Kris Hall Redesigning Android

A Hollywood wag once said that human beings have three primal urges: food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s script.  In the gaming world that last bit could be changed to “redesigning someone else’s game.”

I am bringing this up as a way of acknowledging the pettiness of what I am about to do: offer quick and simple thoughts about how I would have designed Android, the new sci-fi detective game from Fantasy Flight Games and designer Kevin Wilson (this essay assumes you know a bit about the game).  It is of course so much easier to make snap judgments and oh-so-superior commentary on any work of art or craftsmanship than to actually produce such a labor of love yourself.

If I think this impulse is so shallow, then why am I giving in to it?  For one thing, because the impulse is so strong.  It isn’t unusual for me to think about ways that I would redesign a game, but I started coming up with detailed ideas for re-designing Android in the middle of playing my first session.  That was odd, and I decided to analyze my feelings to see what they indicated about the game.

I came to two conclusions.  One, Android appeals to me on some level.  I don’t waste time thinking about the design of games that I hate.  Second, I do feel that the design leaves something to be desired.  I think that there is just some unexplored potential in the design, and the possibility for additional fun and suspense.

Let me take a moment to say that the game as it stands does work.  It may be too long or complicated for some, but the Appalachian Gamers had no trouble playing it, or understanding basic strategies.  Because of game length, I would probably be more comfortable playing with three players than with five, but that apparently is a common opinion.

I appreciate the personal stories that each character has, and how we gain or lose points by bringing various subplots to their conclusions.  In our game, my character was a crooked cop seeking redemption, and I found it easy to identify with my character’s desire to solve a twenty-year-old murder case and to bring down the local crime boss who has been my character’s patron and corrupter.

I was less enthusiastic about the murder mystery and conspiracy aspects of the game.  As many others have noted before, the game is not so much a murder mystery as a contest to see which player can frame their specific target character for murder.  It may be hard to create a new murder mystery game mechanic, but I might have preferred the old Clue-like process of elimination method than the plant-evidence-on-the-suspects method.

The puzzle-piece conspiracy mechanism struck me as an ingenious but ultimately rather abstract way of manipulating victory conditions.  In our game, Ted Cheatham took advantage of the conspiracy mechanism and gathered the appropriate high-scoring favor tokens to win the game.  It struck as rather un-thematic that a player could win by simply accumulating favors from a corrupt political or economic powerhouse.

It occurred to me that a more interesting way of dealing with the conspiracy idea would be to have active Non-player character tokens that move and can affect the game.  Of course, there are non-player character tokens on the board now, but they are merely passive targets for players who want to plant evidence on a suspect rather than being a threat or some other active force in the game.

I imagined a game in which players get a card at the beginning of the game which tells them which conspiracy their character particularly opposes. Players then get points by eliminating NPCs of that conspiracy.  The NPCs move around the board when prompted by card draws, and they try to accomplish goals of their own according to rules set down for their conspiracy.  For example, one conspiracy might be trying to control all red ritzy locations, and their NPCs will always stop after moving into one of these locations.  If all such locations become occupied, that conspiracy gains a victory, and opponents of it lose points.

Critical Reader:  Wait a minute, Kris.  Fantasy Flight has already published a game with those sorts of NPCs.  It’s called Arkham Horror.  Instead of blaming FFG for not simply cloning Arkham, why don’t you praise them for trying something new and different?

Kris:  You may have a point.  But I don’t believe that adding active NPCs would make Android an Arkham clone.  But it would do something for Android that the NPCs of Arkham do for that game: make the game universe feel more alive.  Right now, Android’s future world seems rather under-populated to me.

And there are ways to make the wandering NPCs of Android different from the monsters of Arkham.  For one thing, players might be able to help or influence conspiracy NPCs that they are not fighting.  Helping a particular conspiracy might be a way to strike indirectly at other players.  Players might even be able to set some NPCs against different NPCs under certain circumstances.  Complicated rules for conspiracies and NPCs wouldn’t make Android a shorter game, but it might make it more dynamic.  And Arkham fans have already proven that there are gamers that can handle multiple sets of complicated rules.

If the Android folks decide to expand the game, I hope they consider something like this.  Rather than shying away from Arkham-like mechanics, I would hope they could borrow, revise, and enhance some of Arkham’s best elements to make the Android universe a livelier place. 

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