Dragon V2

While I'm still hoping to see something like the Nautilus X that I wrote about a couple of years ago, I was also increadibly pleased to see the new version of the Dragon spacecraft from SpaceX that will allow seven crewmembers to get around in space. The Dragon V2 was announced the a couple of weeks ago by Tony Stark Elon Musk and it looks beautiful! The first thing that strikes you is how sleek and modern it looks, both outside and in. The seats and control interface especially looks just like something out of the new Star Trek movies which is pretty neat! Of course, the spartan interior will likely look quite different during actual operation and with stuff crammed everywhere. The control interface will be based around touch screens coupled with a center panel with physical buttons and switches for emergencies.

Elon in the pilot's seat.

Room for seven.

Moving out of the spaceship you might notice that it's standing on its own four legs and the four large, black exhausts around the hull. Yepp, this thing is meant to land on its own using eight (partially 3D-printed!) SuperDraco thrusters after having entered the Earth's atmosphere. Elon says it will have the accuracy of a helicopter which is pretty impressive compared to simply aiming for the ocean! If you feel sceptical of the idea, just take a look at what SpaceX has already accomplished with Grasshopper:

Of course Dragon V2 will have parachutes as well, for emergencies. After landing it will be ready to launch again very soon which is one of the core concepts of SpaceX's approach to space - as much as possible should be reusable and the time to relaunchability should be short.

We don't have much information about how it performs in space but in the video above you can see something similar to a service module with fins (for radiation) that is covered by solar panels. This is an interesting choices as we usually see foldable "wings" for the panels. Perhaps this approach of less moving parts make for higher effieciancy.

First off the Dragon V2 will be used for getting astronauts to the ISS but it's clearly meant to handle other tasks as well and we know that SpaceX still has Mars as its main goal. Just the other day Elon made an interview on NBC News and said that he's hopeful that we'll see the first humans on mars in 10-12 years. A bold statement, but coming from this man I'm not immediately sceptical. Of course the Dragon going to Mars would probably be version 3 or 4.

Speculation on what the next Dragon might look like.

With more and more private companies picking up the slack that governments have left off it's an exciting time to be a space exploration enthusiast!

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Firefly the Game - First Impressions

Making work in the 'verse!

Hello world! Back from Japan and when I came home I had a number of parcels waiting for me - my Torchbearer rulebook had arrived (beautiful!), The Heart of the Wild for The One Ring, a 1/35 scale brass minigun(!) and, last but not least, Firefly the Game!

I've always been a fan of the scrappy crew flying their tramp steamer in space idea. When watching Star Wars as a kid I didn't dream of being a Jedi, but of being a smuggler like Han or a bounty hunter like Boba since they had they had their own ships, lived their own lives and were simply... cooler! Han Solo being the kind of archetypal space smuggler didn't prevent Cowboy Bebop from bringing its own style and themes to the genre and then Firefly came along (well, before that there was Outlaw Star, but as I haven't seen that yet I'll leave it).

At first I turned my nose up at the fusion of western and sci-fi but by the end of the pilot I was sold! Loved the show and was very sad when it was cancelled - there was just SO much potential left untapped. Sure some of it appeared in the movie Serenity, but that was really just a pale shadow of what could have been.

Anyway, here we are years later and the show has spawned its first proper board game iteration. The theme of the game is something I've been looking for for ages! I remember being really excited for Smugglers of the Galaxy back in 2004 and although that game had a lot of the stuff I was looking for it stumbled at several points and failed to live up to my standards. More recently Merchants & Marauders seem to be scratching a similar itch, even though the setting is different (which is the only reason I haven't picked it up yet). There are also The Phantom League, but that seems to be more of a euro game, and Merchant of venus, which seems mostly focused on trading.

This new Firefly game from Gale Force 9 does seem to have all the bits I've been looking for though - a crew, a ship, trading and smuggling and heists, space hazards and general misbehaviour. All of it in card form though which means randomness. I won't go much into how the game plays or what's in the box as that is easy to find out anyway. The rulebook is free to download from the games official website.

The game setup. This was when I played solo to learn the rules, but you get the idea.

