demyx is up for it.

getting a skype game of this going this weekend is pretty high on my list of things to do.

It makes a ton of sense after your first full game.

I'd be interested in doing some eventually too, when I get around to checking it out, that is.

I picked this up on PS4 today. I played through the tutorials and two full games vs AI.

I won both games when an AI attacked the King and both of them died. In both games I was able to maintain Prestige Leader for the second half of the game.

In the first game I was the rabbit Amber. I used a lot of spells and explored a lot of dungeons to utilize her bonus. Along with completing prestige quests I held Prestige Leader. When the king had 3 hearts left an AI went after him and they both died.

In the second game I played Brun the Bear. I found one of the four glowing stones very early and decided to go for that victory. I ended up fighting two AI's over and over getting to them and usually winning. I tended to hold back my cards for dice rolls. I managed to get all four stones but an AI attacked the king when he had two hearts left and they both died. I won a second Prestige victory.

I've found myself thinking a lot this evening about what I should or shouldn't have done. I'll be trying an online game tonight after my daughter is asleep. I really like it so far.

I wish wished this won the voting. Damnit.

Got this for PS4 and have so far only gotten around to the tutorial and a single game.
Lost the game as I was a bit slow in deciding which strategy to follow and then trying for a brute force victory when my stone collecting strategy kept getting rejected by unlucky rolls. Rabbit won a prestige victory when the rat killed the king and died in the assault.
I think this game will grow boring quickly if only played against the AI, but it has loads of potential when playing with friends.

How much is it? I'm definitely interested by on a tight money week. BLARGH.

It is talked about on Three Moves Ahead, BTW. Definitely worth a listen. They have some critiques, but it sounds really great to me and the look / visual design is raved about.

$20 on Steam. I expect PSN charges the same amount.

shoptroll wrote:

$20 on Steam. I expect PSN charges the same amount.

Yeah, it's $19.99 normally, but the PS+ price is 13.99 until...the 7th, I believe? Don't quote me on that, I thought I had read it somewhere but I can't seem to find it now.

EDIT: September 8th @ 9am PT/12pm ET.

That's a nice discount... But $20 isn't bad either. And I've still got my eye on Galak-Z (and need to play to support a friend who worked on it.)

MODERN LIFE IS HARD.

Played through the tutorial and one AI game on PS4 last night.

- Smallest text I've ever seen in a PS4 game. Stuff like card descriptions is simply unreadable from where I normally sit
- Other than that, lovely presentation
- Game is fairly slow, of course much of your time is just hanging out during other player turns. Plus I found that frequently I'd have a turn where I was unable to accomplish much of anything.
- Early on I got a quest on the opposite side of the game board from my starting area and was never able to make it that far without getting killed and sent back to square one. Is there any way to abandon quests and get a new one?
- The one game I did play took quite a while, like over an hour. I'm sure this varies especially against real players but it just kinda dragged on.
- The variety of ways to win seems cool, but as a noob it's hard to know what to focus on other than just trying for Prestige

Anyway I'm kinda on the fence about the game. Maybe I'll fire it up again on a lazy sunday afternoon.

I am REALLY digging the art style on this one. Anyone know the name of the lead animator or designers?

These guys.

(Not sure who did what. They refer to themselves as a "collective" and I think everyone does a little bit of everything.)

The developers are pretty active on the Armello subreddit.

They've said the text will be enlarged.

Looks like some people are getting various bugs like the AI not taking its turn.

For your cards - press -> twice and it will zoom in on the card.

Online games take 2-3 times as long as vs AI games but everyone is learning as they go.

I'm disappointed in the lack of local multiplayer, the dev says that was never planned and they may look at in the future but don't count on it.

I've now played with both bears, both wolves and the rabbit Amber. The Armello Wiki says some of the heroes are for kickstarter backers only but I seem to have them unlocked.

The Bandit clan was supposed to be exclusive to backers, but the devs were going to have issues with implementing that for one of the platforms. So they held a poll and backers I think decided they were ok with making it a timed exclusive. Not sure if there's something weird going on that I missed since that plan was announced prior to the PS4 port announcement.

As for artists, they credited the artists for the card previews they did in their updates on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...

This game is currently broken on the latest OSX El Capitan dev seed. No idea if it works on Yosemite though. I'll probably be playing on PS4 until the Mac version is sorted.

