New Angeles - First Impressions

The city falls.

Yesterday I went to my first JIGG (Japan International Gaming Guild) board game meetup since 2010 and it turned out there were still a couple of familiar faces hanging around, and a bunch of new ones of course. It was good being back and playing games! I started out playing a couple of games of Roll for the Galaxy, a game I own but have only played twice, and it reminded me of how much fun and how quick to play it is. When everyone knows the rules it's 30 minutes, tops, and filled with fun decisions. I think I might like it better than Race, for general play like this.

After that I set up New Angeles with four other players. No one hade played it before so there was a bit of a rules explanation and the first round was a little slow, but we were soon up to a decent speed. What I was expecting, or hoping for, were the fun discussions and arguments from Battlestar Galactica, but with less cruft that is only tangentially connected to this core, and... that is pretty much what I got, with a twist.

It plays over six rounds with each round being 3-5 turns. A turn consists of a new Asset being revealed, the active player poposing an action (clean up the streets, or fixing the broken power lines, or setting up hospitals etc) which can then have a counteroffer proposed by another player. The players with no offers on the table votes for which to go through and then that is implemented and the turn passes to the next player. This structure is interjected by events that are bad for the city in different ways, and Demands that are requirements that the corps need to meet every two rounds, to not be penalized with added Threat.

And here's the first brilliant part, Threat is a measure of how close it is that the US government steps in to take control of the city, meaning everyone loose (it's very similar to Archipelago). It goes up through certain actions, or inactions but mainly by not meeting Demand and doing actions in districts with Illness tokens. To win the game you need to make sure Threat doesn't reach 25 AND make sure you have more capital than your immediate rival. At the start of the game you draw a card to see which other player is your rival and it doesn't matter if someone else has more capital than you, if you have more than your rival at the end of the game you are one of the winners. There's also likely a secret Federalist in the mix who actually want the Threat to rise as a government takeover would mean the Federalist wins! Having personal victory conditions like this is smart as you can never really discount anyone.

Jinteki, for all your clone and biotech needs!

The second brilliant thing is having the Demand take place over several rounds. Instead of drawing a Crisis card every turn, like in Battlestar Galactica, you have this looming threat that you need to take care of together. The idea of the Cylon player tanking a skill check in BSG was cool, but usually only happened once per game as it tended to expose her. With more time to work subtly it's a very different thing here, and things aren't usually as black and white, or cut and dried, as in BSG. This allows the Federalist (or anyone else) to work more subtly toward his goal.

Did I forget to mention Investments? Yes, I think I did. This is a third brilliant mechanic. There will be three checks for Demand in a game and at the same time you check to see how well your investment faired. You get one at the start of the game, and one after each Demand phase and generally they tell you to do something that has a negative impact on the city for a capital gain. And since you win by having capital they are important, however going for them could make you look like a Federalist to the other players. Add to this that each megacorporation has different ways of making extra Capital (Jinteki by removing illness, HB by moving bioroids etc) and you have a nice murky soup of city planning, corporate greed and high stakes backstabbing!

I like the orange minis, and I can see that they were going for some kind of holo Deus Ex-like thing. However, all of them in the same colour makes it tougher to read the board state at a glance. Might have to paint.

Just as with BSG the game highly rewards a little bit of light roleplay and theatrics. When you have the right group of people interpreting what's happening on the table through the lens of the Android setting the game really takes off! The game I played yesterday wasn't quite there, but everyone was very involved and there were quite a few deals being struck, even outside the codified offer-counteroffer mechanic.

You still have a bit of a board state to take care of, but instead of the Raiders and Vipers of BSG you have Human First, Orgcrime, strikes and outages that all have more of a menacing impact on the game. While these negative elements rarely have a direct impact on Threat they do make it much harder to run the city properly and meet demand. This  makes it important to clean up now and then and this is usually when corps can make a killing or the Federalist can sneak in some damage.

I've talked about Battlestar Galactica quite a bit, and although there are many similarites, the tone of the game is completely different. Or should be completely different. I think it's easy to fall into the kind of pure co-op mindset of BSG when you play it, when in fact you should simply embrace greed and play as dirty as you can possibly get away with! Since capital, assets and general favours are all up for trade you can propose all kinds of interesting deals. Especially when twisting the other players' arms! You could play nasty and vote down an important action only to take advantage of the following crisis later to score some capital. Or, as I did, slowly push for actions that raised Illness in the city and then reap the rewards as I went in and quarantined the affected districts for a lot of points!

