The Gaming Den

[OgreBattle]

I hear good things about it but don't know anything about it. The only card games I've played heavily are M:tG and Pokemon.

Something about the actions you do per round was mentioned as being good, so what's with that?
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[Ancient History]

I think it was the only CCG to get the highest rating from InQuest magazine. The design was innovative and elegant, the art was as good or better than the majority of the games on the market at the time - and this was during the CCG flood - and it was one of the very rare CCGs with a cyberpunk theme, which it handled very well, and which it should have because it was based off of R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020 RPG setting. It had one real expansion, Proteus, and I think some cards for a second expansion were released but not the whole thing.

At basics, it's a two player game, with each player drawing from a different pool of cards - you could be the hacker or the corporation. The Corp player's goal is generally to advance it's corporate agenda, which awards it Agenda points and other benefits; the netrunner's goal is to steal the agendas (and thus win the Agenda points) and generally fuck with the corp's shit. The first to 7 Agenda points wins; a later expansion added another victory condition and some losing conditions, but Agenda points are the big deal.

And the thing is, as the netrunner you can hack anything. You can hack the cards in a corporation's hand (HQ) or their deck (R&D) or their discard pile (Archives), or any subsidiary nodes - look at a card, look at it, maybe even trash it. Corps protect themselves with IC - intrusion countermeasures - which are laid face-down and which the corp has to pay to activate. So you have elements of both a geography game and a bluff game - does the netrunner dare the IC? Can the corp afford to activate it? What happens if the runner succeeds? And of course there are trap cards.

The game is well-paced because each player only gets a certain number of actions per turn - 3 for the runner and 4 for the corp - and you spend an action to draw a card, get a bit, make a run, lay down some IC, etc. The resources for buying stuff is bits - which I always used those little glass beads because they are perfect for it. Hackers use bits to buy cyberware, contacts, icebreaker programs, cyberdecks, etc. Corps use bits to pay for IC, advance nodes and and agendas, etc.

The game is weighted somewhat in favor of the Corporation, because all they need to succeed is for the runner to do nothing, but especially early on in the game, the corporation is extremely vulnerable and the runner can get lucky - and as you can tell, the Corp is generally on the defensive, with few ways to fuck with the hacker directly if they don't make a move on them.

There are some mini-systems within the game I haven't talked about - net damage versus brain damage versus meat damage, how tracing and base links and tags work, "hidden resources", virus cards and counters...but it's a really fun game. I love it.

[raben-aas]

The game was also directly tied into the CP2020 paper and pen game: There were 3 sets of optional rules about how to use Netrunner as a means to handle Hacking in the game (I think it was var1: Play a game of Netrunner instead of hacking/rolling dice, var2: Play a simplified game of Netrunner just to handle Hacking all of those adlibd lil systems a netrunner will hack on the fly, var3: just use the Netrunner cards as an inspiration for random events in the game (if you feel bored, turn a card, if you get an idea by seeing the illustration or reading the title, go ahead and make sth up, if not, nothing happens).

[duo31]

The other big Pro in Netrunner's favor, was that starter decks were well balanced, and you didn't have to shell out a crazy amount of cash (unlike Pokemon, MtG) to be competitive.
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