I played a solo game just to try it out and then I played a full four player game yesterday. First off I'd like to say that the cards and components look great! I'm normally not a fan of movie stills in games (FFG made a great decision in using 100% art in their Star Wars card game) but here it's been been handled pretty well and the stills actually takes the backseat to the rest of the graphic design which is done in a very thematic retro style that I really dig! At first it looks like a bit of a mish-mash but as you set the game up it all comes together nicely.

Mal flying the Serenity with a motley crew, a Cry Baby and with a warrant issued. 

Each player starts with one of the seven available captains, 3000 credits and an identical Firefly ship of their own. The first few turns are usually spent getting some crew and equipment for them before you start taking jobs from the five different contacts available. Buying crew/equipment and taking job offers are the least random aspects of the game as you can a) take any cards in the discard pile as well as draw blindly and b) always "consider three, take two". This means that you have a fair amount of control of what crew you're getting for your ship and what you're getting your ship and crew into!

Most jobs involve flying some cargo from one location to another, while others have a specific target planet where you need to "Misbehave" - the game term for causing a ruckus and testing the mettle of your crew. Legal jobs that don't require any Misbehaving are pretty straightforward and the only randomness you need to worry about are the movement cards (more on those later), however the Misbehave cards can really take you for a ride if you're unlucky. They allow you to choose between two skill tests to roll and some of them also have an "Ace in the Hole" - meaning you can bypass the entire card if you have a specific item/crew profession with you. It's actually a really cool way of getting lots of variety and theme into the game but it also makes it fairly random. If you don't have an extremely well-rounded crew you could draw a card that you simply can't get past. In fact there's one card called Alliance Operative that is impossible to get by unless you have River Tam in your crew... which is seriously awesome from a thematic standpoint, but can be a bit frustrating from a general gaming standpoint.

Allaince cruiser. Oh yes... painted.

When you move your ship you can choose to mosey along a single sector, without burning any fuel or accruing any risk. You can also do a full burn wich allows you to move five sectors but for each sector you move you have to draw a card from one of the two movement decks. There's one for Border Space, where Reavers prowl, and one for Alliance space, where there's always the risk of a customs inspection. Then there's the ever present risk of the ship breaking down or some other calamity occuring (or boon for that matter!). This is also a pretty neat idea, but again... very random. If you're unlucky enough to get hit by the Reaver Cutter and you don't have the right crew you can get seriously crippled! Again, very thematic but possibly frustrating.

So randomness is definitely a factor. I don't really mind this all that much as this is a game you play more for the experience and storytelling aspects rather than to optimize the gameplay and win. Don't get me wrong, you can definitely put a killer crew together that can handle anything, but play it with the theme front and center!

Literally five minute paint jobs! It's a board game after all. Well, except for the cruiser 

where I spent another five minutes doing the "windows".

What I do mind is the social solo play aspects of the game. Yes, you are playing with three friends but for the most part that experience and simply playing by yourself won't be very different. There are a few of ways ot interact with other players but, besides sending the Cruiser and Cutter in the direction of the competition, none of those came up when we played. As this is a racing game rather than a direct conflict game this is perhaps not all that surprising, but I still think more interaction would make the game a lot better. There are already loads of different house rules floating around for things like cooperating during a job as well as boarding each others ships to steal cargo or equipment and I would be surprised if similar rules don't turn up in one of the upcoming expansions.

I think the four of us liked the game well enough, mainly thanks to its strong theme and sense of story building, but we were all in agreement over the low player interaction problem. The game also starts off kind of slow as everyone simply tries to get their ships into shape. Inspired by the "Idea Turns" of High Frontier I wonder if this couldn't be sped up a lot by having a kind of auction for crew and items during setup. Or perhaps simply hand out some basic crew randomly and give out less credits.

During the second half of the game when we all had a decent crew things picked up considerably though. All of a sudden the race aspect became very apparent and who would win was all up in the air. By this time we had the card drawing down pat as well, but even so Firefly is a game that will most likely run longer than the 120 minutes written on the box. In fact, I think four players is borderline one too many. I have a feeling that three players will be the sweet spot.

Hmmm.... I guess I sound kind of negative in this here First Impressions article. Well, the game does have a couple of issues, but even so I had a great time playing and the Firefly theme is so well integrated that you can't help but feel the story of your ship unfold as you play. Is it the perfect space smuggler game that I've always wished for? No, but it's the best I've come across so far. GF9 simply getting some more player interaction into the game through expansions would alleviate the main problem with the game as it stands right now.

