Aaron Lawn: Android Overview and thoughts

Having played five games of Android, I feel I am at least competent enough to get my thoughts of the game down.  Obviously, there are caveats.  Android is a sprawling game that takes about 45-60 minutes per player.  I can’t possibly claim to have experienced everything, but I’ve got a decent picture of the game.

To start, I’ve done a bare-bones recap of the game - skip to here if you’d like to read that first.  If you’re already familiar with the rules, onward.

Ultimately, Android feels very unlike a typical Fantasy Flight game - The overall game experience is more similar to niche designs that push the boundries of games.  It really feels like a game where a designer has been turned loose to do whatever they want - which doesn’t happen in most of the Fantasy flight catalog, which is filled with licenses and game revamps¹.

As is typical for games where the designer has pulled no punches, the game is going to succeed and fail with it’s excesses.  Android manages both.  Firstly, Android has taken two fairly disparate types of games and tied them together.  Take-that card play has been tied to a resource base (light/dark) and then merged into a VP generation game.

The bad is that ultimately, take-that cardplay remains a negative mechanic - you (as the player) will be punished by cards from the other players.  However, the typical feeling of undirected chaos and spite that this can foster has been minimized in several ways:

1) Dark (bad) card play is all but required to play light (good) cards.  It is quickly apparent that other players are playing bad cards on you mostly to facilitate playing their own beneficial cards.  Balance between the two can be critical to efficient play.
2) Dark cards are player specific.  At any point in time you can generally predict how much trouble you are in by how many of your cards are held by the other players.
3) Dark cards are also often situation specific.  Due to this, plus reason one, players often find it to their benefit to hold dark cards from multiple players, because there is no guarantee that a player will take the actions that will allow you to play the cards you hold.  As you learn the game, playing the different roles also allows you to learn the risk levels of various spaces and actions for your current character.

So, Android has given some direction and meaningful choice to typical take-that card play.  But it hasn’t fundamentally changed the negative aspects of this style.  If the prospect of losing your entire turn² turns your stomach entirely, stay away.

Android has also managed to use the typical Euro-style Action point mechanism to create a successful rendition of noir themes³ in a game.  The limited action points, coupled with the multiple sources of victory points result in players being forced to constantly reassess where to spend their time.  Not unlike choosing which temple to fight over in tikal, or any eurogame where limited resources force you to choose your battles, Android ties its theme to the visceral feeling that the game mechanics evoke.  Do you spend time patching up your relationship with your estranged wife or pursing the case?  There’s never enough time to do everything, and in this case, a typically dry mechanic fits directly into the theme.

The take-that cardplay also ties into the winds of fate that are ubiquitous within noir.  No sooner do you decide that everything is under control than someone plays a card on you that makes everything so much worse.

FFG made several decisions that I think have hurt the ‘experience’ portion of the game.  Each character in the game has several stories written about them.  The cards are the vehicle for those specific stories, and the flavor text is snippets from those stories.  Where I think they have failed is that they chose to use quotes from those stories to title the cards. 

For example, the bounty hunter character has a card that thematically causes her car to break down⁴.  The title for this card, which is the part of the card you are liable to read out loud to the other players, is “You stupid hunk of junk!”.  I don’t think the title of the card is inappropriate, but it does nothing to further the ambiance and ‘story’ of the game.  If the card has been titled “Your car breaks down”, it would have allowed the players to quickly spell out the story behind the mechanics.  This style of title is common throughout all the cards.  A serious reading of the title, flavor text and mechanics is required to figure out what each card represents.  FFG should have used the title to convey the generic/stereotypical event that is occurring, leaving the Android-world specifics within the flavor text.

This is one of the parts of this sprawling game that will easily cause the theme to be lost behind the mechanics of the game while you are playing it.  FFG has caused the theme of the game to be about specific stories, and I think the game suffers because of that decision.  In a game where cards will not appear in a specific order (if at all), more generic event titles would have helped players quickly grok the events and themes of the characters they play.

Enough of theme.  How about the play of the game?

After three games with four and two with three players, I’m fairly confident that the game is best balanced with three players.  This is not because of downtime or length (which will increase with more players), but because the three methods of VP seem to be the best balanced with three.  With four players, the Conspiracy section of the game completes quickly (often before the second half of the game)⁵.  Also, many of the personal plots for characters have a substantial cost to cause to “go bad”.  It is harder to justify taking a direct action against a single other player in a 4 player game than in a game with three.

Obviously, the game will be longer with more players, since there is no scaling mechanism to the game.  Extra players simply adds more actions.  Most on-board actions aren’t limited, but some things are (see ⁵), which does change the flow of the game fairly drastically.

