Do Androids Dream of Board Games?

I have always been fascinated with Cyberpunk, primarily because, if you didn’t already know it, Blade Runner is my absolute favourite movie, and nothing has ever budged it from that spot.
What I liked about Blade Runner is almost ephemeral, but to try to put it into words, it was the dystopian, noir setting mixed with a protagonist and antagonist who were both mixtures of grey. While the Blade Runner is the hunter, the replicant in the prey, the roles are reversed by the end of the movie. I find Roy a particularly fascinating villain, because he toys with Deckard in the final hunt. Roy is dying, yet he plays the game one last time because he was built for combat. He shows how he is not a product of his engineering but something much more by saving Deckard in the end. Because at the end of his life, he finally was able to understand how precious life was.
I’ve run a number of Cyperpunk RPG’s and, while fun, they were pretty much fluff. It was D&D in the future, where cyberwear replaced magic. You ran a mission, you got paid, you got more cyberwear. Later the creators of the game would go on to state that that wasn’t their original intention. That you were supposed to be brave street soldiers who fought against the ‘system’. But of course, absolutely nothing was presented in the main book to play like that (with the possible inclusion of the Rockerboy character class, which was an odd choice for somebody to play as a ‘edge runner’).
The problem, it would seem with cyber RPG’s is that when you have cyber equipment, you are generally superior to somebody without cyber equipment and since cyber equipment just costs money and sometimes a small bit of humanity loss (or Essence cost in Shadowrun) there is very little reason not to do it.
Looking to another supers game call Underworld, I think that game had it right. See, in Underworld all supers were engineered with science. So all superpowers where genetic, cyber or whatnot. In Underworld, you had to not only buy the power you wanted, but the doctor who was going to install all this stuff and the therapist who was going to help you out with it afterwards. While odd for a supers game, what a brilliant mechanic to introduce for a cybers game.
And yet, neither of the major two cybers game did just that. Both had a bland $X will get you X bonus.
The reason I think about Blade Runner and the Cyberpunk RPG is because of a new board game, called Android. While I have not yet played Android I own it and have read it over. It is a game which is complex. Overly complex in fact, to the point that it will overwhelm some players. But it is a very deep and quite logical game. But it does one thing in spades, which is atmosphere. It is dripping with atmosphere which is quite interesting for a board game to accomplish.
In Android, there is a murder. And that murder hints at a bigger conspiracy going on. Now unlike say, Clue, the murderer and conspiracy are not predetermined. You are not trying to guess who did it (which I think I would have preferred but the game works almost as well without it). There are a number of suspects and you are given two ‘hunches’. One is your guilty hunch and one is your innocent hunch. If your guilty hunch turns out to be the murderer, you get a nice victory point bonus at the end of the game. So, you go around collecting evidence of the murder or the conspiracy and you can place that evidence on any suspect you desire (i.e. usually the suspect you have your guilty hunch about). Whether or not you see this as actually finding real evidence or manufacturing evidence, that’s up to you. The conspiracy works much the same. You place pieces on a puzzle which, if they link up to a person or organization, give you certain victory point bonuses at the end of the game.
But like Blade Runner, the murder isn’t the important thing here. It’s the vessel which drives the game but the story is about the hunter. Or in the case of Android, the investigators. There are 5 such characters and each are unique. Like RPG level unique.
Each of the 5 investigators comes with a back story and a unique set of problems. One is a corrupt cop. One is a bioroid (android) who has directives that he must obey. One is a detective with a bucketload of bad memories. One is a psychic clone who must avoid going insane. And finally one is a bounty hunter who is bad with money.
Each investigator has a set of unique goals and unique plots which affect them. They can ignore those plots in favour of trying to ‘solve’ the case or they can focus on them to try to get a ‘happy’ ending from the plot. Getting happy endings results in victory points. ‘Happy’ for the bounty hunter means she ends with lots of money. ‘Happy’ for the clone means not going insane.