Still, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Firefly to any fan of the show. Especially if you are in it for the experience rather than to work out the perfect strategy. And with some patience (and money) I'm sure the gaming experience will keep improving with the expansions.

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Movie Musings

During the past couple of months I've watched a few movies of the sci-fi variety and I thought it'd be worth typing up some thoughts on them.

Tragically I ended up going alone to Pacific Rim. Sure I might have been a bit impatient, but still! I think you

know what the movie is about pretty much; giant mecha fighting giant monsters. This could so easily have become too silly for its own good or it could have taken itself too seriously, again ending up making the movie silly (the Transformers movies manage to do both at the same time!). Instead Guillermo del Toro finds the perfect balance and a movie about mecha fighting monsters becomes as fun and as awesome as it should be! It's hard putting my finger on exactly what it is that makes it work so well, but I certainly enjoyed myself and look forward to the sequal.

Something I really liked was that you had about five minutes of exposition at the start of the movie and then we got straight into kaiju fights! No gradual build-up, no origin story, just pure mecha fun from the get go! Brilliant! I really don't understand why the film didn't do better in the states. It didn't do badly at all, but I thought it could easily have been the big summer blockbuster. Did the average American movie goer miss the flag waving and patriotic undertones of movies like Transformers and Independance Day? Was the international cast and the main battlefield (Hong Kong, not NY or LA) off-putting? Or am I being a bit too prejudiced? ;)

Next up was Elysium, which I did manage to see with a couple of friends. After Neil Blomkamps first movie, District 9, was such a cool piece of cinema I had quite high expectations. I'd heard that the reviews were lukewarm but I went into the movie theater undeterred! It's about the poor, filthy masses down on Earth in contrast with the super rich and beautiful who have taken refuge to a space habitat (basically a Stanford Torus) called Elysium. Although the gritty style of District 9 is still very much intact you quickly realize that this is a different kind of movie. If District 9 was Fargo, Elysium is (the original) Total Recall . If District 9 was The Wire, Elysium is The A-Team. And I really do mean this in the best way possible! I think one reason for the lukewarm reviews is that this fun 80s style action movie can be hard to see behind all the grit and realism that Blomkamp loves so much. I was a bit confused as well at first, but when Sharlto Copley's evil sleeper agent character just became more and more over the top and insane it all clicked; "he's having so much fun doing this!". Despite the grit and the realistic design you really can't take this movie all that seriously - it's an action romp with superb sci-fi design and execution! Think about the plot a few seconds too long and you'll realize it's got holes like a sieve. But that's not the point! Just lean back and enjoy it.

With a lesser director Elysium would have been some kind of direct to video release, but Blomkamps amazing eye for detail raises it to a different level. The movie is full of all kinds of cool technology and designs, but they never insist upon themselves. This is really quite rare in modern sci-fi as every neatly designed gadget or gun have to be poured over by the camera, showing it in detail and how it works. Blomkamp simply throws all the cool stuff he likes in the movie but just allows it to stay in the background, which really helps with world building and, again, realism. And there are so many things that you'd like to just pluck out of the movie and put in your little sci-fi mini game! Just look at the different ships/hovercraft to the above.

If you don't know what I'm on about, consider the original Star Wars films. They had tons of background technology and designs that just were there and most of it you as the viewer never really understood or got a good look at. This probably had a lot to do with the cobbled together practical models used that often seemed to be a compromise between the concept art and what parts the model builders had knocking around. In the new prequal trilogy on the other hand, so many of the ships, gadgets and sets are thrust in your face, screaming "look at this awesome design I came up with! Please agree with me that this is awesome!! LOOK AT IT!!!", and to me this detracts greatly from a movie. I want cool designs, but I don't want to look at a showreel. Anyway, I quite liked Elysium and while it's not as good as District 9 it should be in every sci-fi fan's collection. 

