The last three of the weekly games days with my regular opponent Crabro have featured Android, the Fantasy Flight cyberpunk detective game by Daniel Clark and Kevin Wilson, the co-designer of Arkham Horror. Given the publisher and designers involved it was of course bound to have a lot of bits and high production values. It can be bought for a surprisingly low price given this pedigree but that is possibly because it isn't by any means to everyone's taste, being a long game with a fair degree of rules complexity.
Spotting it for around sixteen pounds (a very low price for a game like this these days) my friend snapped it up but we quickly realised that it was going to be difficult to table it on a group games night, not just because of the theme (science fiction is definitely not popular with all the group), but for the sheer length. Having had a look at the components and knowing the theme, I was very keen, and we both read the rules and did some research on Boardgamegeek. One surprise was that Scott Nicholson, in one of his video reviews had given it a very definite thumbs down, something I had not seen before. However, we were encouraged that despite its three to five player listing there were comments to the effect that a two player game was not only feasible but an enjoyable experience.
I am a lover of heavily thematic “narrative” games, by which I mean games which can be interpreted as having a developing plot and characters: Not quite Role Playing Games necessarily, but ones in which a story is playing out through the gameplay, at least in my head. Narrative is possibly the underlying thread in my love of literary and genre fiction writing as well as cinema and games. Android has not disappointed at all in this respect, and given the amount of flavour text describing the characters, their back stories and plots, it would easily be possible to become even more immersed than we were. However, as we have been learning the rules, which adds more time to a long game, we tended to try to keep the game-flow moving rather than reading every word.
I am not a writer of session reports, of which there are some absolute corkers amongst the archives of Boardgamegeek, but there are a few games which have involved such drama and hilarity as they progressed that I have almost wished I had taken notes and written them up. Among them have been some epic games of Battlestar Galactica, Middle Earth Quest, many of my seventy-odd games of Commands and Colors (sic) with Crabro and a very high percentage of the games I've played over the years with Grumbletweezer. Our recent games of Android have definitely evoked that feeling.
The game contains a number of knowing references to classic SciFi (many more I suspect I have missed) and has more than a hint of the “Future noir” ambience of Blade Runner, a film of which I am passionately fond to the point of having watched every available version, even the work print. So...I get very immersed in the flavour. This week I was the wayward daughter of the only honest cop in dystopian future L.A. and motivated mostly by greed to the point that bounty hunting was possibly more important than solving the murder or uncovering the sinister conspiracies behind the scenes. As played by me, I'm afraid Rachel never had more than $2,000 dollars to her name but she did manage a couple of cyberware augmentations for that. Dick was playing the 'tec I played the previous week: moody bad cop Louis Blaine.
Several hours of play, cups of tea and a pizza later, the game ended in an honourable if very low-scoring draw...or so we thought at the time. This particular murder story had made it a lot easier to kill off suspects...so I did, and cunningly (so I thought) led my opponent to believe my hunch to point to “Vince the Strangler” as the killer. I mean how could he be innocent with that moniker..? So he bumped him off too. This left only the suspect I was actually “obsessed with” ( i.e. had both innocent and guilty hunches about) alive, and me sitting pretty score-wise as I thought. Crabro then revealed that according to the rules, if only one suspect remains then no-one is guilty. Thus with no bonus points for hunches and quite a lot of my game involved in killing (and re-killing after one suspect controversially came back to life) rather than following leads, the scores were very low.
After an epic game, with a great deal more use of cards and of new aspects like taking out hits on people, we were well satisfied to call it evens but in reading a FAQ later Dick reversed the ruling on the remaining suspect as a result of my being “obsessed” which made it a comfortable win for me. I actually think I was happier with the draw really but it's good to have another rule point cleared up. I'm sure a number of mistakes were made and we are still forgetting odd rules but, thanks to a player aid listing those most often forgotten, the play was more confident this week.
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