A setting by Fantasy Flight Games originally started in 2007. It consists of tabletop game Android, Android: Infiltration and the reboot of the Netrunner card game. Has spawned several series of novels, each fleshing out a portion of the Android universe.
Set in a cyberpunk future where Mega Corporations run things, clones and androids are considered less than humans, and a giant space elevator ties the moon down to Earth. Setting is currently based around the city of New Angeles where the base of the space elevator is built. Other notable locations include Moon colony of Heinlein and city grid SanSan among others. Although it may appear overly oppressive with large Megacorp controlling all aspects of life, it has themes of idealism such as Caprice Nisei the first clone to be awarded rights and a setting where ordinary people, Runners, can attempt to disrupt the Agendas of said Megacorps.
In the original Adventure Board Game Android, a murder has occurred, and five detectives are working to find out who did it. A game with many mechanics, there are personal stories for each detective to make a rich story with lots of replayability.
Netrunner is an asymmetrical card game where one player play the role of a Megacorp, (Haas Bioroid, Jinteki, NBN or Weyland Consortium) and the other plays the role of hacker of varying factions and ideologies. Both sides compete to score Agenda cards.
There is also a board game called Mainframe, in which six runners, also playable in Netrunner, are hacking into a Titan bank server to steal as many credits as possible. Players take turns drawing cards with shapes on them, and producing those shapes on the playing field with the goal of enclosing as much territory for themselves as possible. A new board game, called New Angeles was announced August 2016, in which players play exclusively as the Corps of the world of Android, trying to advance their agendas while coping with civil unrest.
The Roleplaying Game of the setting, Shadow of the Beanstalk, was released by Fantasy Flight Games in April 2019 and uses the company's own Genesys roleplaying system.
The franchise currently has five novels:
- Free Fall
- Identity Part 1 - Golem
- Identity Part 2 - Mimic
- Identity Part 3 - Rebel
- Strange Flesh
CMON published Graphic Novel Android: Run The Citadel with accompanying miniatures for the second volume of CMON comics.
Unrelated to the mobile operating system.
This board game gives examples of:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: One of the suspects can be Eve, an android pleasure bot. Floyd, an android detective, can choose to act against his programming, depending on his personal plot lines.
- The Alcoholic: Raymond drinks to drown his memories of the war, which makes entering nightlife locations during the game risky for him.
- Androids Are People, Too: Haas-Bioroid's official line. The Humanity First group disagrees.
- In this setting, clones can be classified as androids sometimes. Similar issues arise with both groups.
- Bland-Name Product: "Diesel gives you flames."
- Bounty Hunter: Rachel Beckmann.
- Cursed with Awesome: Caprice's psychic powers give her an edge in solving the murder and revealing the conspiracy (and allow her player to look at their opponents' cards under certain circumstances), but they're also unstable, and put serious stress on her sanity, which her opponents can exploit for their own gain.
- Cyberpunk: It probably would be easier to count the amount of tropes that don't belong to this genre, or were not used by works that the setting homages.
- Daddy Issues: Rachel is estranged from her father, a police captain who disapproves of bounty hunting and cyber-implants. Rachel happens to be a cyber-enhanced bounty hunter.
- Dirty Cop: Louis is one. He can, depending on his plot, cut ties with the organization, or sink further into it.
- Expanded States of America: New Angeles, located in what used to be the coast of Ecuador and marching up into the Andes near Quito and surrounding Volcán Cayambe, is an unincorporated territory of the United States, and sends a nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives known as the Resident Commissioner.
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Corp and Runner software is usually derived from mythology.
- Four Eyes, Zero Soul: Chairman Hiro of Jinteki.
- Mega City: New Angeles is physically enormous, covering approximately 62000 square kilometres and stretching all the way up into space. It offers plenty of places to explore, with all the businesses, services, and private residences its 500 million official residents require. It may also house as many as 500 million uncounted beings, including off-gridders, androids, and those simply too poor to own an ID.
- MegaCorp: After capitalism won the great struggle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the corporations now hold the real power, controlling most governments.
- Self Made Woman: Director Haas of Haas-Bioroid.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Raymond is haunted by his memories of the Martian War, particularly the death of his best friend and the disappearance of his CO behind enemy lines.
- Shout-Out: To Alien with the Weyland Consortium, a reference to MegaCorp Weyland-Yutani.
- Many of the place names reference science fiction authors: the lunar colony is called Heinlein, and there are board locations called Adams Garden and Bradbury Towers, among others.
- Space Elevator: Stretching seventy thousand kilometres from Earth's surface into geocentric orbit, the New Angeles Space Elevator, colloquially known as the Beanstalk, was envisioned by Jack Weyland as a way to make travelling into Earth's orbit easier and cheaper than expensive, finicky and inefficient chemical rockets. Workers, colonists, tourists and materiel travel daily up to the Castle at the end of the Beanstalk and beyond to Luna and Mars, while raw materials, including the precious and expensive helium-3 isotope, come down.
- Spoiled Brat: Thomas Haas. His mother protects him somewhat.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: This trope drives most of Floyd's plotlines.
