Armello: The Board Game

It’s March 29, 2024, and I’m in the kinda unique position of reporting that a game I had a blast designing has already made a treasure-trove on Kickstarter and still has about a week to roll. It’s Armello: The Board Game, a deckbuilding adventure board game of furry animal heroes with swords questing to take the throne from their corrupt King . . . over each other’s (temporarily) dead bodies!

Armello: The Board Game is being published by friends at King of the Castle, aka the wonderful creators of Campaign Coins. I’ve been writing occasional design notes you can find in the Kickstarter page’s updates and the game has just hit a stretch goal where I’ll loop back into the game to design two fistfuls of magic Amulets. It’s time I stepped away from an all-out push to finish 13th Age Second Edition’s next playtest packet to talk about the game that’s already being crowdfunded!

This board game version of Armello inherited a huge trove of goodness from the earlier digital game from League of Geeks. The digital game originally featured on Kickstarter and was supported with new cards and hero clans and game expansions for many years. Hundreds of beautiful cards, cool custom dice with magical symbols, and cutthroat anthropomorphic animal heroes on a quest to usurp a Corrupt king has translated into a competitive deckbuilding quest-and-combat boardgame . . . though ‘translated’ isn’t the right word. I aimed to create a game in a new medium that captured the spirit and evoked the feel of the original.

Digital games can do a lot of things that aren’t repeatable on tabletop. Then midway through the design, I turned the digital game’s more traditional style of cardplay into a deckbuilding experience. Partly that’s because I love deckbuilding games. And partly it’s because deckbuilding felt like a great metaphor for character growth and experience. Each hero has their own unique starter and experience decks as well as cards they can buy from the market or win as treasure.

There are six days to go for the Kickstarter, plus some time in the post-crowdfunding phase. I’m not sure I’ll be designing for more stretch goals, but I do know that the design note I just wrote talks about a possible expansion.

If you do nothing else, check out the cool Kickstarter video! When you play the digital game, you’ll recognize the narrator as the voice of the King.