I remember hearing about Europa Report quite a long ago, but feared it had died the kind of death movies you like to see usually do. So I was pleasantly surprised when it was released and made available for streaming. It's of the found footage variety but as the cameras are mostly fixed inside the spacecraft you rarely get the shaky cam that can be tiresome if used to much. It's about the first human exploration to Jupiter's moon Europa and we get to follow the crew through the journey and as they finally set down on Europa. The creators have gone to considerable length to make the movie as an accurate portrayal of space flight and that alone makes for an interesting movie. It's so rare these days to see something like this - the latest I can remember is Apollo 13 and (of course) 2001.

Europa Report is basically a "things go wrong in space" movie so you kind of know what you're in for, but what actually happens and how these problems are handled is what sets this movie apart. I don't want to move into spoiler territory so I'll leave it at that. It's also remarkable what kind of visual effects they've managed to achieve with the budget they had. The exterior shots are simply gorgeous! Especially during the landing sequence on Europa. Really spectacular stuff!

This is a film any sci-fi enthusiast would enjoy, but if you prefer hard sci-fi and perhaps enjoy real space flight it's an absolute must watch!

Hmm... that went on a bit too long. The next two will be quick.

I had heard so much bad about World War Z but I ended up thinking it was fairly good. It has almost nothing in common with the book of the same name, which really is the films great problem. Had it been released under any other name I think the reception would have been much better, now it simply seemed like people were angry that it wasn't the "real" World War Z and discounted it because of it. Standing on its own legs the movie adds a few things to the zombie mythology and it's actually pretty cool to see a zombie movie that is more like a classic disaster movie rather than a horror movie. Wouldn't mind a sequal.

Finally, I've watched Star Trek: Into Darkness. JJ Abrams does his thing and there are some cool scenes and pretty visuals. The cast is quite good (I liked Cumberbatch) and no expenses have been spared to make the effects spectacular. However, this is not Star Trek. It really isn't. And this is coming from someone who is really not a Trekkie in any sense of the word. I watched a bit of TNG as a teenager but that's about it. Recently I've started watching TOS and I quite enjoy it from a conceptual stand point. As a teenager I remember I thought Star Trek was mostly boring and not as action packed as Star Wars, but watching it now I like it because it is something different.

These two new movies really don't have anything in common with Star Trek except names, ships and uncountable nods and winks to the original series (really, it's starting to become a bit much). They could easily have been done as just generic non-Star Trek sci-fi movies and no one would have noticed. No one would have said "you know, Into Darkness really reminded me of Star Trek".The whole overarching concept of exploration and the future of humanity has been discarded in favour of explosions and silly plot twists. It's like rebooting Star Wars and forgetting about the Force. Or rebooting The Lord of the Rings and forgetting the actual ring! Basically, I think it's a waste of an IP when it's turned into generic action like this.

Yepp, I think that's about it when it comes to recent (new) sci-fi I've watched. I could perhaps throw in Agents of SHIELD in the mix, but it's on tv so... meh. Ok! So it is pretty cool and very Joss Whedon-y. In fact, I kept thinking "this is very much like Firefly" which in this case is a good thing. It could use a few generous scoops of grit though, as it feels much too sentimental. Still, I'm looking forward to seeing more!

There are a couple of characters missing still, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a 
River and Simon (although Simon really seems to have been integrated with Fitz/Simmons) 
and perhaps even a Book joining our merry band. :)

As for upcoming movies, we have Gravity by Afonso Cuaron, which looks absolutely fantastic, Ender's Game by Gavin Hood, which could go either way and Robocop by José Padilha, which also treads a fine line. Anything else in the next three or four months to look out for?

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Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter

While I've mentioned Kickstarter projects in the past this is the first time I write an entire post dedicated to one. I've been wary of backing any and have, as more and more projects sprang up, felt a bit of a "Kickstarter fatigue". There have simply been sooo many launched during the past year! That is not to say there has been a lot of awesome stuff coming out of this new kind of venture; things like Sedition Wars, Mutant Chronicles and Zombicide certainly looks impressive! Still, besides helping fund FATE Core and Mutant: År Noll (a Swedish postapoc rpg) I've stayed away from the whole thing.

Then the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter launched and I simply couldn't help myself. It's kind of weird since I've never actually seen the whole series, in fact I only saw a couple of episodes when I was a kid, as well as the Macross movie as a teenager. Still those Veritechs (together with Robotech Defenders - different thing, same name) cemented my love for giant mecha and I think it's that love that made me pull the trigger more than anything else. While I've got a fledgling Northern Guard force for Heavy Gear and there are games like Battletech still around, the idea of a quick playing, less niche, miniature game that focus on classic anime mecha appeals to me enormously!