The two main critiques of the game, that I've seen, are that it is boring and repetative and much too long. Both of which I think are perfectly valid! It is not a game for everyone. If you don't find the setting interesting and don't like negotiatons it is going to come off as boring, with "nothing much happening". It's going to be even worse if you play it as a pure co-op. And if you think it's boring it's going to feel even longer than it is, and it already quite long. Battlestar Galactica used to take us about five hours to play because of all the fiddly stuff combined with all the discussions. The game of New Angelese yesterday took us a little bit over three hours which included lots of rules explanation and no player who had played it before. Which I think is a pretty good improvement! Then again, as the trend toward shorter games seem to continue I can understand how many would feel three hours is too long.

However, for old BSG ethusiasts like me and my group this is a great game and I have a hard time seeing how New Angeles wouldn't replace it. That's not to say I would turn down a game of Battlestar Galactica, it just means that New Angeles would be the one I reach for first when I'm in the mood for some intrigue and backstabbing.

As soon as I got back home I pulled out the Worlds of Android book and started reading again. I really hope we'll see some more games in the Android setting soon...

Read More

No comments

Free Fall and Strange Flesh Book Reviews

Again... it's all because of Netrunner. Playing the game has of course made me want to explore FFG's Android setting more and I decided to start by tracking down the different Android novels released during the years following the first Android board game. Most of them I managed to find through online bookshops but Golem, the first book in the Identity trilogy, proved more elusive and I had to make a special order at my local game store. While waiting for it to arrive I read the two stand alone books, Free Fall and Strange Flesh. Let's start out talking about Free Fall since that was the first book release and seem to have the broadest, most generic approach to the setting. But first, to get into the mood, let's watch a trailer for Blade Runner...

Written by William H Keith/Ian Douglas, Free Fall for the most part feels like a tool to draw the reader into the world of Android. Anyone familiar with the setting knows it's a blend of many different classic sci fi works, Blade Runner being chief among them. Kevin Wilson is quick to point this out in his designers comment section in the original Android board game rulebook and he's been laying it on pretty thick in general. It's almost like a tounge in cheek über-pastiche with names like Weyland, Heinlein and Melange peppered throughout. However, although it seems like it would just be too much and become a soup of stolen ideas, the end result is greater than the sum of its parts and it works pretty well as a setting in its own right!

Still, a groan escaped me when the main character/narrator turned out to be named Rick Harrison. Yes, sometimes it's a bit too on the nose. Anyway, Rick Harrison is the typical gritty detective who tries to do the right thing in a corrupt world. The characterizations in the book aren't all that great, but most of the time they're flat stereotypes so you kind of know them already anyway. The writing in general is passable but unexciting and the story pretty much the same. If you read this book looking for a good crime story you'll likely come away a bit disappointed - however if you're in it for information about the setting it's a gold mine!

The actual board of the Android board game featuring New Angeles, The Beanstalk and the Moon.
We get to explore many of these locations in the books.

The gist of the story is that a politician connected to Humanity Labour (which is an anti-android organization) has been murdered in a very grisly fashion in a luxury hotel on the Beanstalk (the huge space elevator that the city of New Angeles has grown up around). Rick Harrison is sent to investigate but to keep it on the down low as it's a volatile situation. As the investigation progress there are human as well as bioroid (robots) and clone suspects. There's a fair bit of future CSI-ing going on which is quite well done with most of the technology used feeling reasonably realistic if you extrapolate from what we can do today. 

Still, much like the original Android game, the murder case is not really the main show - it simply serves as a framework to present the many different parts of the Android setting that makes it interesting. Although the title is a dead giveaway I was actually surprised that almost the entire book takes place on the Beanstalk or on the Moon and we only get a small section about New Angeles. The city has a much larger role in Strange Flesh though, so I suppose they planned it like this from the start. During space detective Rick Harrison's investigations we meet or at least hear about pretty much every character that is in the board game. Lily Lockwell plays a large role, as does Floyd 2X3A7C and Raymond Flint. Caprice Nisei and Louis Blaine are mentioned as well as some of the suspects like Noise, Eve and Mark Henry. In fact the only character I found conspiciously missing was the in dept bounty hunter Rachel Beckmann. When you take the time to include every other main character, why not her?

