One of the simple pleasures that has been denied by the Covid-19 pandemic has been that of getting a group of friends together to play a board game. Obviously, there is no proper substitute for in-person play with friends and family. That said, apps like Tabletop Simulator do a good job satisfying that itch as best as can be.
Another potential salve are virtual board games that invoke the feeling of tabletop, while still leveraging the medium to do things that are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to pull off in a pure tabletop setting. Alongside my old friend Chris, we play one such board game: Armello.
The king has fallen to rot and corruption, and his days are numbered. We can't save him, nor would we want to. Instead, it's time to see who will fill the vacuum of power, ascending to the throne.
To be honest, it was oddly relaxing to just sit with Chris and a couple of randos and just play a board game for a while. I've been looking for an excuse to launch and play this game for a while now, and when our initial plan fell though, this became an excellent backup.
For those not aware, this game was a Kickstarter-supported project back in 2014, when there the likes of Pillars of Eternity and what would go on to become Broken Age started the trend of independent developers turning to crowd funding as a way to avoid groveling at the feet of large AAA publishing houses.
And while that's an interesting backstory in its own right, the other fascinating aspect of it is that become they made significant headway on the version we played, there was a physical prototype that served as a proof of concept for the underlying structure and gameplay systems. I remember when I played this game for the first time. My immediate thought was that I liked the way it felt like playing a good old fashioned board game, and it would be easy to translate these systems to tabletop.
But the devil in the details. Keeping track of perils, modifiers, stats, quests & quest progress, and all of the many things we can take for granted because a computer is handling the heavy lifting is difficult work. To do all of it real time required two human game masters, separate from all the other players, to handle that workload, according to the dev team.
This complexity is part of why there's just a high layer of strategy to the game. There are many paths to success, and while luck does play a significant factor, players who know what they're doing and tip the odds in their favor with skilled play and careful consideration of the board state.
At the same time, the big criticism I have of the game is that there is often, but not always the "Monopoly Moment". As I pointed out in that same with the random other players, Barnaby had pretty much closed locked down the board. If he just sat there, there nothing the rest of us could have done to win...
...except we still have to keep playing because there's still a chance he makes a crucial mistake, which he did, allowing the Zosha player to snipe victory from him at the last possible second. Most of the time, such grand mistakes won't happen, but we all have to keep playing despite the fact the winner is obvious because that slim hope that he can be disposed as surely as The King himself exists. In that moment, Zosha knew exactly what she needed to do in order to secure her victory.
It's a fun game that I wish I had more people to play with.
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