Android

This is going to be hard review for me to do: this is mostly because I will find it very, very hard to create unbiased, objective views of this game without dipping into my deep, everlasting hate that I have for this game. This game has a multitude of factors that make it frustrating, annoying and badly made, but even viewed through this negative filter, it is going to be hard for me to truly put to words what it is about Android that has made me rate it so low on BGG or why I can't stand to see even other people play the game. The reasons for this are various and compound and they reflect some of the recent changes that I've had happen to me in relation to my own tastes and choice of games. So, in the first part, I will attempt to set the scene and explain the reasons why I hate the game, while in the second I will do my usual ranty analysis of the game, followed by at least a brief attempt at objectivity.

If you have read the Arkham Horror review, you might have found out that it was one of my first true boardgames, without counting stuff like Taboo, Risk or Monopoly. This was about the time when the new version of Arkham Horror had first come out, when I had recently started playing board games thanks to my University's large Roleplaying/Tabletop/Board Gaming society. Up until that point my contact with board games had been moderate to none, since usually my main hobbies had been either tabletop wargames like Warhams. I had dabbled into some roleplaying as well, but mostly as a vehicle for creative writing and thus usually only took part in rules-light freeform forum roleplaying, rather than playing anything with a strictly codified set of rules such as D&D.

From this base, I entered the world of boardgaming. I remember being euphoric about playing Arkham Horror and enjoying the game so much that I bought the Dunwich expansion even though I didn't have the base game, so that me and the people I lived with could try it out. I also remember playing Tigris & Euphrates for the first time, a game which I would rate as being in my top 3 nowadays, but which at the time I found frustrating and not having enough theme. I remember even liking Talisman, although even to me some of the faults of the game were readily apparent. Even though I hadn't heard about the terms at the time, it was clear that by any definition, I was a fan of Ameritrash games. Now, I'm not going to frame the rest of this little randezvous with history as an epiphany, where I suddenly saw the light and decided that Eurogames were the one true path, as much as it appeared that way for me. This is, of course, a personal journey that I went through and that I think everyone should or has gone through on their way to finding the sort of games that they like. Everyone's final destination is different, though, and I even know people that have taken the reverse journey, starting with Euros and then gravitating the other way as their tastes change (Acolyte, I'm looking at you).

Anyway, my board game playing went on a small hiatus for a couple of years after I left University, only to come back with a vengeance once I started working in a bigger city. This was about a year and a half ago and this was probably the time the most dramatic change happened in my gaming tastes. Unfortunately, I still remembered the days when I loved stuff like Arkham Horror, so I had a half year or so in which I would still play Ameritrash games even though I was starting to dislike them more and more by the week. It was during this time that I bought Android and this game became the moment when I truly realised that my taste in games had changed completely in just a few short years.

I love Bladerunner: I can't get enough of the film. I have seen the film again and again and I even remember playing the videogame of it, which sometimes I attempt to track down so that I can play it again. The entire feel of the film really resonated with me when I was a teenager. I've always loved reading about future dystopias and the grim setting of Bladerunner fit the bill almost completely. To me, Android seemed like the perfect theme. I bought the game for what I thought was a relatively good price and tried to find people to play it in my meetup group: I finally gave it a go one Sunday afternoon, when we had about 3 hours before the pub would be closing down for the day. I thought it would be enough time to teach and play it. I thought wrong.

The first thing that strikes you as you open the box is the sheer number of components. There's a component for everything, there's different decks for every single character, there's a huge board with chits for clues, conspiracy components, everything. Just unpacking everything takes a geological age, a feat that takes even longer than Dungeon Lords, which itself has a truly bewildering number of different components. Even once that was done, it took about 45 minutes to even just explain how to play the game: the game itself is quite simple, you move, you do an action, but there appear to be so many exceptions that I always going back to the rulebook to find out how this work, or how this card worked in conjunction of that card: it felt that i was reading the rulebook more than I was playing the game.

