Last night I gathered with some friends and we played our first game of Android — a new title from Fantasy Flight Games, makers of Arkham Horror and the Battlestar Galactica game (side note: the BSG boardgame is astonishingly good).
Android lured us all to it like moths to the light, because of its “color.” The game’s setting is a sci-fi future much like Blade Runner or any number of Heinlein, Bradbury, or Asimov stories. The board is split between the Earth megacity of New Angeles, and various low-orbit and Lunar locations. The core means of travel between the two sides of the board is the space elevator known as “the beanstalk.” The game’s story centers around a murder mystery. You’re out to catch the suspect and help the innocent. Each player takes on the role of a unique investigator with their own talents and sci-fi/noir-ish weaknesses. There’s Raymond, the pulp-novel private eye with a past that haunts him and a lover he knows is bad news. There’s Louis Blaine, the Vic Mackey cop still angry at the world over the loss of his partner and friend. Or you can be Caprice, a woman with curious psychic powers who struggles with her own sanity as a cost for use of her powers. And Rachel, a bounty hunter with daddy issues. Lastly, the game would not be complete without the character of Floyd, a human “bioroid” who searches for what it means to be human while dealing with three directives he must obey as a robot.
As I said, the game is ostensibly about a murder. You select a case from a series of cards (much like Elder God cards in Arkham), read it aloud to the table, and then set up your suspects for the game. You always have suspects equal to your number of players plus one. In our case there were six on the table. Each player then gets a card dealt in secret with the face of one suspect. He or she is your “guilty” hunch. You want this suspect to be guilty. You then get an “innocent” hunch as well. You want to make sure that happens as well. The way you do this is by gathering evidence around the board and then placing that evidence on suspects. Some evidence will have a positive (guilt) value, and some will have a negative (alibi) value. No one else at the table sees the value of the evidence you place on the suspects, but they can all rather quickly figure out which two people are on your guilty/innocent “hunch” cards just by watching where you place your evidence markers.
At the end of the game all the evidence of the suspects is flipped over and totaled. The one with the most positive points is determined as the guilty party, and the rest are innocent. Ta-da, the mystery is solved! Game over.
And yet that’s maybe twenty percent of the game.
See, the winner isn’t the player whose suspect was found guilty. That just offers a good chunk of Victory Points at the end. The winner is the person who has the most points. And there are a dozen ways to accumulate those. Oh boy.
While the murder mystery is going on, each player has a side story running concurrently. These plot lines function like miniature Choose Your Own Adventure stories, where at various steps in the timeline of the game will fork in one direction or another, based on your actions and antagonistic actions of the other players. You end up with a variant of the “happy” or “sad” ending with these side stories, which either offer more victory points or hurt you with negative penalties.
Then there is a whole quadrant of the boardgame devoted to The Conspiracy — a 5×5 grid wherein players connect puzzle pieces to link various organizations to the crime. Mechanically these links then offer bonuses or penalties to other aspects of the game (such as, “Corporate favors are now worth more victory points” etc.). Yes, this board game also has a jigsaw puzzle element. That’s right.
Finally each player has two unique decks devoted to their character: Light and Dark. But you don’t draw from your own Dark deck. Instead that deck is available to any other player as a way to target you and generally make life miserable for your character. Using the cards from these decks affects your good/evil sliding scale indicator on your character card.
And after all that, I still haven’t covered all the various other resources and game components. If you thought Arkham Horror had too many moving parts, Android is like Arkham Horror strung out on cocaine at a Philip K. Dick convention. It’s ridiculous. At one point, I drew a card at a seedy location which let me spend a favor token from one of my personal contacts, which then let me uncover an evidence token that allowed me to follow up a lead, which uncovered a puzzle piece conspiracy token that allowed me to earn a good baggage token on my personal side plot.
Android seems to suffer from the game design concept of “If you run into a rule problem, the solution is to create more rules, and then burden the new rules with exceptions.” It feels like some old legacy software program whose code is a spaghetti bowl of outdated scripts, but the best the new programmers can do is write up even more code to patch the system and hope it keeps working. I own the Arkham Horror game so I have a high tolerance for lots and lots of moving parts, and I probably could have enjoyed this game fully even with all the chits, tokens, cards, and puzzle pieces. But four recurring problems ultimately left me feeling frustrated with the game.
1. Too much downtime. Granted we played with the full five players, but ten to fifteen minutes would pass before my turn came around again. If it’s not your turn, just about the only thing you can do to feel involved in the game is play Dark Cards on other players during their turn. This is actually a move you need to do somewhat regularly in order to readjust your own characters good/evil sliders so that when it’s your turn you can then play a Light Card for yourself. But the reason it takes so damn long for the game to get back around to your turn is that the other players have been formulating their plan for what they want to do on their turn and invariably those plans are dashed the moment a Dark Card is played on them. So it takes them a few minutes to figure out a new plan of attack, which just slows the pace for everyone else, including the player who played the Dark Card on him/her.
2. “Dogpile on the leader” is encouraged. There’s no way to really hide who’s in the lead in this kind of game. It’s evident based on the things the player amasses during the game. While the whole murder suspect that (at first blush) appears to be the main drive of the game is kept a mystery until the end, even those victory points don’t lock you in as winner. In our game, for instance, the player who correctly picked the guilty suspect got something like third or fourth place out of five. So when you have a number of tools at your disposal to focus on the leader, it makes for a rather vindictive game that otherwise reads and feels like a more narrative-driven personal journey for each player.
3. Unused pieces make me think I’m not playing properly. There are so many components to the game, it’s possible you won’t use them except for once every three or four play sessions. In this case we entirely avoided the attribute of Trauma, and all the Trauma markers remained at the hospital location. There were one or two other elements we never touched. Obviously this makes for interesting replays of the game where these components are featured heavily, but my reaction to this kind of setup is that something unused in even one playthrough is something extraneous to the system. If we don’t need it for one six-hour game, then please, leave it out.
I think I might have even swallowed those first three issues and had fun, but what killed my fun was this:
4. The color didn’t matter.
Every character card — every Light card, ever Dark card, all the personal Plot cards with the forking paths of that person’s journey — they’re all written with amazing narrative that describes the characters inner troubles, their actions and moods, their struggles, their lovers and their enemies… It’s some great melodrama that always matches the character for whom the stories are written. Raymond, the private eye, he had Memory cards that were triggered when he ventured to the moon. The moon was his Chinatown. Every other player had one Memory card for Raymond they could play on him while he was at a Moon location, which typically had some negative effect on him. But the story of what happened was slowly revealed in those cards and it felt like an engaging story at that.
Sadly, the color had no effect. And by hour three of the game, we as players were looking to play our turn as quickly as possible (see problem #1) and so we’d just jump down to the bottom of the card and read the mechanical effects so we could get on with the game. That’s the really sad part. For a game with so much story, with so many fascinating characters who seem at least someone linked together via side characters and common contacts, the story continued to make itself irrelevant. We didn’t need to listen to that color in order to decide what to do next.
Android will be the game that almost got it right. It was nearly the perfect board game. If only it had made its story matter.