I had seen some previews of the models before and they looked good! Among others, the classic Veritech Valkyrie in all three forms, the Tomahawk, the Zaentradi walkers and most recently... the MAC II Monster! So I hurried and got one of the early bird pledges saving me a little bit of cash, thinking I could always change my pledge later. The $140 level is where you get access to free unlocks, but so far I'm not quite sure it's worth it. Then again, give it a few weeks for more stretch goals to be achieved and it might be a different matter entirely. We'll see...

Of course, I'm a gamer at heart and although I love myself some great looking models I'm very curious about the actual gameplay. Luckily Ninja Division put together a quick video about the basics of the game and I think it looks fairly interesting:



Now these are of course only the rule fundamentals, and a work in progress at that, but the basic dice mechanics appeals to me. I like that each unit has a defence stat, something that is missing in most miniature games, and the fact that a single roll of the dice is enough to determine the outcome of an attack unless your opponent spend command points to dodge etc.

I have some concerns about the game bogging down when you play larger battles as there seems to be a decent level of detail, but that might be counteracted by the limitations on command points. If you don't have enough points to spend you simply don't get to try and dodge or use your anti-missile systems. However this also means that even smaller games will likely prove interesting as there are a quite a few special attacks and things like flanking and massed fire are in.

The command point system in general seems like an interesting mechanic. Robotech features an otherwise conventional I-go-you-go system with alternating activations but the command points, that seems similar to the command points of Space Hulk, allow you to use special kind of attacks and maneuvers as well as protecting your troops in the opponents turn. Perhaps similar to the special orders of Dust Warfare but available all the time. Hmm...

Well, those are my initial thoughts on Robotech RPG Tactics. It's been very successfull so far and was funded in less than three hours. As of this writing there are another 27 days to go and the funding is at $311,561 (meaning less than $15,000 to go for the MAC II!) which should mean a number of more stretch goals being unlocked.

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Sci Fi on the Screen

I was going to write about the upcoming Elysium by Neill Blomkamp, but with some other movie/tv sci fi turning up I decided to simply expand this post. For me District 9 is one of the best sci fi movies of the past ten years. Granted, that might not be such a great feat considering the competition - the Transformers and the Avatars might be somewhat entertaining here and there, but great movies they are not.

There have been a few other great sci fi films (Moon, Children of Men, Rise of the Planet of the Apes) as well as some good ones (Dredd, Contagion, Source Code) but I think District 9 stands out the most as something completely different to what we've seen before. Neill Blomkamp has a visual sense of concept that I would liken to a young Ridley Scott. While Star Wars introduced the idea of the lived-in future Scott perfected it in Alien and Blade Runner. I get a similar feel when watching both District 9 and the new trailer for Elysium, except Blomkamp has updated the lived-in future to fit better with the 21st century.

As for the more futuristic aspects of Blomkamps movies I get a strong feel of Chris Foss and Syd Mead. Their work during the seventies and eighties had a great impact on me as a kid and Blomkamp just being a year younger than me probably grew up with these images as well. I'm very happy for it as I think a lot of today sci fi designs have become... almost standardized. The same design elements pop up again and again in tv, film and games and while they might look cool they soon get lost in a sea of similar designs. I think bringing back some of the concepts from the seventies and eighties is a great way to bring something new to the table. Especially since technological limitations during that time meant they could rarely be represented well when they were created. This has of course changed since then.

Anyway, what about Elysium? Well, the story is basically that Earth has succumbed to our misshandling of it and has become hot, dirty and over-crowded. The rich people have simply fled the planet and are living in a space station called Elysium - which is a beutifully realized Stanford Torus, yet another nod to the seventies - where they frollick in the artificial gravity and enjoy privileges like machines that can instantly detect (and cure!) cancer. Back on Earth Max De Costa (Matt Damon) has just been told he's got a terminal disease and don't have long to live, so he decides to try and get into Elysium. Jodie Foster plays the government official on Elysium who try to keep him out with the help of a bounty hunter named Kruger, played by Sharlto Copley - the lead of District 9. And that's the basic premise of the movie, but don't listen to me... watch the trailer:

Yepp... looks pretty neat, right? Looking forward to August are we? So that's Elysium. Definitely the movie to look forward to for me personally. 

