The king is sick with rot, the fantasy kingdom of Armello's most feared disease, which drags its host deeper into madness with each passing day. One ruler's misfortune is another woodland animal's opportunity. Rather than seeking an antidote, the leaders of Armello's various furry clans - hunchback bears, lithe wolves, weaponised-parasol bearing rabbits - have instead chosen this moment to make their move for the throne. As the palace falls into disarray while the king's advisors stoically continue to implement their commander's increasingly bizarre policies, you and three other rival clan leaders engage in a complicated tussle for power, which must be resolved, one way or another, before the king's looming death.
Armello, which transposes Shakespearean power-struggles to the realm of an anthropomorphised fantasy animal kingdom, is a competitive board game with a knot of rules and systems that, while initially daunting, soon prove legible. You take turns with the other three players to move your hero around the board, which is composed of hexes that represent woods, marshes, mountains and settlements, gathering resources and might while preparing to strike.
The date of the king's death is set. If nobody attempts to overthrow the king before his natural end, the player with the most prestige will succeed him, and win the game. Prestige is won, point-by-point, by successfully carrying out heroic acts: defeating other players in battle, completing quests, or looting dungeons. There are benefits to being the 'prestige leader' (the player with the most prestige points at any given moment), even before the king's death. This character has the king's ear. Each morning, when the king awakes, he presents the trusted clan leader with two potential declarations to choose between, which will usually impact everyone in the board. In the early stages of a game they are relatively vanilla (a demand that everyone pay the crown some taxes, for example) but as the king's madness deepens, they become increasingly radical (perhaps decreeing for all of the king's guardsmen to be replaced by leathery dragons).
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