Lenas wrote:
No idea what this game is, but good luck pal
Oh! Duh, I should've taken the opportunity to plug the game. I've talked about it in a thread before here, I think, but it didn't generate many views or replies so it probably just drifted away.
Android: Netrunner is a card game by Fantasy Flight Games, and is the game that's been in the top 3 of "The Hotness" (most active page views) on Board Game Geek pretty much since its release last year at GenCon, where it sold out in ten minutes despite having hundreds of copies on-hand. It comes as a $40 MSRP two-player Core Game set, with 7 additional small expansions (6x $15, 1x $30) released to date. To return to referencing Board Game Geek, it's seen a meteoric rise to #5 overall in the Board Game Geek Geek Ratings in that year since release.
Netrunner was Richard Garfield's (of Magic: the Gathering design notoriety) third customizeable card game in the mid-90's. It's an asymmetrical cyberpunk-themed game that essentially pits a hacker against a mega-corp. Wizards published it, along with an expansion pack, but it was slow gaining traction amidst the glut of CCG's of the time, and they wanted to pare their offerings and attention down from three to focus on one and build up a tournament scene. So Jyhad (his other creation) and Netrunner got the axe in favor of Magic.
Fast forward fifteen years, and Fantasy Flight Games has been having success with what they call their Living Card Game format, which forgoes chasing rares and a secondary singles market in favor of frequent installments of fixed distribution packs. Their LCG stable is mostly licensed properties, including a long-running Game of Thrones LCG, and more recently Call of Cthulhu, Lord of the Rings, and Warhammer-themed LCGs. They got in touch with Wizards of the Coast, licensed the Netrunner game from them, and then rebranded the game to fit their 1st party science-fiction/cyberpunk setting they created for their Android Boardgame. The mechanics of play are largely the same, but they rebalanced the cards to account for the removal of rarity, and added a faction mechanic to help give some structure and theming to decks.
The game itself is an asymmetrical game that plays a Runner against a Corp. The Corp's objective is to advance and score cards called agendas, while the Runner is trying to break into the Corps' servers to steal them (presumably to either profit off of the corporate data they've liberated or to expose the Corp's nefarious dealings to a horrified public).
The genius of the game lies in a few elements, all of which combine to create a really strong theme and great layers of mind games to be played against one another. The first is the asymmetry. The game treats the Corp's playspace (his deck, his discard pile, his hand, and other cards in play) as servers storing his various data, and one of the most important types of card is ice -- firewall-esque defensive programs he can install into servers to protect them from the Runner. Most of the Corp's cards come into play face down, and can be installed very cheaply (if not outright free). The Runner, on the other hand, plays all his cards face up as he builds up resources, hardware, and programs to draw on to fund and fuel his runs on the Corp's servers. This creates two very different feels while playing the game, depending on which role you're playing; the Corp feels hunted and naked, despite having the more perfect view of the game state, while the Runner feels desperate to find what he's looking for (since agendas average 1 card in 5 in legally constructed Corp decks) and both sides feel strapped for cash.
Speaking of cash, that's the other thing the game does very novelly compared to other CCGs. There are a number of types of action you can always do during your turn, including drawing cards or taking money from the bank. The limiting factor, then, is often not what cards you have in your hand, but the limited number of actions you're allowed to take each turn. This creates a very strategic game where you must balance your available funds against the things you'd like to be doing, and the Runner can easily get to a point in the game where he no longer needs to even play cards to apply pressure (and potentially win!). But most of all, you never have NO options on what to do based on having a lousy hand.
By the way, Coro, the equivalent to mana-screw is either lack of ice (for Corps) or lack of economic boosting cards in your starting hand. One mulligan's allowed for each player, so if you build your deck sanely, it's not a
common problem.
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