Android - Living up to the hype...

Taken for what it is, Android is a powerful and at times, moving game. And for that, it lives up to the hype that Fantasy Flight Games suggests and my own anticipation.

It's a long game, but...you've got time to play it. Most games give you one or two things you can do during your turn, but Android allows you several actions on your turn. So while you have to plot your turn out, you don't feel entirely rushed. You think up a strategy and try to get it done.

Players need to divide their actions between focusing on the 'main plot' which is trying to determine who is the killer and/or the conspiracy, or focus on their own personal plots, which are often intense life dramas, such as dealing with being owned by a company, being on the take from the mafia or your clone sisters being threatened. Strangely enough, your final focus can be to make others fail in their personal plots, which was largely overlooked.

The first game played out very well. The single design flaw is that the personal plots are so important (*) that a player will fight tooth and nail to try to get them to be completed in a positive fashion. * When I said 'important' I meant in a two fold fashion. One they are important to get victory points. Getting your personal plots can be as rich in VPs as figuring out who was the murderer. But they are also important because very quickly, you get very attached to the character you're playing. The stories are very well written and the 'story penalty' stings. For example, I was playing an actual Android. A human priest was kidnapped by human terrorists who hate Androids. My plots gave me an option (not everybody gets these, most players are forced to deal with the good or bad due to how much attention they give them). I could go and murder the human terrorists, but that breaks my duty to why I was created (Thou Shalt Not Kill) or I can let the priest die and obey the company. The good ending is to try to save the priest but it's not that easy. After killing the human terrorists, the plot can end VERY badly because I've broken one of my prime directives. So it's a very important question. The easy road was to let the priest die and deal with that.

The flaw, as I said, is that players will fight tooth and nail to make positive things happen to their characters, typically in a role playing game. Thus, as you quickly grow attached to these board game characters, you want them to all have happy endings. And because these happy endings are worth VP's, unless other players make it a strategy to fuck you over, I think that 90% of the personal plots will end well for the players. I think that if one player focuses on trying to ruin the other player's lives, they'll only ruin one other player (it's very hard to try to ruin everybody). Therefore the perfect balance would be if everybody focused 1/3 of their time to their personal plots, 1/3 of their time to solving the crime and 1/3 of their time to ruining the another player's personal plots, then you would have a perfect game whose outcome would be truly unpredictable and exciting.

Still, the flaw is extremely minor. As we played the game, we found our niche. Jackie tried to solve the conspiracy. Cori and I focused on the crime. Rob focused at first on the crime and conspiracy but wanted a happy ending for his 2nd personal plot of the game, he focused greatly on that for the 2nd half of the game and all but abandoned the 'main plot'.

By the end of it, we all had our personal stories to tell. Cori was the only one who had a bad ending (technically it was still a Happy Ending but it was a low level Happy Ending). Jackie has solved the Conspiracy and gotten a lot of VP's for that but I squeaked out a 'win' (*) by getting my happy endings, solving the murder and getting enough favor tokens from the company that I was built from. * The first board game with inexperienced players is ALWAYS a muligan!

What was also fascinating about the game, is that even after the game, it held out imaginations. The murderered man was some rich 'dude'. The murderer was the rich son of the company that I worked for. Cori surmissed that this rich son, Thomas Haas, was obviously gay. But that Mr. Willians, his lover, was going to out him. Being the son of a massive company who is trying to patent Androids (like me) that just wouldn't do. So Haas killed his lover. Take it further, one of the Androids, Eve (a pleasure model) is in the NAPD at the start of the game. So clearly Haas tried to immediately place the blame on a pleasure 'droid'. However during the course of the game, Jackie proved that Jinteki (the big opposed corp) was part of the conspiracy. So clearly Haas was running independent of his mother, murdering Mr. Williams and allowing his own mother's company to take the blame via the pleasure 'droid'. And he must have had contacts with Jinteki because they somehow manipulated Human's First to kidnap the Father (as part of my above plot), because I was closing in on Thomas Haas. They figured by kidnapping and killing the father, I would be affected enough to give up. Little did they anticipate that I would be willing to cast aside my programming and kill to save the Father, which spurned me to return to my work and find the evidence against Thomas Haas. I can only imagine the Haas-Bioriod company's reaction to my discovering that the the son of the CEO was responsible. In one case, the company has been shamed by the actions of their human spawn. On the other, the company has been redemned due to the actions of their created Android. Financial success over personal disgrace. How appropriate to the dark future.

That's just the story that Cori started and I finished in my head. But tell me of another board game that lets us, as players, weave that story. Things just fell so well into place. It's kinda eerie.

Android is definitely a game I must play again. And again. It's hard to explain well and it takes a LONG time to play, but it's one of the more rewarding games I've played in a long, long time.

Hats off to Fantasy Flight Games for making Android.