What I also wanted to mention was SyFy's new series Defiance. It's a science fiction melange mixing Firefly, Mad Max and Babylon 5 with some interesting ideas crammed in. Perhaps I should have put Mad Max first as the show takes place on Earth that was inadvertently ruined by an alien fleet 30 years ago. It's not clear exactly what happened but it seems like there was a big battle that pretty much ensured mutual destruction and now a bunch of different alien races are stranded on a post-apocalyptic or post-terraform (although that's not the correct word since it was alien technology... extraforming?) Earth. 

While the Mad Max angle is obvious with the jury-rigged vehicles, evil raiders and a lack of resources I think SyFy really wants to grab the Firefly fans with this series. Besides the sci fi cowboy style that is fairly prevalent in the pilot it's a lot more than that, the backstory of the main character (a rogueish ex-military man who now make a living through salvage) and the general feel of struggling against the odds certainly make my Firefly bell ring. The city the show takes place in (and the name of the show itself) is even named after that fateful battle and there seems to have been some kind of military unit called yellow jackets. Hmm..

The B5 feel comes from the great mix of aliens and uplifted animals that live in Defiance. The Votans who came with the alien fleet was an alliance of different races and although they're all pretty much of the rubber forehead kind, and fairly stereotypical at that, I enjoyed the variety. I really liked the uplifted (?) orangutans though! Made me want to paint my ape gang for Jude Dredd. Here's a trailer:

In the pilot we get to know the main character, Nolan, and his feisty sidekick/adopted ailen daughter Irisa. They scavenge stuff from the alien spaceships that periodically crash down on Earth (quite often I assume) but after a run-in with raiders they find themselves in Defiance, which is very much a futuristic version of the frontiers town. We get to see the main factions in town and the obvious (at first, but probably more grayscale as the series goes on) bad guy is a scheming alien Castithan who also owns the local bar. His antagonist is a rich human who owns most of the mines in the area. Naturally they both have children and the human girl is in love with the Castithan boy... I see a lot of Capulet/Montague stories in the future, even though they fastforwarded it and changed the ending.

There's a betrayal and the towns energy shield is sabotaged just as they learn that an army of Volge are Theo Jansens's Strandbeest. It looks like the town is going to get wiped out, but luckily Nolan saves the bacon with some kind of alien power source that he scavenged in the beginning of the episode. He becomes the new town sheriff (I bet noone saw that one coming!) and at the end we get to see who the real bad guys are, including a bearded guy with some seriously silly looking glasses.
marching their way. I kind of liked the Volge although they pretty much looked like more cybered up locust from Gears of War. They had some neat walkers though, including one that reminded me of

The pilot was very much that, a pilot. And in my experience sci fi or fantasy tv pilots are rarely good in and of themselves as they have too much stuff to cover and get the audience hooked on. Neither plot nor character development is given enough time as there is an entire world to establish. This lends itself to one-dimensional characters and a very cliché script, but this is not anything I hold against Defiance. While some series, like Firefly, succeeds brilliantly in making an actual good pilot I think that is the exception rather than the norm.

All in all I think Defiance has potential, as long as SyFy actually dares to do something new. Right now the show is dangerously close to the cliché cliff but there are still enough interesting things in it for it to be able to break new ground. It'll be interesting to see the next few episodes.

Oh, and the series also ties in to a new MMO by the same name and apparently the tv show will affect what happens in the game and vice versa. Yepp. Here's another (live-action) trailer that shows more of the gaming side of the setting. Big bugs etc.

There we go.... some of my ramblings regarding sci fi on the screen. See ya!

EDIT: Well then... look what just popped up! AMC is apparently developing Ballistic City, described as Blade Runner meets Battlestar Galactica, taking place on a generation ship and being about crime. It sounds absolutely spectacular!

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Aliens: Colonial Marines

New trailer for Gearbox's Aliens: Colonial Marines that's supposed to be a direct sequal to Cameron's film. It's been in development hell for a long time, but hopefully it's worth the wait... until spring 2012. I always keep my fingers crossed for anything USCM related.

