Sunday Board Games Club: Android!

Today, I played what must be the slowest game I've ever played. The game was Android, by Fantasy Flight Games:

The background is that of a murder in New Angeles investigated over a two week period, six days per week. Each turn takes one day and our game had five players, the maximum.

Timo, a Berliner, is the owner and game master (and rule encyclopedia) and had really lavished attention on the game, using cellophane sheaths (called card sleeves or deck protectors) on all the cards, putting little paper bands around the decks of cards and then putting the decks in their own plastic boxes. He'd also put all the counters in compartmentalised boxes, and put the character specific cards together in their own boxes with the right counters so they didn't all get mixed up. I'd like to say that this was unnecessary with Android, but it was necessary and made the game much easier to set up. I'd never seen the point in having deck protectors before, but I'm a convert now.

Each player gets a character as detective and I got to play Floyd 2X3A7C, a bioroid (biological android: the replicants from Blade Runner). One of the advantages my character had was that I got an extra unit of time on top of the standard six.

Android is not a bad game but it's just really slow. To get to the end of turn four took us three hours! This is an average of 45 minutes per turn, or 40 if you have a 20 minute set up, which was at least what it took. The last time I was in a game this slow, there were eight players. I estimated that we would take until about eight o'clock to finish the game, so I called it quits at two o'clock. Maybe if we'd been more experienced or there were only four players it would have gone faster?