A Brief Look at Android: Netrunner, the Best Game I’ve Ever Played
Her mother found her when she didn’t get up for breakfast. She was warm, though that may have been because of the sparks still falling from her cranial jack. These days, people know the net’s not all rainbows and unicorns. More than one console cowboy’s ended up fried courtesy of a megacorp none too happy about the pests trying to steal their secrets. But a 12-year-old? Surely a random tragedy. Not that the doctors can explain the horrific cerebral scarring discovered during her autopsy. The net can bite back, but not like that.
Meanwhile, halfway across the world, Nipponese cloning corporation Jinteki breathes a collective sigh of relief that the notorious cybercriminal the underclass calls “Chaos Theory” will be harassing their servers no longer.
WHOA WHAT’S GOING ON
Sounds cool, yeah? A badass cyberpunk story about megacorps and hackers sparring in a neverending war for the purest power — information. Yeah, that IS cool! Here’s the thing, though: I’m talking about a card game. Android: Netrunner. It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s the best game I have ever played.
That little story up above? That’s a game I actually played. The player playing Chaos Theory (the “runner”) blundered into one of my traps, dealing her a crippling three points of brain damage. On my turn, I, as the Jinteki megacorp, spent an entire business day sending packets of electric death back through the net to put this upstart hacker to bed for good.
THIS IS SO AWESOME HOW IS THIS GAME REAL
Man, I don’t even know how this game’s real. Well, it used to be a failed collectible card game but it’s been remade and all its old issues are fixed and the art’s way better but none of that’s important right now.
The most amazing thing about this game is that it’s not just a game. It’s two games. Remember when I said I was playing as a corporation and my opponent was the runner? Yeah. This is a 2-player duel where each side is playing a vastly different game. And it’s great.
The corp and runner need to score seven points to win. Both sides score these points via a type of card found only in the corp’s deck: agendas, representing the corp’s initiatives and secret plans. To score points, the corp needs to invest time and money to advance their agendas until they’ve achieved their morally questionable goals. Trouble is, when you put your agenda down, there’s a hungry runner on the other side of the table aching to steal it.
So what can you do? Lucky for you, some of the corp’s cards are “ice” — a cyberpunk term for firewall, essentially — that can be put in front of your precious agendas. Ice range from harmless walls to brutal slabs of white hot murder. And here’s the best part: corporations play their cards face down. Slap down an ice and advance a card behind it, look the runner in the eye and say, “Yeah, it’s an agenda. You want it? Come and get it. You think you have what it takes? I dare you.” Better yet: the card you’re making a show of protecting is not an agenda, but a trap. Cackle with corporate glee.
SO HOW DO THE HACKERS NOT DIE
They’re called runners, first of all. I’ve been calling them runners like this whole time. The game is called Android: Netrunner. Come on. Get your head in the game.
It does seem pretty likely that a lonely runner would emphatically die against the might of a megacorporation wielding more ordnance and capital than most nations. Consider: corporations can grow psychic clones, hire private armies, and make the runner’s computer literally explode in their face. Runners can guzzle energy drinks, buy computer parts, get part-time jobs, and, um, stay up all night.
Don’t worry, you scrappy punks, you’re not as overmatched as you seem.
Each playable runner character is one of hacking’s elite, a rare talent that can wreak unfathomable havoc on corporations singlehandedly. Given enough time, these runners become unstoppable juggernauts who can break through corporate defenses like tissue paper and fly unhindered through the net like gods.
WAIT, WHAT? SO HOW DO THE CORPS NOT LOSE EVERY TIME
Remember how I said back there that the runners get unstoppable “given enough time?” There’s the rub. Corps start with the advantage, and they have to capitalize on it — or at least make their opponent think you haven’t lost it yet. Remember, the corp plays all their cards face down. A corp player might know that all their defenses are way too expensive for them to activate, or that the runner could neutralize them easily. All the runner sees, though, is a minefield of unknowable horrors, ready to spring to life and wreck their whole shit. How’s your bluffing, son?
Force the runner into impossible decisions, bait them into emptying their wallets running down decoys, or feign toothlessness only to punish them for their arrogance. It’s all about subtlety, control, and misdirection. It’s like poker, but way better and with a bunch of cool cyberpunk cards and shit.
Or you can just murder the runner. Like, find out where they live and blow their house up until they’re dead. For real. You can do that.
SOUNDS COOL BUT IS THE GAME REALLY THAT GOOD
Oh lord, it’s so good.
No other game I’ve played can match the tension in Android: Netrunner. It’s relatively short to play, but every turn presents dozens of super important decisions. While a shitty Netrunner deck is still shitty, your intuition, judgement, and shrewdness prove much more valuable assets than the decklist. You start to feel like the head of corporate cybersecurity, wielding the might of gods as you fool hapless runners — or, like a stim-addled master hacker calling in his favors with smugglers, infecting the corporate grid with viruses, and smashing your way to victory with a giant virtual hammer. So what if your brain gets zapped a few times on the way? You weren’t using all that brain anyway.
With three runner factions and four corporations, each with wildly different strengths and weaknesses, there’s nearly endless potential for customization and creativity. The card pool grows every month through non-randomized expansion packs, adding new options and opening up entirely new ways of thinking about the game. Some people tweak the same few decks for years, but me? I like to shake things up every time I play, busting out entirely new, entirely weird decks as often as possible.
But for real, the best thing about this game? It’s the theme. The world of Android: Netrunner is wonderfully rich, even though it’s only shared through images and snippets of card text. Check out 12-year-old Chaos Theory and her computer Dinosaurus, a modified version of a toy designed by Jackson Howard, an executive in the NBN Corporation, a media empire that secures their dominance by printing their logo on the moon. And with a theme this great, every game is a story in itself. And god damn, I like cyberpunk stories.
Each game is a saga of a runner with his or her own personality, motivation, and style going toe-to-toe with one of the four most powerful corporate entities on earth. It’s a story of successes, failures, risks, surprises, feints, and haymakers. It’s a high-stakes cyberbattle of the goddamn titans and I could play it for the rest of my life.
I probably will.
