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Review of Armymals
Blurb from the publisher: 'Forget the zoo, forget Madagaskar, real animals join the army!
Welcome to the world of Armymals. The greatest leaders of the animal kingdoms compete for the title of the furry general. Help your team move around an interactive battlefield and pin down the enemies under a heavy fire or outplay them strategically with capturing flags and control points. Master the Armymals dice, build your team from 33 available characters and shuffle the action, skill and mission decks. Finally, set up the game board environment with the high quality miniatures and enjoy the tranquility while it lasts. Soon, the Armymals will bring it on!'
What you get: Your EUR 40 or equivalent will buy you Armymals, a game of animal warfare for 2-4 players that can be played in around 45 minutes. The box contains the following: the Rulebook in English, a 47,5 x 42,5 cm gameboard, 33 Large Animal cards, 60 Action cards, 66 Skill cards, 26 Mission cards, 8 Tank models, 24 Tank tokens, 6 Base Hex/Flag tokens, 40 Damage tokens, 12 Used Skill tokens, 30 Acorn tokens, 10 Acorn/Nut tokens, 20 Armor tokens, 29 Victory Points tokens, 30 Control tokens, 6 Flag tokens, 7 Location models, 4 Chop Chop tokens, 4 Forest tokens, 1 World Oak token, 12 Forest models, 12 Mountain models, one Mill model, 2 Tractor models, 2 Haystack models, 2 Barn Models, 6 Armymals dice, 6 Active Tank tokens and 6 Poison tokens.
Gameplay: In Armymals players control two or more tanks and combat each other trying to obtain 7 Victory Points (VPs) or another number they agree upon. To earn them a player must meet the specific requirements of each Operation that is valid in the Mode of play. The rulebook describes 13 Operations, from Annihilation (2 VPs to the player that deals the killing blow to a tank) to Capture the Flag (3 VPs to a player that enters an empty base hex and captures its flag) to Secret Missions (secret missions with different amounts of VPs). There are 5 Modes of play: Classic, Deathmatch, Wide Front, Tank Wars 2.0, and Mechasquirrel Madness. Each of them accommodates a different number of players (from 2 to 4), has a different difficulty level (novice, normal, advanced, expert) and lasts anything from 30 minutes to two hours. Each mode works with particular Operations; for example Deathmatch contains Operations Die Another Day (destroyed tanks are permanently removed) and Skills that Kill (extra skills of the animals that players are using are mixed into the Actions card deck and can be used by anyone).
I run the playests at Classic mode, a kind of longer 2 to 4 free-for all extravaganza. It provided more diversity and a more nuanced play than the straightforward Deathmatch, where the winner is the last man standing.
Each player begins with a Flag, 5 Control tokens, 2 Tank models, the corresponding Tank tokens and an Active Tank token, as well as three random Animal cards. He also receives one Action card, and allocates his animals to the tanks. Two become the Drivers of each tank and one becomes the Commander of the whole team. Commanders can only use Command as a skill once per turn, and must usually pay Acorns for it. Passive skills also exist. Drivers on the other hand have stats on Health, Range and Move, while they can use their Driver skill once only during the whole game. As an example, Catherine the Great (a cat dressed in pink regal attire and all sorts of silverware) gains 2 Acorns instead of one every time an Acorn comes up on the die, while Sir Francis Drake (a drake in half-Victorian and half-Asian attire) can draw one random Action card from another player’s hand at a cost of 2 Acorns. If the same characters were however Drivers, Catherine would have had a Health 7, Range 2 and Move 3, and could have blocked her opponents from using Driver and Commander skills as well as Action cards until the tank’s next turn. Sir Francis on the other hand would have had a Health 8, Range 2 and Move 2 and could have drawn one random Action card from each opponent’s hand. Depending on the initial three Animal cards and the tactics a player wants to go for, he’d better choose wisely.
Players alternate turns. A player can execute a turn with one tank only. It is mandatory to execute the next turn with the other tank, i.e. a player will never play the same tank two turns in a row. There are few preparatory actions in each turn: exchanging the Active Tank token between Drivers, Removing Armour from the Active Tank (usually because it has expired), Ending Effects that last until this tank’s next turn, Using Cards and Skills before rolling (the opponents can do the same), and finally Rolling Dice. Six dice are rolled, with five different outcomes: three are about adding 1 or 2 on either Movement or Range, another deals 1 damage, the fifth gains the player an Acorn while a sixth allows for the tank’s or the turret’s rotation in any direction. A player can also use two identical dice to draw an action card instead of the result they describe. Dice can be rerolled up to two times each, the second reroll however is final.
Movement, as well as shooting, depends on the dice. The spin result is the only one that allows the turret of the tank to be turned autonomously, saving the player the whole hassle (and expense in rolled dice) to move the tank along with the turret. Moving forwards costs one Movement, backwards two Movements, entering water +1 to what was already used, while rotating on the same hex by 60 degrees also costs one. Apart from water there is also impassable terrain, namely everything that is not a token but a model: Forests, Mountains, the Barns, the Haystacks, the Mill and the Tractor.