[edit]

*sigh* The animation in the cinematics is all jittery on PS4. I hope the game doesn't follow suit.

mrwynd wrote:

I'm disappointed in the lack of local multiplayer, the dev says that was never planned and they may look at in the future but don't count on it.

I knew this before I bought it but still it's kind of disappointing though. It makes sense though, if you're playing locally you'd need to have those you play with leave the room or something when you look through your cards. Of course that's just what I had to do when playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3 in hot seat mode.
Now if someone would just put this game on Wii U and use screen on the gamepad for the cards and it would be brilliant.

tracking post

Picked this up last night for the PS4. Started a full game pretty late so I wasn't entirely engaged, ended up losing the match due to some bad luck with rolls. Had four crystals but three times I was one die short of completing the challenge at the castle. King ended up dying of corruption and I ended up taking second in prestige.

Reminds me a lot of the Mage Knight board game, which is cool. I can see the game getting a bit stale against AI after awhile, though. It'd be awesome if they added some sort of solo campaign mode with faster sessions that had smaller goals to accomplish. That might require a rebalance of some of the cards, though, so I could see it being a challenge.

I really do love the concept and the artwork is great. Seems like there's just enough interesting decisions to make with a good dose of luck to keep things interesting. Probably my favorite thing is that the penalty for getting killed isn't too severe; it sets you back on time and prestige but depending on where you are in the game it's not that hard to recover.

Anyone know if they are planning on making a physical version? It falls right in the Mage Knight/Runebound/Return of the Heroes/The Witcher/etc. style of adventure RPG board game. I think Mage Knight is the best of that style but I could see this being up there for simplicity and fun. Unlike many of those other games the PvP combat is actually fun and not too punishing to the loser.

Yeah a physical game would be great, though there are potentially a lot of fiddly bits. I was working through the tutorial with my daughter and darn but this game is complicated. I think we got 3/4 of the way through the tutorial in an hour or so, and that was with her accidentally skipping important bits of the dialog. They also forget to tell you how to do certain key things, like what you press to roll the dice, so at points in the tutorial you're just randomly pressing buttons in hopes of activating the thing they've instructed.

If you're not going for a Prestige victory don't worry about dying. Sometimes it's a very good tactic to die if your quest is near your start point. Your first quest will be near your start point. The second quest is on the opposite side. The third quest is again near your start point. It's much faster to die after completing the second quest.

I've found alternating quests of Fight and Hearts is the path to killing the king.

Completing all of your quests is important for any victory as the final quest gives you free entrance into the Palace:

IMAGE(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5824/20520589523_96902aeebf_b.jpg)

When entering the Palace you still receive the warning about losing Prestige and a great Peril - but that doesn't actually happen. This is the screen that comes up after you step into the quest tile inside the Palace:

IMAGE(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5747/20953560290_eb45ef109a_b.jpg)

Here's a video of me slaughtering the King when he has 3 health remaining as Barnaby. The suit of armor gives -1 action points but +3 armor. It's perfect to equip when entering the palace.

If I get these two items together early in the game I almost never lose:

IMAGE(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5727/21141688025_aca5f044b1_o.jpg)

Anyone up for a 4p game at some point? The ai aint doing it for me.

I just received this as a gift and it's great fun. Still learning, but for some reason I thought it was a relatively trad RPG. It's not. It's a turn-based board game with cards and unique map and play each game.

I'll be playing this for a while, I think.

I fired this up yesterday, after picking it up during the winter sale, as a much-needed break from my work crunch.

You can see the boardgame roots pretty clearly, and I've been enjoying what I've seen quite a bit.

The constraints on map size and the timer mechanic of the corrupted king set a nice upper bound on how long a game can last, while still allowing enough variety to be interesting (so far at least).

Look forward to playing more once this work crunch passes.

Lemme know if you want to play some multi, I love this trashy little high variance game.

Picked this up on Ps4, it's on sale for $8 until Tuesday July 12. I hope to get a play in later today.

Scaphism wrote:

Picked this up on Ps4, it's on sale for $8 until Tuesday July 12. I hope to get a play in later today.

Scaphism wrote:

Picked this up on Ps4, it's on sale for $8 until Tuesday July 12. I hope to get a play in later today.

I also picked it up. Haven't played it yet. Apparently the MP is quite fun. Maybe we should set a GWJ night!

I got this from a friend aaaages ago and have only just dusted it off. It's good! Really enjoying it.

It's a fun game I wish held up better.