Seed phrase?
The recovery key in Armory includes 18 meaningless words and that's called root key.

Seed phrase is a series of meaningful words and that usually includes 12 or 24 words. If that's what you have, it has nothing to do with Armory.


Download Armory from btcarmory.com.

Restores from paper backups compute the first 1000 addresses. If the wallet had any use, there is a high likelihood to see history on the first 10 addresses, at which point it's worth syncing Core in full to check for balance.

Hello,
to fully work, Armory need a local copy of the entire blockchain trough a running bitcoind process (or at least as far as I know).
But, you can still run it in "offline" mode and "Restore" the paper wallets. This should allow you to retrieve the bitcoin addresses (and their private keys) that you can use on a public blockchain to look at the current balance or (with the private keys) import them in a different wallet program.
What could be tricky is that, since you aren't accessing the blockchain, Armory can't detect automatically which addresses were actually in use. You might have, with the help of some more experienced use, to make Armory generate for you a list of additional addresses than the "default" ones you'll see when restoring the paper wallet and manually check all of them.