ANYWAYS. New Year's Eve was awesome. We got some new board games for Christmas and last night we played a new game called Android. I'll tell you a little about it, though I doubt most people will be interested.
Android is porduced by Fantasy Flight, who make my all time favorite board game: Arkham Horror. They also make some of the most complicated games you will ever play.
If you're in to board games hardcore style...this is definitely for you. It got AMAZING reviews and is a really fun, competitive game. It's for about 3-5 and I don't recommend playing with less than 5 players after you learn how to play.
The premise is you each play an investigator who is trying to solve a crime scene. The crime is the same for everyone, and so are the suspects. Everyone has different "hunches" (hunch cards that award points for either convicting a suspect or proving them innocent) about the suspects, and I gotta tell you, convicting the killer doesn't necisarrily win you the game. It sure does help, however.
Now this game is INTENSE and has an extremely high learning curve because there is SO much going on at all times. Not only do you have to uncover clues to convict the suspect your character thinks is guilty, but you also have "plot" cards that your character has to deal with.
These plot cards are basically a character's personal life/issues interfering with his/her investigation. Along with these each character has individual cards that only they start with. One character is mentally unstable, one is a gambler with a card that deals with her money issues, one has problems with people in his past and his card deals with his memories etc. etc.
They make for really fun flavor text and add so much to the character development. They also give other players strategies to try and hinder any other character. Another thing you deal with is each character has light and dark cards, where you can play light cards on yourself and dark cards on other characters. Again trying to hinder them, and help yourself.
One more thing going on is there is a "conspiracy" puzzle, where instead of getting points to convict someone you can try to uncover a piece of the puzzle and uncover the conspiracies connected with the murder.
So needless to say it is one beefy game. Unfortunately it feels like they got a little overzealous with all these innovative new ideas that they had and just shoved them all in to one game. It's like, man, you could have maybe come out with two games and split all these ideas between the two and they both would be amazing. Also, the way they implemented all these new mechanics makes it so that you simply can't ignore any of the elements. I tried to ignore the conspiracy and focus on convicting my suspect, and that screwed me a bit. My husband took all his time playing my dark cards, and uncovering the puzzle and that screwed him over. Another friend tried not to play anyone's dark cards and that wound up screwing him a bit. So you can't ignore any of the elements in the game...which is annoying and cool at the same time.
Overall a great game, but certainly a game you have to play to learn. And even more so a game you need to play a few times to reeeeally enjoy.
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