Shooting requires not only Acorns (each one is a separate attack dealing one damage), but also for the target to be in your turret’s arc of site and for you to have clear view towards him: in other words, no impassable terrain or other tanks must be on your sights before him. Your Range depends on the Driver you chose for that Tank, even though you can increase it by the appropriate dice rolls. Armour may protect your tank’s frontal part. If your tank takes as many hits as its Driver’s health, it is destroyed. Don’t allow that to happen!
During his turn a player can play as many Action and Skill cards as he wishes; he is only not allowed to end up with more than five at the end of his turn. A similar rule prohibits the accumulation of Accorns. If a player reaches eight or more he ‘goes nuts’, loses half of them and his active tank receives two damage. Should it be destroyed, the player loses a VP too.
Armymals also has detailed rules concerning its strategic locations (yes, the Barn, the Mill etc), how to control them, to reclaim them from enemy control etc, how to take and block flags and so on and so forth. Its Mission cards may give VPs for anything from ‘Dealing 5 or more damage in one turn’ (1 VP) to ‘Deal 3 damage, drive 2 hexes backwards, rotate the turret and draw 2 cards on the same turn’ (3VP)’. Its skill cards, which are also divided into Driver and Commander and apply to each animal separately, provide additional powers to any player. Horsatio Nelson as a Driver can choose the result of an opponent’s roll instead of the opponent actually rolling, for a cost of five Acorn. On the other hand, as a Commander his 1 rolls increase both range and movement for the remainder of the game for the cost of four Acorns. The Action card deck on the other hand includez jewels like the Machete Yeti (2 damage dealt to any enemy tank next to a Mountain model for a cost of 3 Acorn), while the one-Acorn Moo cancels the effect of any other action card as it is played. Tough.
The strong points: Talk about entertainment! I received my copy in Essen 2014, and it was by far one of the most fun, easy to get into and easy to play games I received in that batch; we are talking around eighty different games here. The theme is from another planet. Combining animals and war might not be the first thing that comes to mind, but the way Armymals does is just incredible. The art and the concept overall is hilarious. Spartan Leonidas is a badass lion that can change any dice roll to ‘damage’ as a Commander, while as a Driver each ‘damage’ counts double. Winston Chinchill can copy anybody’s skill as a Commander and keep that one until he decides to copy somebody else (!), while as Driver he can reduce the damage both tanks have taken by paying with Acorns. More, I say! There are action cards like Bush Senior (Forests grow out of the blue for a round) and BFF (!), which redirects damage from one of your tanks to the other one. I wish I could post pictures here to do the art and Armymals justice. You would have seen Moosolini the Moose, Allixander the Great, King Anthur, Hippopatton and all other sorts of trippy paranoia.
The game is clearly a wargame, even though a more free-form one with a lot of chaos and joyful abandon. Your tank might be hit even though it is nowhere near any threat. It might be roaming full of life just to find itself fighting tooth and nail in a moment’s notice. This does not mean however that there is no strategy or planning. On the contrary: solid back work is needed for the more looney tactics to come into effect. Approach it as a purist, simulationist wargame and you will be extremely disappointed. Think it more however as an adaptation on a theme, a sort of Knightmare Chess, and you will be immediately mesmerised. It does appear hard when taught, in reality however it isn’t. The rules are minimal, while the exceptions from card play can be resolved when they arise. There wasn’t a single game where we weren’t choking from laughter, and I am not talking about the theme only. Maneuvering these god damn tanks isn’t exactly a piece of cake. You want to do something with the Claw only to realise that it’s T-Pewpew that you can move this turn. You have your opponent right in your sites but you don’t roll shots. Aargh! The feeling was very strongly reminiscent of Roborally, not because the mechanic is in any way similar (it is not), but because the tanks, just like Roborally’s robots, exude an aura of incompetence and do not fully cooperate. One tries to do the best that he can given the circumstances, not the absolute best he would have wanted to do.
There are so many options I wouldn’t even know where to start from. One can play the same game with the same Commanders and Drivers over and over, in order to explore the game’s more tactical aspect. Or, you can change them all the time. At the third game with four players on the table you will have used them all and will have repeated three already. That’s however one of the strong points of Armymals; just because you play with an animal that you know, does not mean that it plays the exact same way against all animals. In a Classic game where the extra skills can be used by anybody, the others will exploit your abilities differently... and you theirs, of course. Even the exact same three animals create a different team if Commander and Drivers swap places. More asymmetry than this and the universe implodes.
