Android: Netrunner

I don’t play this at work, obviously, but I’ve thought about a run I made against a coworker while sitting on hold with pharmacy, replaying it in my head between calls. That’s the kind of game this is, one that keeps working on you after the table’s cleared.

Corp knows almost everything and builds mostly permanent defenses to advance agendas, Runner sets the pace, probing those defenses and trying to steal them before they land, and the whole thing is bluffing dressed up as a hacking thriller. The asymmetry is real, not the cosmetic kind where both sides do the same three things with different art. FFG lost the license years back and by rights that should’ve killed it, but the NISEI crowd kept printing new cards for free, which is either the nicest or most stubborn thing I’ve seen a board game community do.

Here’s the part nobody warns you about going in. A lot of the game is knowing what your opponent’s deck can even do to you, so if you haven’t kept up with the card pool you’re playing half blind against someone who has, and that’s a specific kind of unfair that doesn’t show up in the rulebook. My triage read on it took longer than most games I own because of that, you’re not just learning your own cards, you’re learning everyone else’s.

Flavor text is a mixed bag depending who you ask, some of it’s genuinely great, one ICE card called Archer references a “danger zone,” and another called Bad Times has the ISBN for The Andromeda Strain buried in the text if you go looking, but other stretches read as verbose and heavy handed. Component people go deep here too, DIY bottle-cap tokens, bead caddies for click counters that just barely peek out of the box lid. My debrief instinct says this is a game that rewards study time you don’t always have on night shift, but when a run goes right, there’s nothing like it on my shelf.