Corruption and intrigue in a virtual animal kingdom court

The scene: A corrupt dictator receives a terminal diagnosis and is determined to burn his country down around himself. You are an elite powerbroker with fleeting access to the ruler during his slide into a murderous dementia. What do you do? Launch a coup d’etat? Or partner with the king to position yourself as the heir after his inevitable death?

Bible history is full of such stories—Saul, Athaliah, Belshazzar, Herod—and it’s easy to imagine similar dilemmas in today’s Syria and North Korea. The new video game Armello puts players in the same tense situation but with a storybook sheen. The king in this game is a dying lion (with more than a passing resemblance to Scar from Disney’s The Lion King) ruling an anthropomorphic kingdom of rabbits, wolves, bears, and rats jockeying to unseat him before he destroys everything. The cartoony graphics and animal avatars make Armello safe for young children, although the sinister text descriptions can be more unsettling than anything uttered by Narnia’s talking animals.

Players who have enjoyed boardgames like Settlers of Catan or Smallworld will quickly understand how Armello works. Four competitors maneuver for advantage across a claustrophobic layout of hexagons representing towns, swamps, and forests. But Armello has the advantage over the typical boardgame because it sandwiches layers of complex systems that would take too long at the kitchen table. The king’s canine troops alternately rescue or raid depending on the ruler’s whim, vile monsters roused by the king wreak havoc, and dynamic hazards litter the terrain.

Ethics are not usually an element of boardgames. No one agonizes about killing conscripts in Risk or charging excessive usury in Monopoly. In Armello, too, players can drift into playing it like a bloodless Game of Thrones, backstabbing and betraying cute animals on the way to intercept the mad king. But Armello has two factors that give it a moral tinge: collaboration and corruption.

At the opening of each day, the king gives the most influential player the dubious privilege of choosing between two bad policies, making the player morally complicit. These frequently force the player to choose between hurting themselves or harming the country, and the decrees increase in severity and madness as the king’s health deteriorates. At the same time, this collaboration positions players to inherit the throne when the king dies. As I played, I felt genuine anger at the king for making me dance in his destructive masquerade, even as I fought tooth and nail to win his ear.

The game uses an intriguing mechanic to measure the power of corruption, or “rot.” If two corrupt agents are fighting, the most rotten gains an advantage. And if a player is sufficiently rotten, the king’s demonic allies no longer attack the player. But a corrupt player has no edge over an innocent target. The result is that if a player is pure, it is enough merely to stay pure through the whole game. Players who flirt with evil are in a constant arms race both to be the most evil, and to make sure opponents have at least a little taint.

Armello (available for PlayStation4 and PC) supports multiple players, as any good boardgame should, but only over the internet between different machines. The game relies heavily on stealth and secrecy, impossible to recreate among players in the same room. The computer’s wolves and bears are decent enough competition, but the real solitaire fun comes from a series of bonus challenges (in the form of Playstation trophies and Steam achievements) that force players to exploit the game rules to their fullest.

If the random dice rolls in Settlers of Catan give you fits, Armello will be similarly maddening. The best-laid schemes of mice and wolfmen often run awry, thanks to unfortunate dice rolls and card draws. But the game, to its credit, is transparent about the odds players face, and a little pre-planning improves the chances. And even if your house of cards collapses, your animal allies can console themselves with the knowledge that the king’s reign of terror is over—at least until you restart the game.