Half-way through we noticed that there was no where near enough time to finish the game at the pace we were going, so the little vestiges of theme that for some people make the game went by the window. No time to read the cards aloud anymore, nobody knew what was happening to their own or other people's character and the game boiled down to doing repetitive, mechanical actions in a bid to speed up. We were still no where near winning, so we called time at some indeterminate point and totaled up our scores: someone won, although we weren't sure how. I said I would be trying it again later, with more time to spare, but I never took it out of the closet again. I eventually traded it for Incredible Contraption, a game which I have yet to even play.

Now, you might be saying, quite rightly, that I didn't give the game a chance, that if I had the time to play it properly, I might have seen it for what it was. As true as this might be, what was clear to me at the time was that I didn't care much anymore about board games attempting to bring storytelling aspects to games and Android was largely the catalyst for this change. The rushed game of it that I had allowed me to see the game behind the mask and this allowed me to see that I had bought a game on the strength of the theme alone and I was committed never to commit this same mistake again.

The problem with Android is that the it's difficult to work out what was the actual focus of the design of the game: the central elements of the game, the murder mystery, is an afterthought, a vehicle for the personal development and storyline of the characters within the game: this is central part of the game. The mechanisms of the murder mystery are the most boring part of the game, involving the character just picking up tokens as they appear around the board, like picking up clue tokens within Arkham Horror but instead of them being future resources, they are the end-all and be-all of the entire mystery. Granted, it is possible to use the clues for other things, for example the so-called Conspiracy Puzzle, but even this feels detached from the game: you don't feel like you are piecing a conspiracy as much as you are just connecting stuff up in order to get you more points. Lastly, the entire murder mystery falls flat on its face when you realise that the act of investigating it feels more like you are framing people than actually discovering who the murderer is.

Although I make comparisons to Arkham Horror, but the game itself functions in a fundamentally different way: while Arkham has the characters be largely faceless apart from being themed as being certain people, the adventures that they will go within Arkham are colourful and filled with twists, as each of the locations that a character can find himself in can have different, unexpected challenges. Android, on the other hand, attempts to make the characters colourful through the use of branching paths, but does this at the expense of making the world and the adventures that the characters go through essentially faceless. Most of the locations within the game matter little, with the only thing mattering being if the location is dark or light. The story of the characters themselves is told both through the aforementioned branching story cards and dark/light cards: these are meant to represent good/bad events that happen on your character and are played depending on if you are in dark/light areas, but largely these cards don't feel like events but more as pure, mechanical bonuses/penalties. Even the branching story paths feel disconnected to your actions: sometimes the choice of path is completely out of your control and into the control of other players, which I guess can be said to fit the fact that you can't completely control your own life but it doesn't make for the most exciting of tactical choices. In the end, it does not feel like your action are weaving storylines of any sort, like they do in `Arkham Horror, but that the story that your character goes through is accidental to the actions that are happening on the board. It's this disconnect with the theme which is the most jarring part about Android and this, coupled with the frankly boring actions that you can do in the game (move here, pick up tokens, move there, pick up tokens etc etc) mean that by any metric, even one that purely attempts to analyse Ameritrash games by their own metric, the game is an utter failure.

There are a few saving graces, although they are few and do not outshine the shadow of bad design outlined above. First of all, just in terms of aesthetics, the game excels. This is a game in which to mark the different ranges of vehicles, there are different sized calipers. Everything else has beautiful art, including the big board showing New Angeles, the beanstalk and the lunar colonies. This is an additional shame, because such beautiful art deserves good, integrated theme/rules to back it up. As well as that, it is possible to enjoy the game as an attempt to progress the journeys of self-discovery which are the main theme of many of the characters within the game. At this point, however, it almost begs the question of why not simply play a Roleplaying game and attempt to answer those questions in a much freer, deeper and more meaningful manner, especially when Transhumanity has been done so well by RPGs such as Eclipse Phase.

In the end, there's no way I can honestly recommend this game. The main frustration I have with it is that it promises more than it delivers and feels distinctively like a broken dream, one that seemed good at the outset but on further reflection just turns out to be a false hope. Android, to me, feels like a well of possibility badly misused, a hodge-podge of rules that was more concerned with outside appearances instead of attempting to give a gameplay experience that fitted with  the theme presented. As such, Android only gets 1 angry scowling King Philip out of 5 due to the way that it crushed my young dreams of replaying Bladerunner.