Fantasy Flight announces “Android: Mainframe”
Runner vs Runner
This week, Fantasy Flight Games announced another tabletop venture into one of their most popular IP's - the Android universe. "Android: Mainframe" is described as a fast-paced board game for up to three people where the players have essentially two objectives: hack into one of the Titan Transnational Bank and do it better than any of the other players.
What's better than stealing riches from a helpless megacorp? Stealing riches from a helpless megacorp and demonstrating your superiority over other runners as you do it! In Android: Mainframe, you compete for control of different nodes within Titan's servers. Lock down a node, and you score its riches. At the end of the game, the richest runner wins.
However, outrunning other runners can be a trick—even trickier than hacking through corporate defenses. While you're hacking your way into the server, your competitors may very well be hacking your hacks. You might lay down an access point or reroute a data stream only to find your efforts subverted.
Fantasy Flight Press Release
It appears that a big part of this game's strategy is board management. Most of the programs that the players utilize during each round create paths, with the objective being to 'capture' sets of nodes within the bank's system. The more nodes the player has by the end of the game, the higher the score.
Of course, it is never that straightforward when it comes to runners in the Android universe. While most of the programs make paths and partitions, other programs allow players to disrupt paths, delete or manipulate access points or even provide extra turns.
Drawing from their super-popular living card game, all the characters in "Android: Mainframe" are runners from "Netrunner." So if you're a fan of that game, you will be looking at some familiar faces like Olivia "Chaos Theory" Ortiz, Kate "Mac" McCaffrey and Ji "Noise" Reilly.
"Android: Mainframe" looks to be another unique jump into the Android universe. The game is scheduled to arrive at retailers in the second quarter of this year. Are you ready to take a crack at Titan Transnational?
