Android

I played an interesting game on Saturday, called Android. The game is based in a futuristic world, with distinctly cyberpunk overtones. I felt we should be playing it while listening to the theme from Bladerunner. It involves a murder, and the players are supposed to be finding out who the killer is, but it is much more than that, with politics and corruption involved.

For a first play, it was a bit of a disaster. The events are supposed to take place over a two week period, with 6 days of each week (I suppose even Cyborgs get Sunday off) representing the 12 turns. The game is supposed to take 2-4 hours. I was expecting a bit longer, as we were all new to the game, and we were playing with the maximum 5 players. Even so, after 3 hours, we were only just playing the 4th day of our first week, so I suggested we finished at the end of that week, which we did, about an hour later.

I have a few ideas why it took so long (aside from us being beginners), and want to play it again with fewer players to see if I am right. I think we were playing it slightly wrong – not in terms of rules (although we discovered a couple of slips there), but in terms of tactics. You have so many action points (“Time”) per turn, and some actions take only one “Time”, which means you could do six-seven actions (or even more) in a single turn. Other actions take considerably more “Time”, which means your turn would be much shorter. We were concentrating on the simple more numerous actions, which is why I think we over-ran.

Despite this, it was a game I thoroughly enjoyed and would want to play again. It is very rich in theme, and the different player characters have different personal plots going on in parallel with the action. I hope to get it onto the table again soon.