Scott Tepper: This Android Is Lost

During a recent episode of This American Life on NPR, they had a short story about a guy who, while at a party where he was less than 100% sober, came up with an exceptional conversational game: the object was to figure out which tv show was the closest philosophical analogy to a specific rock and roll band.  All sorts of metrics come in to play such as the longevity of the band, the era, the type of music they put out, how popular they were, the importance of their music, etc… For example, it turns out that The Rolling Stones would be Gunsmoke, Devo corresponds to Fernwood Tonight and Hall & Oates equals Bosom Buddies.

Though able to appreciate some of the comparisons made in the radio episode, I lack the worldliness of most rock music connoisseurs, so I wouldn’t be able to contribute much to a rock band = tv show conversation.  Although I have seen more than my fair share of movies and tv shows, my area of expertise is naturally boardgames, which brings me to a newly released game I played this past week: Android, designed by Daniel Clark and Kevin Wilson, and produced by Fantasy Flight Games.

Usually after playing a new game, my sentiments generally gel into a pretty specific feeling: either I like or dislike the mechanisms or themes and how they work together. After playing Android, however, I found myself in the rare predicament of trying to figure out what I thought about the game.  It was then that it came to me that Android was very much like the tv show, Lost. 

Foremost in Android, just as in Lost, you are presented with a grand underlying plot: A mystery where the individual investigators trying to determine which of 6 suspects is the murderer.  Also like Lost, each minor character(played by the gamers) in the drama has its own strengths, weaknesses, and subplot.  Some characters can move farther on a turn, or start with more resources, and they all have their own stories.  One of the characters, for example, is trying to reconcile with his wife, another is dealing with their descent into madness.  At certain points in the game, depending on whether a character has acquired good or bad baggage(positive or negative tokens depending on certain actions taken), their personal stories develop and their abilities, as well as their strengths and weaknesses, change.  Eventually, based on how their individual stories turn out, the players will gain a certain number of victory points at game end.

The gameplay in Android is turn based, similar to the episodic nature of Lost. On a player’s turn they use up time (a certain number of actions) by either moving their character on their board to other locations limited by the distance their car can move, or draw or play cards that either can help themselves or hurt other players.  They can also use an action to uncover a piece of the conspiracy; puzzle pieces with paths on them that, when connected, by the end of the game, give various bonus victory points.

The meat of Android is exploration.  As the characters move around the board they acquire positive and negative evidence that they assign secretly to the different suspects, or visit locations where they can acquire tokens that can be traded for a variety of purposes.  At the end of the game the evidence is revealed and the suspect with the most evidence against them is found to be the perpetrator.  At the beginning of the game each player is secretly assigned one of the suspects.  If your suspect has the most evidence against them, then you receive victory points.  All victory points are added up at the end of the game and the player with the most wins.

The thing that makes Android the most like Lost for me is the sense of confusion.  There are so many little things to think of and/or keep track of, many of them hidden from general knowledge, that you really don’t have any idea where you stand in relation to the other players, victory point-wise until they’re all tallied.  As a result, during the game, all the decisions you have to make(should I use my actions to draw and play postive cards that help me, or cards that impede my opponents, or move around to collect evidence?), while they are usually full of angst, end up being rather insignificant on their own. 

So much of the game is concealed or kept secret, ie., random conspiracy tiles may give benefits to those who draw them, or opponents can play detrimental cards on your turn, that it is generally difficult to plan out your turn in advance.  This is very much like the unpredictability in Lost.  Right before the credits roll in each episode, the viewers are usually presented with some sort of new cliffhanger that adds a new layer to the mysteries of the show.  It’s as if you’re constantly being sucked further downward in a narritive made of quicksand.

There has never been a tv show like Lost, and I feel comfortable saying that similarly, I’m not aware of another game like Android.  The theme is unique and the presentation is excellent.  And so I come (back) to my last, and probably most significant comparison between Android and Lost: I don’t know what to think of either one. 

I became hooked on Lost during its second season on the air.  Several friends had told me what a great show it was, so I rented the whole first season and by the 4th episode I was addicted.  After a few seasons of having good characters go bad, and bad characters turn “good”, and characters dying and coming back to life, feeling that the story had been so convoluted that I had trouble keeping track of what I “knew” and what had or hadn’t been resolved, and worst of all the impression that I was always being toyed with by the writers, I let go of my need to keep up with Lost and stopped watching it..  Sometime in the future I may rent the episodes I didn’t see to find out if the story really evolved into something worth my time to watch. 

And that sums up my feelings about Android.  Parts of it are interesting.  In the whole, trying to figure out what your character should be doing while keeing track of the other players characters is almost overwhelming.  With all the clandestine data, it’s difficult to know where you stand during the game, which can leave you wondering “are these actions that I’m taking really benefitting me?”.  Amongst the cards that can shape the story in Android is one that has the power to literally wipe away all the work the players have done during the game assigning positive and negative evidence to the suspects.  The fact that this (and maybe some others) were included in the game leads me to believe that the designers wanted to induce a sense of futility in the players, and unfortunately, I do not list futility as a trait of boardgames that I enjoy playing.  As I respect the storytelling and grand scale of Lost, so do I similarly respect Android.  It just seems for me, right now, that the opportunity costs for engaging myself in both of these diversions outweigh the benefits.  I want to keep an open mind, though, and maybe some day will find myself enjoying plowing through all that I need to do to get to the end of both of them.

Oh yeah, that reminds me, there is yet one more reason that Android is like Lost: In Lost, you have to wait for a week to get your next fix.  In Android, when you are playing with 5 players, it feels like a week between your turns.

So here’s my challenge to you… now that I’ve done one, can you come up with a tv series that is the philosophical equivalent of a boardgame?

And confidential to all my readers…Happy Holidays and Many Gaming Returns!

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