On Dec 30, 6:00 am, jimmy corrigan <[email protected]> wrote:
> saw android in the store the other day and it looked cool. does it
> deliver the goods? does it really feel like, as the store clerk said,
> "blade runner: the board game"? highlights? lowlights?
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Now for the Minority Report:
(see what I did there? Minority Report...it's a dystopic, sci-fi
crime story and...what's that? You get it? Not funny, eh? OK,
carrying on...)
I didn't care for the game at all, really. Not only was it long, I
thought it did a really poor job of evoking the theme, and I thought
the human interface was terrible. The art, while lush, was busy and
made it more difficult than it needed to be to see the markers on the
board (thin white borders on the markers would help a lot). Plus, I
didn't think the board background actually gave much of a "cyberpunk"
feel to things. It was lush and pretty, but not terribly evocative.
There's practically no art on the cards, so the part you spend the
most time looking at is actually rather ugly. Worse, the type on the
cards, in typical FF fashion, is ludicrously small, especially given
the fact that the story cards need to be referenced by all the other
players at the table in order for them to intelligently play the
game's many "take that" cards. Large, bold keywords would have helped
a lot. Part of the reason the type is so small is that as much as 2/3
of the card is covered in flavor text. As we went into the game
wanting and expecting a theme-rich "experience game," we opted to read
all the flavor text aloud during our first play. In some cases, this
really worked well, but in many, it was disjointed and confusing and
did nothing to evoke a cyberpunk theme (in fact, it occurs to me that
there's far more noir theme to the game than sci-fi of any sort...this
game would suffer none from being set in the 30s or 40s).
Mechanically, it was OK. I had no problem with the movement mechanism
in and of itself, but at the end of the game we were bemoaning the
ridiculous imbalance of the "cars" along with everything else. We
played with the "PI with tortured memories," "mercenary, money-
grubbing chick," and "corrupt cop." I felt that the PI character was
greatly imbalanced compared to the other two, with MUCH more limited
"gotcha" cards against him ("Gee, if I can only trick him somehow into
getting into a fight on the moon, I'll have him!"), greater range, and
better "good" cards ("Oh, this time, you don't just get to investigate
that lead for free, but you get to do it from an adjacent space!").
Meanwhile, the corrupt cop spends 2/3 of the game suffering massive
penalties for using many of his cards. Then there was the wild
amounts of randomness in the scoring. Not only did I only manage to
draw one or two positive evidence chits (not a path to getting your
Guilty hunch to stick, let me tell you), but there were so many
adjustments and "peeks" toward the end of the game that the whole
situation shifted in the last two turns. Anything anyone had done
earlier was completely negated. Then there's the wildly different
rewards on the face of the tiles. And so on. I know it wasn't
supposed to be a super competitive thing...it's an experience game.
But the whole thing...all the mechanics...frame it as a game you're
meant to try to win. So having so much randomness and imbalance was
fatal for me. I'm sure someone's going to tell me that if I'll just
play it four or five more times, the intricate subtlety of it all will
reveal itself, but the first impression was long, frustrating on the
eyes, lacking in theme, and unfun, so I'll never make it to
understanding.
Randy...
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