Some more info over at Kotaku.

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Android - a Last Chance

In 2008 Fantasy Flight Games released Android, a science fiction game with a very strong Blade Runner vibe where you were trying to solve(?) a murder as well as keep your own personal daemons in check. It had beautiful components and everything about it seemed to appeal to me. Blade Runner is one of my absolute favourite movies, and I'm a huge fan of William Gibson, so when I got it I pimped it out and studied up on the rules.

Then I got together with a bunch of JIGGers (this was back when I lived in Tokyo) and we tried it out... and it was kind of... meh. I tried it a couple of more times but I never really got the experience out of it that I was hoping for. It simply took a long time (easily rivalling Twilight Imperium) and I think in the end everyone just wanted to get it over and done with. The "murder mystery" just felt very random and after a while you didn't have the energy to care for everyone's personal plots.

So when I moved back to Sweden Android was one of the games that I decided to sell. And this is very rare for me, I'm a hoarder! Naturally I would have liked to keep it, but I had to make some priorities and I simply had a lot more fun playing Age of Conan, Chaos in the Old World or Arkham Horror (although I have a feeling that AH might get "fired" by Mansions of Madness).

However, it has always lingered at the back of my mind. I simply want to like it so much - it has all the right ingredients! I've been thinking that maybe if we tried playing it with just the right crowd when we were in just the right mood then maybe it'd click. So when me and Anders (who's also a huge Blade Runner geek) were planning a game night we decided to give Android another try. Mats and Jimmy joined us as well and I think all of us are very much into the theme and experience when gaming, meaning that Android should be right up our alley.

Android set up and ready to play.

We set up the game and started playing and in the beginning we got really into the story, reading all the cards out loud and playing pretty much in character (although we all jokingly agreed Floyd should speak in a monotone). But as time went by the card reading fell by the wayside as the characters stories never really drew us in, and after four hours we had only made it half the way through. We decided to end it at that time. Checking the different suspects it turned out that the guy with the least tokens on him was the murderer, making the mystery seem even more random! We didn't mess much with the conspiracy since the mechanics for it are kind of boring (although it's definitely what you should go for if you want to win), but most of us had managed to get the positive ending on our plots.

First off I have to say that this is the most fun I've ever had playing Android and I'm glad we gave it another shot. Playing with the right kind of people and with the right mindset makes a huge difference. If we'd had the time I could probably have played the second week as well and had (kind of) fun with it, but in the end the game still left me largely unfullfilled, and it scores very low on the commitment vs fulfillment ratio. The theme is excellent (although at times ham-fisted and clichéd) and I love the concept of the different mechanics - murder, conspiracy, plot - but it never really comes together as a harmonius whole. As the game goes on it just feels like you're less and less in control of what's going on.

There are a bunch of posts on how to play Android "correctly"out there (like this one) and they usually come down to stuff like "play the story", "play the characters", "play as the designer had envisioned". Although I understand where they're coming from, to me that seems to be an awful lot of restrictions to put on a game that is as open as Android in fact is. Why give the players all these options and freedom if you "have" to play the game in a certain way to "get it" or make it fun. To me that is not good game design.

Now, I hate drawing Twilight Imperium into each and every board game post I make on this blog, but there is a game with tonnes of different things to do and ways to play the game, but it all fits together and all the different ways are valid. Sure it might be a little clunky, but everything you do in TI has an impact on the game and although you can fall behind you never feel out of control. Damn, it's about time I stop talking and start playing some TI again. It's been ages!

Well, this is starting to get long-winded.

Even though we talked about this being the last chance for Android in our group I don't actually think it was, the attractive elements are simply too many. I'm pretty sure that in a year's time from now some of us are going to thinking that maybe if we tried it just once more... then it might be really cool! Maybe we'll try it with some kind of variant rules next time, like the Directors Cut or something.

Perhaps I'm suffering from some kind of Star Wars prequal denial thing when it comes to Android, I like the concept and ideas so much that I can't make myself let it go. Hmm...

UPDATE: Nope, I indeed can't let it go! I just got my hands on a used but unpunched copy for the same cheap price I sold mine for in Japan. More on this later... :)

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Our cyberific ancestry!

I like this!

From Online Schools by way of io9.

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