Every turn your draw enough cards to fill your hand (up to the amount of wit your character has) and you use your mana or coins to either equip gear, use spells, or play trickery cards. Every “round” is a lengthy affair, consisting of two turns per player, a day turn and a night turn. Speaking of stats, you have four that you manage: fight, which is how many dice you use in battle defense, your health total wits, the amount of cards you can hold in your hand and spirit, your spell magic. Spell cards can be treacherous for unprepared victims. Unless you’ve built up your stats high enough, it’s hard to counter the king’s high dice count. In fact, throughout much of my play time, I wondered why any one would even attempt to kill the king or enter the palace when it was such a treacherous ordeal. Of all these ways to win, prestige is by far the easiest approach. There are several ways to claim the throne: through sheer prestige, which you gain from completing quests and slaying enemies (including other players) by collecting four soul stones and presenting them to the king by killing the king or by using the game’s Rot to your advantage. It’s up to you, as one of the eight unique animal characters to take up that throne for your clan (wolf, bear, rat, or rabbit). The premise is thus: the king of Armello has fallen ill with Rot, the land’s evil, and after nine days, he will perish, leaving one of the four players on the board left to claim the throne in that time. And yet, I can’t stop playing it.Īrmello is strategy game from League of Geeks that fits in perfectly with my board game analogy because that’s essentially what it is: a board game beautifully rendered into a video game landscape. Looking at my time spent with Armello on the Xbox One, I am inclined to feel the same way about the game’s progression. Relying solely on luck is a frustrating mechanic for everyone playing except that game’s winner. For instance, every game of Life demands a player to be uncharacteristically good at spinning a wheel or pulling blind cards in order beat their opponents, thusly leading to angry accusations of cheating or outright quitting. There’s something extremely infuriating about a board game that relies entirely on luck.

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