The victory points comes from three areas. ‘Solving’ the murder/conspiracy. Getting favour tokens (which is the ‘money’ of the game). And resolving your personal plots in a ‘happy’ way. In their example, the player who completely failed to solve the murder but resolved their personal plots very successfully ‘won’ the game. I guess the idea is that while other character successfully solved the murder, their life was so fucked up as a result of it, that it wasn’t worth it in the end.
Again, dripping in atmosphere. I haven’t really seen this type of game play in any other board game before. And atmosphere can be ignored, certainly. You can just treat the plots you get as text on a card. Corrupt cop is loosing his wife. Get enough good ‘baggage’ to ‘succeed’ in the plot and she stays. Get too much bad ‘baggage’ to ‘fail’ and she leaves you. The first one gives a victory point bonus so that’s the ideal one, right? Sure, but this is a game where, if you like, you can really get into the life of your investigator. It’s not role playing but it’s far more involved than any other board game would normally attempt.
During the course of the game you spend your time getting some form of token. There are lots in the game and fortunately, it’s reasonably logical if not somewhat convoluted. Again, this is not a simple game and it’s hard to get your head around what is needed to be done to accomplish anything. But once you do, the logic appears.
In order to solve the ‘crime’ you need to hunt down one of three types of clues that are on the board. When you move to a location with a clue, you get to investigate it which gives you evidence to place on a suspect or a conspiracy piece (again, you can pretend this is actual evidence/conspiracy or you can be manufacturing it to fit what will give you the win).
While not tracking down evidence, you spend the game getting those aforementioned tokens. There are plenty of different types of tokens and they are confusing but again, they eventually follow a logical understanding.
1) Favor tokens are the game’s currency. This is the tricky part to the game. Knowing where to go to get the favour that will open up what you want. The favour tokens are: street, corp, society and political. Generally favour tokens do very little on their own (they are worth a small amount of victory points) but usually they are used to buy other tokens which are more useful.
2) There are baggage tokens, which are used to affect your/another players plots. You want to put good baggage on your plots and bad baggage on another player’s plots. The concept behind good baggage is that you’re actively trying to resolve your plot in a good way, rather than a immoral way. You’re pretty much responsible for putting good baggage on your plots while other players are responsible for putting bad baggage on your plots. You need favour tokens to buy baggage tokens. As a fine example, you can use street tokens to buy baggage tokens at the local bar/brothel. Hopefully the logic begins to appear (favors from lowlifes can be exchanged for goods and services which will make your miserable life slightly better).
3) Some places are restricted. You can go there but it takes a bunch of your time to get through the ‘front door’. As a way around that, especially if you plan to visit that locale a few times in the game, you can go get a warrant. But warrants require political favour tokens.
4) Interestingly enough, if you really want to help or hinder the suspects, there are expensive places on the board which can aid you. There is one place where you can ‘buy’ an alibi for a suspect that you obviously want to be innocent. There is another place where you can buy a ‘hit’ to be put onto a suspect. Three ‘hits’ and that suspect dies. It’s expensive, but it’s a good way to get rid of a suspect that you don’t want to be guilty or innocent. And are you manufacturing this or uncovering the truth? You get to decide.

There is logic to the game but it wont’ be entirely obvious to players what they should be doing on a particular turn. If you’re close to some Street Favors, you might as well snatch up a few of those in hopes that later, you can use them. But unless you know that you will want a warrant on one of the major corporations later in the game, you might not think it wise to get the political favours that are required to get the warrant in the first place. It’s not a game that lends itself well to the first time players. Strategy will be hard to build until the game is very familiar.
But the game has enough beauty and feel that I’m fascinated with it. Just like I am with Blade Runner. I dunno if it’ll be the best board game of all time. I’ll have to play it to see. A game can’t just be all style and no substance, afterall. I dunno if it’s quite as innovative as the designers will claim it is, still, I have to respect the design behind the game. They put a lot of love into this one and I hope it pays off for them.