"We'd get together, play it for a couple of hours and then sit up for a few more hours discussing the mechanics and what we enjoyed. "It was just like a board game design club," explains artist Ty Carey. "About version ten, we honed for maybe six more revisions because when we got to version ten it was like 'Yep, this is it.'" "We went through about ten prototypes during that time," says Kusters. We felt it was a complete injustice because the iPad is such a fantastic platform to do digital board games."Īfter eight months of evening prototyping on their "passion project," Kusters and his colleagues finally had something they were comfortable with. "They were, frankly, just not acceptable. "We were all playing board games on our iPad and, back then, they were all atrocious," says designer Trent Kusters. Heroes can clash with one another or negotiate what are inevitably shaky alliances. Three years ago, League of Geeks (who describe themselves as a "development collective" whose day jobs have them working on other projects) came together out of hours with the intention of creating a board game for tablets that would make the most of what the platform had to offer. It's akin to making two games, one after the other, and it certainly hasn't been a quick process. That iteration was only a means to an end, a way for the team to rigorously test its mechanics and balance before it transcended our material plane to become electronic entertainment. It's a digital incarnation of an entirely original board game, a fantasy game that League of Geeks first created in physical form. It's a validation for League of Geeks, the patchwork development team behind the project because, while Kickstarter is often a source of funding for many niche projects, it's fair to say that Armello is particularly niche, perhaps even quite singular.Īrmello's developers call it a "digital board game" but it's not simply an app conversion of an existing board game. As I finished it, it achieved that success, comfortably passing the $200,000 AUD mark with a couple of days still to run. As I began writing this preview, Armello was on the cusp of Kickstarter success.
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