Android : Mainframe Announced

Fantasy Flight Games have announced a new game in their Android Netrunner universe, Andriod: Mainframe, a fast, light game of hacking.

This is the fourth game set in the Android universe, the other three being Android, Infiltration and Netrunner. Based on a similar theme to Netrunner, and not the Blade Runner detective noir of Android, Mainframe has players acting as rival runners as they attempt to hack their way through a megacorporation's digital defences and steal its riches.

 

It’s all about spatial control, as you attempt to control nodes on the board but can also lay down tracks, representing sub-routines to block in your token, thereby securing the node. There are a number of special characters in the game, each with their own complement of unique subroutines, meaning each player has to different strategies.

Mainframe is very different in style to the previous games in the series, and with a play time of less than half an hour quoted, considerably lighter than its Grandfather Android. To be honest Mainframe looks more like a mini game that you would see in Android.

I rather like the look of Android Mainframe, looking like a more random version of Nexus. Hopefully the price point will be right, as I think with such a light game it’s also going to have to be a relatively low price to encourage hard-core Netrunner players to give it a go.

Android: Mainframe is due to be released in the middle of 2016.