Armello v1.2 The Stranger has Arrived

By Rebecca Smith,

Heyo Armellians!

The Stranger, v1.2 has arrived on Steam in all it’s glory! This is our second, free, major update since launch, jam-packed with fun stuff that we’re excited to tell you all about it. If you’re the type of person that prefers patch notes rather than my charming summary, first of all, ouch. Second of all, here you go!

As always, for the purpose of ensuring this update is stable experience for PS4 and DRM Free, this update will land on these platforms a few weeks down the track,

First of all, a gross new Dice Skin event is live right now, so play Public Multiplayer games to unlock the limited and exclusive Stranger Dice. This event will end Wednesday 24th PST.

This time, you'll get one set within the first 1 - 2 Public Multiplayer games you play, and then another set every 3 - 6 other Public Multiplayer games you play. This will ensure you get your set quickly but will allow for hoarding, gifting and trading through Steam's Inventory system.

The Stranger

The Stranger is a mysterious and powerful Follower card that does not abide by the standard deck rules. When a Hero stumbles across it in a Dungeon, it insists on joining their adventure and nothing will stop it from doing so. Not even other Followers. If The Stranger’s Hero dies in combat, it will manipulate its way into the party of the victor and continue with its torment.

If The Stranger is in your party, at the start of your turn, it will lead you to a random adjacent tile at no AP cost. This effect can be a nuisance but if harnessed correctly, can be incredibly powerful.

And a few words of wisdom, The Stranger absolutely cannot stand the Palace.

New House Rules

Here we have a few options for you to play with that completely shift the dynamic of the game. We like to keep the experience of smashing your friends fresh, so please enjoy these new game changing rules.

• King Dawn Damage: By turning The King’s standard dawn damage off,
• The King will continue to rule Armello until the heroes intervene.
• The Mad King: Each night, The King ensures there are at least 4 perils on the board.
• Starting Hand Type: There are three options here, Default; an even distribution of Item, Spell and Trickery cards, Random; start with completely random cards and Draw; Choose which decks to draw your starting hand from on your first turn.
• Hero Wits: Heroes gain a passive bonus to Wits.
• Hero Starting Equipment: Each hero starts with either a random Treasure or a random Follower.

New Cards

With this shiny new batch of interesting cards, we are really focusing on forethought and strategy. Block an opponent's path by casting a Rotten Fog or stop them by force by standing in their way, armed with a Tower Shield. Avoid confrontation by forcing an opponent into an Armistice and steal the King's ear by hosting a most splendid Bubble Tea party.

• Tower Shield (Item): In Battle, +1 Shield, and when Defending gain another +1 Shield.
• Bubble Tea (Item): (Play on) Hero, +1 Prestige until the end of target's next Turn.
• Rotten Fog (Spell): (Play on Empty Tile) Plains, Forest, Dungeon; Creates a toxic -1 Health Fog on the Tile until next Dawn
• Armistice (Trickery): (Play on) Hero (Not Self); If either Hero attacks the other, they'll be given a Bounty

Gameplay Improvements

All Heroes have had their Body Stat increased by one. Here’s a snippet of insight regarding this decision from LoG Design Guru and Co-Founder, Blake.

“One (1) Body is usually all there is between death and hanging on by your last thread. And being close to death feels better than being dead. Now, with the Body increase, if you hit a nasty Peril or fail your first battle there’s a good chance that instead of death, you’ll escape, broken, bleeding but alive. You can then heal, flee, strike back, but most importantly it gives you that choice. Basically, giving all Heroes +1 Body, gives players room to make “some” mistakes and lessens the impact of random and opportunistic occurrences.”

Read Blake’s full dissection here.

In addition to this, significant tweaks have been made to Card costs, primarily in the Trickery Deck to further promote interesting choices in card play. Oh, and let’s not forget Stealth. We have made stealth even more sneaky by hiding certain actions from the status feed and removing a few other unavoidable “tells”.

Muiltiplayer Improvements

We learnt a lot from the Winter Dice event. Lesson one was that people love their frosty dice. Lesson two was that all sorts of characters come out of the woodwork, including AFKers and hackers. At the end of the day, we want people to enjoy playing Armello in it’s purest form and will always fight to preserve that. As such, we have added AFK timers and improved Steam VAC (anti-hack protection).

Visual Improvements

Have you ever taken a step before remembering that you were Poisoned a minute ago? Well this should happen less, now that the Poisoned effect is now very obvious. You’ll find that a few other cards have fancy new visualisations too.

The most obvious improvement that we’ve made in terms of visuals is increasing text size in most areas once again. This makes Armello more accessible overall and more effectively accommodates players who like to sit further from the screen, say, in a lounge room setting.

Also! A Deck shuffle graphic has been implemented which notifies all players when a Deck has been depleted and is in the process of being replenished. This further fortifies the board-game-y-ness of Armello and assists high level players in tracking essential cards.

Hotfix v1.2

So it turns out that The Stranger brought along some unexpected bugs that we have tracked down and hopefully obliterated. Thanks to all who reached out with detailed descriptions and logs. If you encounter further issues, please be sure to let us know.

Bug Fixes
• Transferring The Stranger after a combat death now function correctly.
• The Stranger will now correctly flee when it's hero lands on a Palace tile.
• Perils that have been peeked at are now always correctly dismissible.

Known Issues
• If you start your turn on a Quest The Stranger will move you but you will still encounter the Quest.
• There are some NMA's being caused from the Stranger moving you into certain states before Card Draw.
• If you play two cards on a human player Hero in quick succession the target may NMA.

That's a Wrap

The crew here at LoG are in a really good rhythm at the moment, so future updates and even unannounced super top secret DLC are well underway. We have so much more exciting content to share with you but for the time being we hope you have a ball with v1.2.

If you like Armello and you want, positive reviews on Steam go a really long way in making us feel warm and fuzzy, along with increasing our overall visibility.

Thank you all for your support!

<3 Darcy and the LoG Crew

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Written by Rebecca Smith

Rebecca is the Newshound Manager at TrueSteamAchievements, TrueAchievements and TrueTrophies. She has been contributing articles since 2010, especially those that involve intimidatingly long lists. When not writing news, she can usually be found sharpening her very, VERY, pointy grammar stick in anticipation of its imminent use. Outside of TSA, TA and TT, she works in an independent game shop so that she can spend all day talking about games too. At home, with a variety of PCs and consoles on hand from which to choose, starting with a ZX Spectrum, games are never far away there either. However, as you're not supposed to have an unhealthy obsession with just a single subject, she also likes to read and dream about owning her own tribe of minions. She'll occasionally go outside.