Foothills Mall Game Daze Employee Recommendation, 4/2009

Thomas-

It’s the future and there’s crime. You’re a detective trying to solve a murder but there’s a whole conspiracy behind the murder and on top of that all, you’ve got to straighten out things in your personal life. Think of it as you’re trying to make the best sci-fi detective movie. The box says it plays 3-5 players, but it’s an amazing 2-player game.

Have you ever seen the movie Strange Days? There’s this guy and he’s trying to solve this murder, and there’s this conspiracy, but while that’s front and center, the movie is really about his relationship with his ex-wife. It’s just like that in Android. While you’re trying to solve the crime, you may be dealing with your corrupt cop getting out from under the mob or the psychic trying to control her abilities. Stuff like that.

There’s three main parts of the game: the murder, uncovering the conspiracy, and the personal plot lines. With the murder, everyone has different hunches: you think one particular suspect is guilty, everyone else has different guilty hunches. When you follow up clues, you get to place evidence on the various suspects. Whichever suspect has more evidence against them at the end of the game is found guilty. If that’s your guy, you get lots of points.

You can also dig into the conspiracy, which is this puzzle area on the board. (Point to board image on the back; this is the upper right hand quadrant.) When you investigate, you can place a puzzle piece on the board linking various groups up to the conspiracy. At the end of the game, depending on what groups are linked up, you might score more points.

The last major element is your personal story. As the case goes by, different things can happen that either moves you towards a good ending for your personal story or a bad ending. Because we’re thinking of a movie, a good ending is worth more points than a bad ending.

There are several crimes to investigate and a ton of different events that can happen in the game, so there is a lot of replayability in here. It’s from Fantasy Flight, which means that the game is going to look beautiful and there’s a lot of stuff in the box. It’s a massive game. Plays great at 2-players and on up to five. There’s no player elimination, so you don’t have to worry about getting knocked out of the game. It’s a solid evening’s worth of gaming.