I also have a pet peeve that the scene of the crime isn’t more important - but that’s mostly theme, not gameplay.

I don’t find that the disparate characters have created any balance ‘issues’, but it is important to play the games several times to recognize what the limitations and strengths of the characters are.  Some characters (the psychic) have very bad cards that can remove all favor tokens from their possession, meaning that victory points from tokens will be very hard to come by.  Others (the cop) collect tokens like water, but have many cards that cancel their attempts to place conspiracy pieces.

Characters are generally balanced by the extremes.  Some characters have very very strong cards that are balanced by strong drawbacks and bad cards.  Other characters have less powerful cards, but few drawbacks and few exceptionally bad cards.  I do believe that the psychic character is slightly weaker than the other characters.  She seems designed to be a character with both strong good and bad cards, but her advantages seem mostly tied to gaining information about the cards that other players hold.  In a game a large and complex as Android, learning what cards someone else has (at the cost of an action) is usually not as good as simply getting another action point.

Android also has a steep learning curve to the cards.  The basics, while complex, aren’t hard to learn, but learning how to play each character can take several plays.  Not necessarily playing the same character, but simply seeing that character in the game will help you to understand what they can, and cannot, do.

If you’re still with me, and still interested in the game, I recommend it.  It is easily one of the most intriguing recent designs.  It is not completely successful, and certainly not a game for every player, but few games that attempt to change and innovate are.

If you do play, here are my suggestions.

-Play with three players.
-Spend 15 minutes reading the cards (good, bad, and plots).  At least your own, possibly the other players.  This will help you get a picture of the story behind each character and give a better feeling of the ongoing events.  Especially do this if you don’t plan to play the game very often.  An alternative would be to read the cards out loud during play.  This is also fine, but will drastically lengthen the game.
-Don’t use the psychic in your first game.

Finally, my totally minor house rule.  It addressed my above pet peeve.  So ignore it if you don’t care.
During setup, place a hero token from each player onto the scene of the crime.  Treat those tokens as a ‘wild’ lead usable only by that character.  Characters can spend 1 time while at that location to follow up on that lead(using it as any type of evidence, or a conspiracy piece).  Remove the token from the board afterwards.  That character becomes start player.

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Ye olde recap

Android, in theme terms, is a noir futuristic murder game, most obviously related to the movie blade runner.

Android, in game-mechanic terms, is an action point game that is driven by American-style “take-that” card play and characters with differing powers.

Those differing powers manifest in the form of the card play.  Character weaknesses are cards that punish them when they take specific actions, or enter specific places on the board.  Character strengths are cards that modify actions in their favor or give them other benefits.

Card play is driven by dark (bad for others) and light (good for you) resources.  Playing one type of card gains resources to play the other type.  While it is possible to play only good cards, it is much more efficient to alternate good and bad card play.

Players receive an average of 6 action points a turn, with which they attempt to score points in three different ways:

1) EVIDENCE: placing evidence (both exonerating and incriminating) on suspects [on average, one player will score 20 points, one player will score nothing, the rest 5 points]
2) PLOTS: Personal plot resolution, through the placement of good or bad baggage.  Criteria for placement of baggage will vary during the game by character.  [Each player can score roughly 14 points via positive resolutions, or lose 14 from negative resolution.  In my experience, the spread is lower, with most players gaining points]
3) TOKENS: Owning favors, secrets, and conspiracy (value 4) tokens at the end of the game.  Favors (base value 0) and Secrets (base value 3) can be worth additional points based on the conspiracy behind the murder, which is resolved by completing a puzzle. [This section has the highest potential to vary from game to game and player to player.  In my experience, tokens have provided 0-40 points per player.]

leave mr. recap

Ye olde Footnotes.

¹Both of which come with design baggage.  Even Descent, which isn’t licensed at all, is based off the Doom mechanics and heavily influenced by it’s spiritual predecessors, Heroquest et al.↩

²Which can, and probably will happen to you.  Especially if you play Raymond.↩

³Noir themes focus on personal fallibility of the main characters, and the fact that events (usually crime related) often spiral out of control, leaving the main character to pick up what pieces he/she can.  ↩

⁴mechanically, this forces her to spend an extra action point (time) when she moves, until she repairs her car.↩

⁵This is primarily because the conspiracy puzzle provides multiple benefits besides VP potential.  Conspiracy pieces placed allow you to move the conspiracy closer to the Tokens that you want to score points and then provide 1-2 additional tokens, some of which can even directly be victory points… There are a set number of conspiracy pieces, and the more players you have means less pieces for everyone, so it is important to get them before they go away.↩

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