1450: Netrunning

Putting the more formal board game posts on hold for a moment because an idle mention of them during a staff meeting yesterday may have led to us doing a bit more board game coverage over on USgamer in the very near future. So yay for that!

I did want to talk a bit about a tabletop game, though — Android: Netrunner, which I got a copy of for Christmas.

Android: Netrunner is a two-player “living card game” based on the customisable card game of the same name from a few years back. (A “living card game”, for those unfamiliar, follows many of the same principles of customisable card games — primarily the ability to build your own deck of cards prior to playing a match — but provides additional cards through static, predictable expansions rather than randomly mixed booster packs) It’s a particularly interesting concept in that it’s asymmetrical — the two opposing “sides” in the game have very different goals, mechanics and even terminology.

The concept of Android: Netrunner is classic cyberpunk: anarchic, rebellious “runners” are attempting to undermine the powerful “corporations” who run the dystopian future in which the game is set. They go about this through hacking into the corporations’ systems to disrupt them from advancing their agendas; meanwhile, the corporation is steadily building up its defences against intrusion.

In gameplay terms, this means that the two sides have very different roles to play. The corporation’s role is primarily defensive and involves protecting particularly precious pieces of data from the runner player, setting traps and generally messing with the runner’s head. The runner, meanwhile, must build up their resources and equipment to such a degree that they can — hopefully — safely bypass the corporation’s security countermeasures and steal the precious “agenda” cards required to win the game.

I tried the game for the first time with my friend Tim this evening. We played several games, all of which were over relatively quickly. In the first case, I, playing the runner, was flatlined on my second turn for attacking what I thought was a safe bet to score some points, only to fall foul of a booby trap, lose all my cards and consequently be eliminated. In a subsequent attempt where we swapped roles, Tim successfully managed to acquire the seven points’ worth of “agenda” cards required to win, but it was a close-run thing — the server in which the last agenda card was hidden was heavily protected, and if Tim had played just a little less carefully he would have been obliterated by my security measures.

Obviously it’s very early days yet, but I enjoyed the game very much. The cyberpunk theme is much more than window dressing — the cards you play are all very much thematically appropriate, and the initially confusing terminology starts to make a lot more sense when you start thinking about what you’re actually representing when you play your various cards to the table.

It’s going to be a challenge to learn how to play effectively, though, I feel. It’s clear that being reckless can result in swift and merciless defeat very quickly, but this is good — it prevents games from dragging on way too long with a foregone conclusion, and instead allows you to gather everything up, shuffle your decks and try again with minimal fuss. This is exactly what this sort of game needs — not everything needs to come in epic packages of an hour or more.

Tim enjoyed himself, though, as did I, so hopefully we’re going to be playing it at least semi-regularly. I’m keen to try it with my other friends, too — I think it’s the sort of game that will be very interesting to observe how different people play.