Hi all,

I'm very excited about this game. I've read the rulebook online, and I should receive the game itself on Tuesday. Unfortunately, I'm going home for Christmas on Friday, and I doubt I'll be able to clear an eight-hour slot in my schedule for a full first game before I leave.

I'm neither intimidated nor surprised by reports that the first game can take 8+ hours. My first game of War of the Ring lasted eight and a half hours, and both myself and the other player had read the rules beforehand. Now we can squeeze out a game in 3-4 hours, and I hope the same will be true of Android.

But seeing as how I'm strapped for time, I was wondering if it would be possible to run a one-week game, which would hopefully take 3-4 hours (assuming I had the bits punched out beforehand). Ideally, this would give us a strong taste of the game and a good sense of the rules, so that we eventually sat down to play a full game, we would hit the ground running.

So I was hoping that any of you who have played/own the game might offer some advice/opinion on these points:

1. Setup: I figured I would just setup for week one, and ignore the week two setup on the murder sheet. Can anyone forsee any problems with this?

2. Event Decks: I know there are 3 murder-specific event cards, and they are designed to be played over the two weeks. Should I compress them into a single week, or just play the first week's events?

3. Plots: Each detective would only play a single plot. I would restrict Raymond from being played, since each of his plots takes two weeks. Should I restrict Caprice to the "Sanity" plot that must be played on the second week, on let the player draw a plot randomly?

4. Climax: I plan on keeping this. During the last two days, even though it's still the first week, leads are removed instead of relocated. Is this a good idea?

5. Conspiracy puzzle pieces: This is a bit tricky. I don't think enough pieces will get played in a single week to make the necessary connections. I'm thinking of this variant: each time a player draws and places a puzzle piece (of any type), that player immediately draws and places a additional shift piece, and adds it to the Conspiracy puzzle. The player does not get the light/dark shift benefit for this additional piece.

6. Evidence: I don't think this will be a problem. There will be less Evidence than a full game, but it'll still work.

If anyone can forsee any additional problems, or suggest any solutions, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks!

I'm not sure some of the scoring mechanics can work properly with a 1-week game. It's completely fair though, IMHO, to just run the first week of a game as normal (excluding Raymond as you suggested), and see how far you get with things. It would definitely help people to get an understanding of how the game works. But you can at least finish and see where things would be headed, and discuss that. It's like a "trial version" of a game that gives you a taste and [hopefully] leaves you wanting more, or like a comic book series where you have to wait until the next issue to see how it ends - actually, that's more appropriate of an analogy here, considering Android's narrative format.

Eldil said:

With that in mind, I would recommend just running one week and that's it.
Eldil said:

Ultimately, I think it's probably more important that players get through the first week and understand the importance of favors, the conspiracy puzzle, the plots, the differences between the different kind of boards, and the uses for the reporter and the snitch. So I would teach people by playing through a week just as you would normally, and leave out the climax and everything. Once you get to the end, add up the VPs the same way you normally would. This lets each person see how much each facet of the game figures into their final score.

One thing to make sure they keep in mind (as Zach already stated) is that the scoring mechanics will NOT be balanced this way. The person who has correct guilty/innocent hunches will more than likely win the game because plots are balanced to have two run, whereas the murderer points are all scored at the end. Similarly, missing out on the +4 VP conspiracy tokens doesn't seem like a big deal, but that's a large source of VP income for some players (though, since Raymond is out, it probably won't be as critical). Rachel also has less opportunities to make money in a one week game - and she earns a not insignificant amount of bonus VPs that way.

Finally, some other things won't work quite right in a one week game. For example, I doubt you'll be able to collect many Jinteki or Haas conspiracy tokens, and I imagine there's not really much of a way to get enough hit tokens on someone to kill them.

Thank you for the thorough responses. I think I've been persuaded that the first game won't take as long as I initially thought. It looks like my first game will be full length, though I still would like to toy with this format as a teaching tool. Your replies have been very helpful.

Thanks again!

I'd love to see FFG post video tutorials for the complex games. Wouldn't need high production values, either.