Android is a very big game in a small box. It is bursting with theme and is based in a science fiction setting with a dark noir twist. The players represent gritty hardboiled detectives with tragic or violent back stories, who are hunting down a murderer out of three to six suspects while trying to maintain the innocence of one of the suspects.

Almost half of the board is Earth and almost half is the Moon, while a massive elevator slash skyscraper called the Beanstalk joins up the two regions. What sets Android apart from many games is that there is no movement grid. Instead, each detective has a movement ‘caliper’, effectively a curved chunk of cardboard of varying range. The locations have a circle, triangle or diamond symbol so you measure your movement from symbol to symbol.

Movement can therefore become a challenge in itself in how you navigate the board, and certain players certainly look at another character’s movement caliper with some envy on occasion, but it definitely isn’t an obstacle to winning. Movement up or down the Beanstalk is relatively slow, and the only other way to get from the Earth to the Moon or back again is with a dropship pass that you can buy. This can lead to characters remaining on either the Earth or Moon, and the locations you use on either half can affect your strategies.

There are lots of different elements to the game. At its core are the Twilight cards, each player has a deck of Light cards that they can play to benefit themselves, and a deck of Dark cards that the other players can draw from in order to hinder you. Playing these Twilight cards has its own rhythm as you generally need to play Light and Dark cards alternately, and it is to your advantage to play a steady stream of Twilight cards during the game.

The Twilight cards have a lot of flavour text and follow set plot lines for each character. There are three possible plots for most of the characters, and you play through two plots during the course of the two week game. These plots can totally screw you, and define a swing of something like fourteen victory points at the end of the game. As the game progresses players can get pretty catty with how they play their cards.

There is a conspiracy represented by a collection of puzzle pieces. During the course of the game you can place these puzzle pieces to score victory points and connect the central tile to points on the edge of the conspiracy board, these edge points represent victory point bonuses. Players can easily get tied down with fighting over the conspiracy at the expense of the main game, but those victory point bonuses can make a real difference.

Once you take into account specific locations on the board where you can gain what is called ‘Favours’ that you spend to avoid catastrophe or score points, or gain ‘Kill Orders’ to have a suspect assassinated, or gain an Alibi for a suspect, the number of options available to the players is huge. As the game progresses it can be difficult to judge who is winning, which is to the advantage of the game, because it maintains suspense.

It is easy to get distracted from the main objective of the game however You are given a Guilty card and an Innocent card at the start of the game, which identifies which suspects your character needs to ‘find’ out to be Guilty or Innocent. They give out fifteen and five points, so compared to resolving your plots successfully (which can be tricky against cunning opponents) the winner is usually the player who ‘identifies’ the Guilty suspect.

There are a bunch of ‘leads’ placed on the board that your character can visit and ‘follow’ or ‘interrogate’, which allows them to draw a token from a bag that generally has a number from -4 to +4 on it. You place the token face down on a suspect of your choice. There are also blue tokens that count as -5, and red tokens which when found on a suspect in addition to a blue token count as a +5 instead of a -5.

You add up the tokens at the end of the second week, the suspect with the highest score is Guilty and the suspect with the lowest score is Innocent. Then you reveal your Guilty and Innocent cards and gloat over your gaming expertise, as a big part of Android is ensuring the guilt/innocence of your chosen suspect while bluffing your opponents as to your intention. If you get a Kill Order on a suspect, you can really sabotage an opponent’s strategy.

There are drawbacks with Android however, it took us several play throughs to get all of the rules correct, and there are a lot of little individual mechanisms to keep track of. Your character has a limited amount of ‘Time’ during each turn to accomplish your objectives, and there are many paths to take, so games can be slow as you weigh up the options, but Android is ideal as a slow burn story based game, so it is less of a bug and more of a feature.

Android is a real brain burner as you can choose between concentrating on the conspiracy, or your plot, or the suspects, or on giving your opponent ‘Trauma’ which is effectively minus points. There is so much depth in Android, and a wealth of story both in the Twilight cards and how your individual game plays out on the board. There isn’t any direct conflict, but your ability to interfere with your opponent’s game through the Twilight cards is huge.