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Immersion—In a Card Game?

Overall, Android: Netrunner surpasses every other tabletop game I’ve played in one aspect in particular: immersion. Immersion is a word thrown around much more often in the videogame space than in tabletop gaming because most people find that 3D graphics and real-time action lend themselves much better to diving into a game’s fantasy than cardboard and dense rulebooks. However, Netrunner surpasses even most video games I’ve played in terms of immersion in the sense that it connects me fully with the fantasy it wants me to inherit and makes me feel exactly the rush of emotions the character they’ve given me would be feeling as the action unfolds. To accomplish this, Netrunner remains deeply dedicated to its theming on every level of the game experience, a play by the designers that brings Netrunner both its greatest and its worst attributes.

Future Poker

The core gameplay of Android: Netrunner is really one of the oldest of all games: cat and mouse. The Corp, the player representing the future megacorporation with all kinds of resources at their disposal, attempts to play agenda cards secretly face down and upgrade them enough to score their points and gain their bonuses. Meanwhile, the Runner, the player representing the eccentric individual hacker trying to take on the whole corporation on their own with clever hacks and limited resources, has to read the Corp player’s every move and guess where his or her agenda cards lie, because the Runner player is never going to have enough time and resources to look at all the Corp’s cards. The Runner goes fishing by making “runs”—attempts to hack through the Corp’s defenses (known as “ice”) and access cards within a “server” so they can find, steal, and score the Corp’s agenda cards. With the success or failure of the Corp’s bluffs and the Runners reads comes victory to the first player to score seven points.

I Don’t Understand What the Kids Are Saying These Days

While this core cat and mouse bluffing mechanic makes for intense gameplay that and great social fun trying to read and learn all you can about your opponent, we also arrive here at Netrunner’s greatest hurdle—it’s dense vocabulary. Netrunner is, like I said, a highly immersive experience, but at the cost of a high barrier of entry as everything that can be themed, is themed, which can and will cause confusion for new players. Even the most basic of card game mechanics and elements are renamed to fit within the universe of the game. For instance, in Netrunner, players don’t play cards, they “install” them. To make it even worse, due to the asymmetrical nature of the game, both players really have to learn two sets of vocabulary, as the same game element is given different names on both sides of the board, such as the Corp deck being named “R&D” and the Runner deck being his or her “Stack.” This is true for the respective players’ hands, discard piles, and played card areas as well. Usually, players would just ignore these specialized names and use whatever vocabulary they’re comfortable with, but individual cards constantly refer to the stack, the heap, archives, the rig, and others, forcing players to keep within the game’s lexicon. Especially in the early games, this actually works against the game’s deep immersion as inexperienced players are constantly pulled out of the game itself and back into the rule book to look up specific vocabulary words. Fantasy Flight seems to recognize this issue, however, as the rule book has an “Important Vocabulary” section in the beginning as well as diagram labelling everything and a full glossary in the back. Again, I think the tradeoff of immersion for high knowledge barrier of entry was a deliberate choice by the designers, and it has its pros and cons.

Living In Every Sense

Android: Netrunner is a Living Card Game, meaning basically that it’s a collectible card game without the randomized booster packs and instead you know exactly what you’re getting when you buy each monthly expansion. Like the game itself, the rules for customizing decks aren’t as straightforward as other games and take a while to get a handle of, but in general the game is flexible and customizable such that not only is it endlessly replayable, it’s robust enough that you can feel like you’ve really created a deck all your own. But the life in this game goes much beyond monthly expansions—it’s an immersive, thrilling experience every time that truly takes on a life of its own as Runner and Corp battle it out again and again. And they surely will battle again and again, because while getting into Netrunner may be difficult, getting out is nearly impossible. It’s a thrilling game where your luck can change in an instant and the first thing you want to do when it’s over—win or lose—is dive right back in again.