Armello guide - How to make sense of the madness

Armello is a richly detailed and complex board game that layers on a ton mechanics and victory conditions such that no two games are alike. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the game uses dice rolls, card draws, and other chance-based systems to determine outcomes. When you first start playing Armello, you might think the key to winning is simply getting lucky, but that’s where you’d be mistaken. Check out some of these tips to help you make the randomness work for you.

Pick the right character

There’s quite a few different characters in Armello, but each of them have their own unique stats and abilities. When playing, you should look to play as characters that help you achieve the goals you tend to pursue in any given match.

Do you usually find yourself dueling other characters? Choose Thane for his high combat stats and his ability to pierce armor with burned sword cards. If you prefer messing with your opponents in subtler ways? Perhaps play as Mercurio to steal their gold. If you’re not sure who to play as just yet, you can also opt to play as Amber while you try to figure things out, as she’s a decent all-around character.

Don’t limit yourself

Going into a match of Armello, you might decide the kind of victory condition you want to pursue based on your character choice and gear loadout, but don’t let that stop you from potentially pursuing others. Although you might have primed yourself for a specific kind of victory, you shouldn’t try to fight the game to make things go your way.

If a Spirit Stone pops up near you, grab it, even if you didn’t necessarily want to win by killing the King. You might just find yourself in possession of all four, and—even if you don’t—you’ll be preventing another player from getting them. “Going with the flow” like this will often set you up with more opportunities to approaching victories, even if they don’t seem as direct as keeping focus on any single victory condition.

Burn, baby, burn

In Armello, you will do well if you can find ways to eliminate risk better than other players. One of the easiest ways to do this is by burning cards whenever you have to roll dice. Burning cards allows you to sacrifice your hand in order to guarantee certain outcomes on dice rolls, which is almost always a good idea.

Even if you’ve drawn cards that seem like they might be good later in the game, you’re almost always better off burning them to grant yourself a guaranteed edge in the short term instead of hoping to be able to use them at an optimal time in the future. With the amount of variability in Armello, you can’t assume you can save things and use them for later. So, unless a card is immediately useful within the next turn or two, it’s almost always better to use it to help control your dice rolls than holding onto it.

Armello is a game of Wits

During a match of Armello, you can complete quests to improve your character’s stats, and the most important one try and upgrade—almost completely regardless of who you play as—is Wits. Wits determines how many cards you can have in your hand at any given time, and having a high number of cards in hand is crucial to doing well in Armello.

Having more cards in your hand means you have a higher chance of drawing the cards you want. It also means you have a higher capacity to burn cards to eliminate risk in dice roll situations. You may not want to only pursue upgrading your Wits as you quest in any given match, but it almost always helps to improve it where you can.