Android Review – Blade Runner As An RPG/Board Game

Seth Brown – www.RisingPun.com

Android is a giant 3-5 player board game for ages 13 and up, that can take 3-4 hours to play.

This conspiracy-filled board game set in a dystopian future inspired by various famous science fiction novels, where players each play a detective on a murder case. You have two weeks to follow leads, uncover evidence, reveal conspiracies, and resolve your emotional baggage. Imagine if Blade Runner were a 3-hour adventure board game, and you’ve got the general idea. At the end of two weeks, detectives are awarded points for correctly tagging the murderer, uncovering conspiracy, and resolving their own issues. Whoever has the most points wins.

Pieces/Parts:

Many.

A large fold-out board six times the size of the box, conspiracy puzzle pieces, event cards, murder-specific cards, suspect cards and sheets, and hundreds of cardboard chits of various types representing everything from favors and evidence to baggage and trauma. Each detective also has their own playset that includes a play sheet, a strategy guide, a flying car caliper, two decks of twilight cards, a deck of plot cards, and more.

Yes, you’ll want some bags.

How Do You Play?

Even summarizing the 48-page rulebook may take half an hour, but the basic mechanic is this: Every day, you have six times in which to explore the world and make progress.

Each time allows you to do any of these options:

• Move to another location – Go anywhere you can reach from your current location by measuring with your flying car caliper.
• Follow up a lead – Use the lead on your space to either uncover a piece of evidence (which you then place on a suspect to increase/decrease guilt) or uncover a piece of the conspiracy (to add a piece to the puzzle and possibly effect end-game victory points)
• Draw, discard, or play a card – Play light cards on your turn for various benefits. Dark cards may only be played on other players’ turns, to attack them, but take no time.
• Use a location ability – Various locations on the board allow you to spend time to acquire favors or trade favors for other benefits.

All the while, you’ll also be trying to add good baggage to your plot. In addition, each detective has their own unique mechanic with some affect on the cards.

What’s Cool?

Android has theme coming out the wazoo. Check out the trailer on the Android product page and you’ll have a pretty good idea for the feel of the game.

Unlike many more cerebral games where you calculate points and rarely get into the game itself, Android really draws you in. After flying around earth and the moon for two weeks chasing suspects, retrieving evidence, and dealing with the personal baggage of your detective, you really feel like part of a large story. The flavor text on all your character’s light and dark cards really adds to this, and the plots weave theme into gameplay really nicely.

Android easily could have been a movie, and many people would still want to see it. The same cannot be said of most board games.

There are also a number of interesting mechanics.

• When you draw dark cards, you choose which player’s dark deck to draw from, and then the card is keyed to attack that player only. Each player has a twilight marker that can shift from light to dark. Playing light cards and dark cards requires shifting the marker in opposite directions, with the result that players must balance the types of cards that they play.
• The conspiracy puzzle is also quite innovative, with 24 pieces of actual puzzle that can be constructed into a 5×5 grid during the game. In addition to scoring points for completing rows or columns, the placement of pieces determines whether certain favors are worth points at the end of the game, as each piece has a line that can connect the conspiracy to different organizations.

Perhaps the best combination of theme and mechanics comes in the interplay of cards with locations on the board, such as seedy locations. When entering a seedy location, you draw a dark card to injure other players and enable more light card play, which is good. However, many of the dark cards played against you may only injure you in a seedy location (and have appropriate flavor text), which is bad. Players can enable this by moving leads to seedy locations, luring you there. The end result is that you and your detective start to feel that seedy locations are dangerous but good sources of information, which is exactly how things should be.

What’s Not To Like?

Android is an absolutely huge game. It takes up a lot of space, it has hundreds of pieces, takes a lot of time to set up, lots of time to learn (48 pages of rules), and lots of time to play. If you only have a small card-table, or aren’t willing to invest a few hours into playing a single game, then Android may be more game than you want to deal with. The reward (in terms of fun) can be quite high, but the time investment is substantial, and may be off-putting to players who can’t imagine spending 4 hours on a single game.

Some people may also be disappointed that “solving the murder” consists mainly of adding evidence to the suspect you believe is guilty, rather than any process of deduction. Try to think of it as uncovering evidence that confirms your hunches (rather than planting evidence), and it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Finally, some players dislike being directly attacked by other players, and that’s what dark cards are. However, most characters can easily reduce the risk of attack cards by avoiding certain locations.

Overall Thoughts

Android is a giant 4-hour adventure board game, far bigger than my usual Euro-style fare. The first game took way too long to set up and learn the rules, but I really wanted to play again. Things are a lot faster the second time through, and after that, setup time becomes almost reasonable. My friends immediately wanted to schedule a time to play again, because the game just has so much fun in it. Any big science fiction fans – especially if they like Blade Runner – should definitely consider this game. Android is still a very long game, but if you don’t mind spending a full evening on it, it will provide a full evening of entertainment.

Buy your own copy of Android