Tag: living card games

1500: Make a Run

[Aside: Gosh. 1,500 daily posts. Good job, me. I’d celebrate, but I already had something in mind to write about today, sooo…]

Spent a pleasant hour or two teaching and playing Netrunner this evening. This is the third time I’ve had the opportunity to give this interesting game a go now, and each time I play, I like it a little more.

I think the best thing about it is the psychology aspect of it. Like a good game of poker, success in Netrunner relies as least partly upon reading your opponent, figuring out how they’re likely to act and taking advantage of it. When playing as the Corporation, for example, choosing which of your Remote Servers you’re going to install Ice in front of is extremely important: do you think your opponent will assume your most valuable cards — the ones they’re trying to steal in order to win the game — are heavily protected behind Ice, or will he see through the common bluff of leaving valuable cards unprotected as if they’re no big deal?

There’s a wonderful sense of tension in the game, on both sides, and the game is seemingly balanced in such a way as to encourage this feeling as often as possible.

In the last game I played today, for example, I was playing as the Corporation, and a victory on points was looking likely. My last Agenda card — the cards I needed to spend credits on to “advance” in order to score — was heavily protected behind three pieces of Ice, and I had enough credits to rez all of them without any difficulty. Moreover, I could see that my opponent James didn’t have the Icebreakers he’d need to defeat my pieces of Ice, so I was feeling pretty confident. I advanced my last Agenda until it was one token away from final victory for me, and then it was the end of my turn.

Naturally, James used this opportunity to make a final Run on my Remote Server, obviously hoping to pick up my Agenda and bring himself closer to victory, while denying me the win. He began with the Tinkering card, which made one of my already-revealed pieces of Ice into a type that his Icebreakers could deal with. Uh-oh. He also had enough money to power up his Icebreaker enough to crack through it and deactivate its subroutines. Uh-oh. James broke through the first piece of Ice without any difficulty, so I rezzed the next one — an infuriating little card called a “portal” whose main effect was to send James back to confront the first piece of Ice again. This would fuck him over nicely, since he didn’t have enough credits left to confront it again, but unfortunately his Icebreaker was of the correct type to bypass the portal without any difficulty.

This left the final piece of Ice for him to confront. My confidence had evaporated by this point, but I rezzed it anyway. It was pretty weak, but its subroutine would end his Run immediately — and best of all, it transpired that it was of a type his Icebreaker couldn’t crack.

My heart leapt. I had done it. I had fended off an attack that had got a whole lot further than I thought it was going to — and now I was going to win for sure. And win I did — and great it felt, too.

I’m starting to get my head around this game now, and I’m really interested to play it some more. It’s a big challenge — one false move, or an unfortunate draw of the cards, can leave you in serious shit or even with an instant loss if you’re not careful. But knowing the things to watch out for allows you to prepare for most eventualities — and if you’re playing against an evenly-matched opponent, it can lead to some genuinely thrilling faceoffs.

I’m not quite brave enough to approach the clearly experienced Netrunner players in the Monday night board game group as yet, but I’m definitely keen to play more. Hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to do so soon.

1450: Netrunning

Jan 7 -- NetrunnerPutting 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.