So, now that the Android universe is expanding (Infiltration, Netrunner, novels), what do you guys think is in store for the original board game? FFG has been pretty quiet with it, even going so far as to feature it in their Holiday sale two years in a row.

Do you think they'll do the same as they did with Tannhauser, and release a "revised rulebook"? Think they'll ever offer expansions? Or do you think they'll let it fade into obscurity?

Discuss!

Well, this game is truly amazing and what I'd love about it :

- a french translation (yup, I'm french and sorry not to share this game with all my friends !)

- expansions based on new characters

- a french translation (yup, I'm fr… oh, you know)

- that's all, I think, because the game is already great as it is !

- a french translation. Yes, oh yes.

I thought they had a French version out. At least, I thought I saw it in stores here in Quebec. Maybe I'm confusing it with something else, though.

I really hope it has a future, this is a fairly new kind of game with an excellent world. Would like to see some new characters and cases, plenty of room for crossover with Netrunner.

I doubt there will be a revised rulebook a la Tannhauser. It was a different situation (and, while doing the gaming community a favor, they FFG still got some negative feedback from people who didn't know the situation).

I would like to see an expansion with either new characters or additional plots. It would be pretty easy for them to add murders too.

I think they could pull off a print on demand expansion, but the texture on the cards is different and would require sleeving, but I wouldn't mind.

sepayne7l said:

Android is not the best game for the Print on Demand service.

I don't believe they can garantee having the exact same colors as the main game print, so the cards would stand out if they were mixed with an existing deck of cards.

A new Gears of War mission, a new Mansion of Madness scenario… sure. But the only way i see a PoD expansion for Android would be to introduce a new character as you wouldn't need to mix the new cards with the old ones. This would be the biggest PoD expansion yet and i'm not sure it can even be done as the character cards are very large. Would they need to fold it to make it fit into the packaging?

And then, you would require tons of counters (NPCs for the new character) to put with it and i'm again not sure FFG can do that with their PoD service.
And then (again), you would need more events for those new NPCs… And those cards would be difficult to mix with the existing ones.

IMO, i believe only a retail expansion with the minimum size of the "horned rat" expansion or the Blood bowl card game expansion would be the way to go. A new character would be great, but then i think: "do we really need this? the game is already complex enough with already too many components…" and i think Android is fine as it is.

Now Middle Earth Quest on the other hand… WHERE'S THE EXPANSION?

deedob said:

Even though I'd love — maybe more than anything else board game-related — to see an Android expansion, the above makes a whole lotta sense. Plus, Kevin Wilson left FFG — I'm wondering if that will have an effect on anything?

I'm sure it'll have some kind of effect, though probably not a decisive one. He's suggested that FFG might hire him to do freelance work at some point, and has also alluded to the possibility of completed projects whose existence he wouldn't be able to comment on. I'd be very surprised if an Android expansion were among them, though.

For that matter, much as I love the man's work, I'd actually be sort of curious to see what tweaks or refinements another designer might bring to an expansion or revised edition.

As much as i liked Kevin Wilson and his work i do believe he didn't output the best games FFG produced.

Mr. Wilson was/is a great innovator and a great designer, but his designs seemed to always have a glaring flaw that needed to be fixed in an expansion. From my experience with his designs:

- Doom: tbg was too tough on the marines until a fix for difficulty levels was made available online and later, in the expansion.

- Descent was too tough on the overlord, until they fixed the balance in the expansions.

- Android is regarded by many as a flawed masterpiece. It's an awesome game to be sure, but the disconnects between the game characters and the abstractions that are the conspiracy puzzle and the placing of evidence on suspects was not understood by a LOT of people, who dismissed the game as such. It probably needed to be explained much better.
The balance of certain actions is also questionable in some aspects. The broadcast square being too powerful (and corrected in the faq), bad and good baggage being too easy/too hard to place on certain plots (anybody ever succeeded in giving enough bad bagagge on Floyd for him to have an sad ending? we never could even if we tried…), the time required to dig deeper VS just putting a bunch of evidence tokens on your murder suspect…

Android is still one of my favorite games. Though i do see it's flaws. Kudos to Mr. Wilson for having designed this very innovative game!

I believe Corey Konieckza (pretty sure it's mispelled) is also a great designer, and his designs don't seem to have the flaws that require an expansion to fix that FFG's design had prior.
So what i'd love is for Mr. Konieckza to design an Android 2nd edition much in the same way Descent 2 was produced. Now THAT would make my day.

Deedob, I respect your opinion about Kevin vs Corey games, but I'm not so sure I agree with you.

Kevin's games have some flaws, indeed, but they also have many ideas showing the real genius of the author. Rules for Descent, Doom, Arkham Horror and many others are simple (I can't talk of Android because I'm not done with the rules yet). Nonetheless, they offer you countless combinations of possible actions, granting you endless hours of fun (plus, I haven't ever felt the need for fixes to Doom, all the games I played as a marine where very close, narrow victories or narrow defeats, which is a huge plus for me, implying the game to be very tense. Descent is a lot easier, but you can fix it without too much trouble. Plus, starting with The Well of Darkness, scenarios became a lot more difficult). On the other hand, Corey's games are technically pure and perfect, but by far they are too structured. Too many tiny tiny decks with an incredible quantity of subrules to take into consideration. Introducing new players to Corey's games is a real pain for me. And I don't see (with all the respect I have for other people's work) any genius in them. I'm not saying they're crappy. They are very good, with a great logic, a great skill in tracking down all possible cases and cards interaction, but nothing really breathtaking (just consider the way you handle movement + action in MoM and the way it worked in Doom / Descent). Plus, one of his most representative creations, Mansions of Madness, it's completely broken: if you play aggressively as a Keeper, there is no way you can lose a game (in 30+ games I was the keeper, I scored zero defeats; when my friends play as the keeper and I'm on the other side, I've never won. So, at the moment no one wants to play it anymore. But they still ask for Descent / Doom / Arkham and so on), plus the structure of the game, being time-realted, is broken as well (you can easily have the objective revealed before investigators find Clue n.1, and this implies they know how to win the game, but they don't know why they have to act in a certain way to win. Which is a nonsense, to me). And if you can easily fix Doom or Descent (increasing or lowering the difficulty level with cards or by twisting a couple of elements of the game board), there is no way you can fix so easily Mansions.

So, I'm on Kevin's side. Still, I wish him my best for his future, and I hope to see many other games he designed being produced by FFG.

If I had to name someone to revise Android, I'd be interested in a Christian Petersen version (loved to death all of his creations), but I'm not so sure he has time to do this kind of stuff any more