The book provides a good base coverege of the Android universe and is quite detailed on stuff like the Beanstalk. You also get a good feel for the technology level and that it is a hard sci fi setting. Smaller things like how personal communication is handled (the famous PADs of the PAD Campaign from Netrunner for example) is also expanded upon. You also get a much better idea of what bioroids and clones, the titular Androids, actually are and how they work in everyday life. Having read this book I find myself much more interested in this part of the mythos and would love to play as Floyd or Caprice if I ever get a chance to experience the board game again.

That's quite a bit of rambling with almost no information on what the book is actually about. Sometimes I impress even myself. Haha! I guess the bottom line is that it's an ok sci fi book, actually better than I expected, but great as a way to get some more meat on the bones of the setting. If you play Netrunner (or Android or Infiltration for that matter) and like the world that each datapack keeps opening up more of, my advise is to check it out. Yes, I wouldn't be surprised to see much of the same information being in the forthcoming The Worlds of Android book that FFG is releasing any day now (and I can't wait to get my hands on!), but even so I think it's well worth the time to read Free Fall. It's only 300 pages or so anyway so it should be quick.

With that said, on to the next book; Strange Flesh by Matthew Farrer.

I might as well start out by saying I liked Strange Flesh better than Free Fall. The latter was simply riddled with so many clichés that it was hard to get properly invested with the characters. While Strange Flesh is certainly no Crime and Punishment it manages to at least get me more interested in both the story and the characters. It's written in a series of flashbacks as clone detective Caprice Nisei interviews/interrogates civil rights journalist Tallie Perrault and she tells her how she ended up in a shootout with the cops.

The main focus of the book is the megacorp Jinteki and clones in general. The story follows Tallie as she is contacted by two individuals who claim to know the shady genesis of Jinteki's rise to power. This naturally involves cloning and of course, Caprice is a Jinteki clone herself specially designed for and on loan to New Angeles PD. Not just any clone but one with apparently human level intelligence and emotional capacity as well as a unique PSI ability that allows her to read minds! This is by far the most 'out there' concept in the otherwise fairly scientifically grounded Android universe and I think it was a good move to devote a book to this very special case. Overall I think it is handled well with Caprice's abilities following a certain logic and having limitations.

Her relationship with Jinteki and chairman Hiro is explored more indepth as well as some of the inner workings of Jinteki as we follow Tallie as she investigates the paper trail that her to clients present to her. I think the clone information is especially interesting as it almost reads like background to Blade Runner - explaining more about the replicants and how they're used. It's quickly clear that clones are designed and used as equipment and most of them seem much more simple or perhaps single minded than, for example, the replicants of Blade Runner (or Caprice Nisei for that matter). In one sequence (small *spoiler alert* here) a fast food worker clone is kidnapped (stolen?) and tied up in a bathroom and what he's most worried about is that he's missing work and how the restaurant might perform worse if he isn't there. He's basically programmed to love his job and only be good at what's needed for his specific line of work. It's simply good sci fi and I would have loved for the book to delve even deeper into it.

Strange Flesh is also much more focused on the city of New Angeles and while the Beanstalk makes an appearance Tallie Perrault and her clients move around many different parts of the city, allowing the reader to get better acquainted with it. There are several "famous" locations like Levy University and Broadcast Square and it's nice to connect faces to the names, as it were. While the story can be a little slow at times and Tallie often comes across as aggressively naive, I still quite liked the book and felt it was a more interesting read than Free Fall from a hollistic perspective. While it presents info on the setting it actually has a decent story to tell as well.

All in all I'm quite happy about investing some time and money in these books. Mostly because my greater comprehension of the setting (I now know New Angeles is located in former Ecuador!), but as entertaining stories as well. I've arranged to get my grubby paws on the Identity Trilogy as well, starting with Golem, and I'll make another book report once I've read that. If you decide to go for it I highly recommend plugging the Blade Runner soundtrack (preferably the Gongo edition) in your ears as you do it, it really enhances the feel!

Also, it really made me want to play the board game again. Even though I've never really been able to make it work as well as I'd like. Unfortunately I had to sell my copy when I moved back to Japan and my friend Anders got rid of his copy as well. Let me know if you have it for cheap! ;)

Don't forget, Fire Broadside is on Facebook nowadays, just like your mom and dad and uncle Enus. Until next time, dear readers!

Read More

No comments