Nick Burnham

Run Your ICE Off
by Nick Burnham

I have played Magic: the Gathering for most of my life, so I’m excited to play any game created by one of my all-time idols, Richard Garfield, especially a game so different from Magic you would hardly believe it came from the mind of the same person. Despite Netrunner’s inherent differences from Magic (or maybe because of them), it did not gain much popularity when it originally released in 1996, although it did find a cult following. Fast forward to now, and the game has become an undoubted success thanks mostly to Fantasy Flight Games and their seemingly endlessly-repeatable Living Card Game formula. Since FFG put out Netrunner under their Android brand in 2012, they’ve released a core set, three cycles of Data Packs with more cards, three deluxe expansions with even more cards, and even a special draft variant line. And I really hope they continue to produce more cards with more expansions, because Netrunner deserves a place in the pantheon as one of the best trading card games ever.

The game centers around an instantly recognizable struggle: one player plays the role of an evil, future corporation bent on controlling the world and seizing profits through any means necessary, while the other plays the runner (hacker) character who will do anything to bring the corporation down. This all takes place in a cyberpunk world based on the Android universe, a world littered with conspicuous characters with devious regimes. To win, the hacker must make “runs” on the corporation’s servers to attempt to find and steal the hidden Agendas. The corp’s hand, deck, discard pile, and other installed cards represent their servers, and the Agendas might be hidden in any one of them. The corporation must obstruct the runner’s efforts with Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, or ICE, by placing them in front of their servers and attempt to advance their own Agendas enough to score them before the runner finally breaks through. Runners can get around ICE with the help of Icebreakers – powerful programs that can disable the subroutines of ICE or destroy them outright. A player wins after they score seven Agenda points, but both sides have a very hard road ahead of them full of tricks and deception.

Several factions exist as options for both the runner and the corporation, and all of them play very differently. My favorite corporation, Haas-Bioroid, develops androids for cheap labor and defends itself with some of the toughest and meanest ICE in the game, while the massive news conglomerate NBN relies on performing traces to find the runner and win through powerful combo pieces. If you want to play the runner, you might pick the idealistic Anarchs, who use viruses to whittle away the corp’s cards, or the scarily intelligent Shapers, with the unique power to change the very attributes of many card types. All the factions have well-defined personalities and playstyles, forcing you to think very carefully about the potential of your opponent during every game.

While no two factions play the same, you do have the option of adopting a certain number of cards outside your own faction to fill in some of the gaps in your deck, and the deckbuilding aspect of Netrunner makes it extremely addicting. You can search tirelessly for the best ratio of ICE, Agendas, money-making cards, and other operations, but you will never find a strategy that beats every other deck all of the time. Fantasy Flight hasn’t created a perfectly balanced game, but they have come close enough that a player can win a game with any faction if they have a solid deck and a little bit of luck on their side. Luck plays a large part in decision-making, but reading your opponent perhaps makes the biggest difference between winning the game and running into a nasty trap disguised as an Agenda. The ability to bluff early and often in Netrunner further separates it from the likes of Magic and its imitators and makes the game so much more compelling than a typical CCG where two players simply run their big, bad monsters into each other over and over until someone dies. As a runner, you will never know exactly what the corporation has up their sleeve, and this makes the game very tense from turn one. Sometimes you will run on R&D (the corp’s deck) three times in one turn and hit nothing but junk, while other times you’ll call the corp’s bluff and make a great score at practically no cost.

Android: Netrunner’s greatest aspects come from much older card games, aspects that Richard Garfield believes let you play the cards rather than having the cards play you, and the game succeeds extremely well in that regard. Similar to Magic, new players may think the game feels clunky and foreign at first, but all the cyberpunk terms and unusual mechanics solidify into a cohesive whole after just a handful of games. Fantasy Flight has really excelled at the presentation of the game as well, as the new art makes the 1996 game look dull by comparison, and you can identify what most cards do and where they belong at a glance. The core set works great on its own, but players will quickly want to spice up their decks with some of the many published Data Packs. For at least the foreseeable future, it seems that FFG plans on supporting Netrunner, an absolutely necessary act for a new card game that differs so greatly from everything else on the market. The asymmetric gameplay, the futuristic setting, the deckbuilding potential, and the great community make Netrunner a game that no one should pass up the chance to learn and love. If you want a game that feels totally new and will challenge your perceptions of what collectible card games can be, I highly encourage you to make a run on Netrunner; you might just discover some hidden agendas of your own.

Score: 9/10