The great science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany once wrote of Robert Heinlein that critics attempting to quantify the latter’s influence on the genre were faced with a task like trying to wrestle the ocean. This is exactly how I feel approaching ANDROID, Fantasy Flight’s surprise Christmas release and the assumed pot of gold at the end of a viral marketing rainbow that began when the company started posting cryptic messages, codes, and YouTube videos from “Jinteki” employees, in-game characters, and other apparently imperiled FFG personnel.
Somehow, Fantasy Flight managed to keep the development of ANDROID completely under wraps until just two weeks before its general release so its sudden appearance on the gaming radar was almost a fourth-quarter miracle for those looking for the next big adventure game from the company’s ace designer Kevin Wilson (DESCENT, ARKHAM HORROR) and Dan Clark.
The difficulty I have in assessing ANDROID is complex. First and foremost, it is impossible to approach the game and not be impressed by the sheer amount of effort that has gone into presenting the game’s BLADE RUNNER-inspired science fiction theme. There is literally enough flavor text here to fill a short novel and almost every social, political, and historical detail about the future world of New Angeles is fleshed out with a thoroughness that is rarely seen in board game design, where theme all too often means nothing more than titles on numbered cards or a unified art style.
Even the non-player characters in the game have back stories, motives, and personalities and I believe that the game is as close as any game has ever come to demonstrating how a novelistic approach can be used to tell a story in the medium. I absolutely love that the game is science fiction in the Philip K. Dick sense (as opposed to the STAR WARS sense) and I even like the wink-wink location name references throughout the game that science fiction fans will recognize. There are also some smashingly brilliant new concepts that could revolutionize adventure game design and for the first time outside of a role-playing game, character development means something more than simply increasing a skill number or getting a new piece of equipment.
However, for all of its merit, I do not like the game at all and I think it is a tremendous disappointment. ANDROID is not much fun at all, needlessly convoluted, and burdened with a jumble sale of way too many trite, repetitive mechanics that wind up almost completely undermining all that wonderful thematic material. The game lacks focus both in terms of concept as well as goals and I do not feel that the right editorial choices were made during its development. In fact, I don’t feel that any editorial choices were made at all and the result feels like a lot of boring, mechanical gameplay punctuated by a couple of really innovative ideas that could have been isolated to make a game on their own.
Just like the on-board images of New Angeles and the Heinlein Moon Colony that the players will move from location to location across throughout the game, ANDROID is sprawling. When I first opened the box, I was shocked at the number of components, cards, and various pieces. Even by Fantasy Flight Games standards, the game is just stuffed to bursting and with a 48-page rulebook to boot. My first impression after reading the rules and playing a couple of sample turns to get a sense of the flow and structure of the game was that it was going to be very complex, with a lot of interlocking mechanics working in service of telling a compelling science fiction story involving the investigation of a murder, the unraveling of a labyrinthine conspiracy of various sinister agencies, and the resolution of personal storylines affecting the five completely unique player characters. It turns out that I was mostly right, but also very wrong.
The players in a game of ANDROID represent some fairly stock noir science fiction characters. There’s the amnesiac deadbeat PI, a corrupt cop looking to get off the mob payroll, a robot getting in touch with his feelings, a psychic Japanese clone with a tenuous grip on sanity, and a down-at-heel bounty hunter. Each character also has a set of two or three storylines that they have to work through over the course of the two-week period that the game represents. I’ve never played an adventure game where I had to deal with marital strife or getting out of debt. The brilliance of this concept is that these plot cards portray certain pathways through a story arc as they accumulate “baggage” tokens, which can represent how the character is progressing in their story. At certain points during the game, this baggage is tallied up and the storyline branches either toward a positive outcome if the baggage is mostly good or a negative one if it’s bad. This concept is tremendous, and I think if nothing else ANDROID shows that meaningful narrative character development is entirely possible in the board gaming medium.
Each character has a set of “twilight” cards- one deck is “light” and represents cards that can be played for benefit and the other are “dark” cards which can be drawn by other players to play in an offensive, “take that” manner. Cards are played via another completely ingenious resource system whereby a sliding scale that moves from dark to light indicates how many twilight points a character can spend on a card. So if Floyd the Doubting Bioroid wants to play a dark card on Raymond Flint, the troubled PI, he has to “light shift” his twilight marker toward the light- meaning that he will be able to “dark shift” in order to play one or more of his light cards on himself. These cards map to plots and there are discounts for playing cards that match a character’s current storyline so there is an incentive to play cards that match up in a narrative sense. Rounding out the “twilight” mechanic, there are possible cards and situations that either reward or penalize players who are shifted one way or the other.