There are plenty of scenarios to keep you occupied and, seeing how customisable the game is, you will not have trouble coming up with more on your own. The mindless battle of Deathmatch takes just over 30 minutes to play with players who know what they are doing. The two-player Wide Front has each player fielding a Commander with four Drivers and uses totally different Operations. A looney Wargame as Armymals might be, you will be feeling at times that you have multiple games in that same box.
Nobody will misunderstand you if you drool over the sculpts. I probably did so myself. I do not hide that it was the first thing that intrigued me about the game. Simply put: perfect. They are cute without being fuzzy and realistic without being a treatise in still life. They are all sort of disproportionate on purpose, appearing harmless at the end of the day. The two tanks each player has are different from one another so that you can tell them apart. Their lines are nothing short of genius; they want you to underestimate them, and you will. Their colours come straight for the happiest ice-cream parlor in the world, with such a bright pink and a pistachio green that nobody would ever dream of ever putting on a wargame. These guys did... and it works. Idem for the bonsai tree Forests or the Mountains that look more like Starcraft minerals in gray. This is amazing sculpting right there, which begs to be also used elsewhere, even though it might be hard due to the rather funky proportions.
Dice are of an equally high quality. No surprises here; they are made by Q-Workshop, and we already know what this means. The mounted map is gorgeous and has two different sides: one contains the game’s elements like the Barn, the Flag starting points etc for ease of placement, while the other has just a river and pastures to create your own scenarios. The card stock of all hexagons and counters is thick and will last you for a long time. The cards are also thick and sturdy even though I am not taking any chances; I sleeved them all immediately. The Animal cards however are just exquisite. They are double the size of a standard card and can be folded in the middle as if they were a file to be opened. Brilliant! ...except that you don’t actually need to. Don’t! Not only they will last you longer, but also having them folded or obscured during the game can only create problems.
The weak points: By now I might be giving the impression that Armymals is one of the best games ever made. It could be, but unfortunately not at its present iteration. And the major reason for it is the outright terrible rulebook. Name a problem and it can be probably found: poor, direct translation from Polish; typos; poor explanation and rules stating the opposite from what they mean; a horrendous formatting with everything thrown in together. The game’s components are stated somewhere near its end. The rules on how the game works are interrupted from the rules on Operations and Modes. There are no additional explanations concerning the Skill cards, so if you don’t understand their description you are on your own. I could go on and on for hours. There are poor and poorer efforts out there, this however ranks by far the lowest in the last few games I have seen. It needs a serious, committed professional overhaul, not only when it comes to the quality of the language but also to how and when the content is presented.
The cards do not fare any better. What does the Wrong Coordinates text mean (‘place a tank on any hex within a 1 hex radius without changing its position’)? One hex from its initial position or from the position my active tank currently is in? Or the Black Lotus (‘Gain 3 Acorns. Lose 3 Acorns at the end of turn’). What if you don’t have enough Acorns to lose then? And as I just wrote, the rulebook does not contain explanations for cards separately. I could go on with countless examples also about the animals themselves and how their abilities interact together, but you get the point.
Even though it doesn’t become fiddly, the game needs space. Even more so however, it needs time. No matter what it claims about 30-minute and 45-minute plays, these refer to people that have already mastered the rules and will take swift actions during their turns. In your first plays you will be safer by doubling all suggested times.
Many and diverse as the Operations and Modes are, two of the latter necessitate the usage of additional tanks that are not included in a single copy of the game. And here comes the not so fun part: there appear to be no other tanks on the market since the game came out. Unless somebody bought another copy of the game just to use the tanks for the Tank Wars 2.0 by marking the identical ones, as well as by replacing the Mechasquirrells with other miniatures for the Mechasquirrel Madness (a second copy would still be needed since that Mode demands two maps), there is no way to play them formally, as suggested by the rules at hand. It’s incredible how low a support Armymals appears to be enjoying. But then, if it truly had any, the rulebook wouldn’t have been in this state for such a long time. The company’s website is not exactly a shining example of support, at least when it comes to Armymals.
Balance amongst snimals, skills and cards might or might not be an issue depending on how seriously you take this game. The permutations are so many and plays are relatively long for me to say with absolute certainty that imbalances exist; I have the impression that they might do. On the other hand, there is always the caveat that the perceived imbalances are a result of the poorly drawn rules and not the actual gaming experience itself. I am skeptical myself. I will give however Armymals a break on this.
I do not think you need a warning if you don’t like confrontational wargames where you drive tanks and try to fulfill military goals. Armymals is about animals in the army. Just because it’s furry and sort of light-hearted does not mean that it’s something else.
Conclusion: Armymals could have easily been anything between a 4/4 and a perfect, 5/5 game, if only the rulebook was better written. If I can have so much fun in its present iteration, imagine the ripples that the game will cause once that gets fixed. Come on, Titan Forge; don’t drop the ball here!
To find out more about Armymals and Titan Forge, take a look at http://www.titan-forge.com.
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