NEW MIRACLES FOR A NEW WORLD
I first played Netrunner nearly 10 years ago in my friend’s kitchen. He had bought a copy of the core set because of its reputation as an excellent board game,1 despite also being a two-player card game with constructed decks and a competitive scene. The game is asymmetrical, with one player taking on the role of a megacorporation set on carrying out its secret and nefarious goals, and the other player taking on the role of a hacker (known as a “runner”) intent on exposing and preventing those corporate agendas, all while building out their hacking rig, accumulating personal wealth, and sabotaging corporate development. Corporations build out remote servers, from which to “score” their hidden agendas, but must also protect their central servers: their hand (or “HQ”), their deck (or “R&D”), and their discard pile (or “Archives”). The runner meanwhile builds a personal rig used to infiltrate these servers that they might trash corporate assets and “steal” the corp’s hidden agendas. The game ends when either player accumulates 7 agenda points, the corp is able to “flatline” the runner (represented by taking one more damage than there are cards in hand), or the runner is able to delay the corp enough that they are unable to complete their objectives in a timely fashion (represented by the corp attempting to draw when there are no cards in their deck). My friend—we’ll call him Josh (because that’s his name)—played as the Jinteki megacorporation, which specializes in traps, ambushes, and “net damage”—damage to one’s mind taken in cyberspace (contrasted with “meat damage”, damage to one’s body in “meatspace”). I played as Kate McCaffrey, a Shaper who is more interested in expanding and optimizing her hacker rig than she is in fighting the good fight or striking it rich. He kept killing me, with surprises like Snare or agendas that still hurt you even if you steal them. I soon switched to playing Silhouette, a Criminal whose speed and stealth allowed her to expose cards, thereby mitigating the threat of traps and ambushes.2
All of this takes place in a rich cyberpunk universe, a not-so-distant future where governments have been effectively replaced by a handful of multinational megacorporations that have taken over sectors like infrastructure, agriculture, labour regulation, news, and law enforcement. Meanwhile, renegades, activists, intelligentsia, and ne’er-do-wells have all taken to hacking as a way to pursue their own goals, be it getting rich, uncovering corporate malfeasance, or expanding their mind and deepening their relation to cyberspace. The world is filled with clones, androids (known as bioroids), gene-splicing and bio-hacking and cybernetics. You can play as a labour organizer bigoted against bioroids, a malignant digital entity whose only motivations are expansion, consumption, and destruction, or the Pinkertons. Netrunner’s mechanics, flavour, and art are all wonderfully- and elegantly-unified, resulting in a game that is part-strategy, part-optimization, and part-mind games. A good game of Netrunner will often feel like a dance, with advantage and pressure flowing back and forth between the corp and the runner, each player attempting to predict, control, and dominate the other. These games can vary wildly, however, due to the rich variety of mechanics, the dense syngergies between those mechanics, and the myriad emergent possibilities enabled by an asymmetrical game. The corp, for example, might take on a “glacier” strategy, which attempts to protect their servers (using “ICE”, or “Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics”) so thoroughly that the runner simply cannot penetrate them; they could use a “tag and bag” strategy, which attempts to physically locate the runner in meatspace and literally kill them; or a fast-advance strategy, which forgoes remote servers and extensive protection in favour of raw speed, scoring agendas from hand faster than the runner can steal them.
SELECTIVE MIND-MAPPING
I played in my first Netrunner tournament a few months after moving to Toronto, in the Fall of 2014.3 At that tournament, I played 8 games of Netrunner in about 4 hours, probably more than I had ever played in a single sitting. I learned that I had been breaking some basic (if unimpactful) rules, that there were ungodly combinations of cards that I had never considered, and that the average Netrunner player was extremely friendly, helpful, and welcoming. Despite coming in last place at that tournament (and receiving the traditional “Scorched Earth” prize for that dubious distinction), I was absolutely hooked. I then began playing Netrunner at a weekly meetup and at every possible competitive event and have not stopped since. I’ve driven to nearby states and provinces to play in regional tournaments, I’ve flown to suburban Minnesota to play in the world championships, and I’ve recently become a tournament organizer in my local meta. I remember hearing my meta-mates cheer from across the room (where they watched the livestream) when I played Traffic Accident and somehow dodged the two copies of I’ve Had Worse in my opponent’s hand, earning me the nickname “Hot Hands”;4 I remember flipping cards to reveal that I had scored all 7 points in a single turn in the 2018 world championships against a player who would himself win the world championship a few years later; I remember an opponent attempting to win by intentionally playing slowly, taking his final turn and presumptively-uttering a smug “good game”, before I replied with “Gang Sign?”, which allowed me a single game-winning final access from his hand.5
My decade-long dedication to this game is not only attributable to the game’s quality, however, high as that quality may be. Nor is it attributable to the promise of competitive winnings and a life as a pseudo-professional Netrunner player; Netrunner has no cash prizes, providing only promotional alt-art cards, mats, tokens, and things of that nature. The highest prize in Netrunner, the “greatest prize in gaming”, bestowed upon the winner of the world championship, is the opportunity to help design a card to be used in Netrunner. Tantalizing as that is though, that is also not the reason I have played this game for so long. No, as any Netrunner veteran will tell you, the greatest prize in gaming is actually the friends we made along the way. That is because the Netrunner community is notoriously friendly, welcoming, and accommodating. Genuinely, our reputation precedes us. I have spoken to many new players—especially people of demographic categories that might not be as well-represented in other communities—who said that they were drawn to Netrunner because they’d heard that it was so welcoming and diverse. I’ve heard from former Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh players about how comparatively pleasant our community was, in both victory and defeat. And, in my experience, this is borne out in concrete results: our metas are richly-diverse in gender, ethnicity, and ability. I attribute the cultivation of such a pleasant and welcoming community to several factors, one of which is the aforementioned absence of financial incentives to play the game. But there are also several top-down design decisions that I believe contributed to this prosociality.
STRONGER TOGETHER
One of these was the choice to make Netrunner a “living card game.” In contrast with “trading card games” or “collectible card games,” living card games release cards in static packs with transparent card lists. In other words, there are no booster packs, there is no card rarity, there is no gambling, and there is (effectively) no monetary advantage between players. So long as one is comfortable with paying the relatively-cheap cost of the seasonal card packs,6 one will have access to the entire card pool and the game’s full deckbuilding potential. Another crucial decision was the choice to reflect diversity in the game’s world and flavour. Globalization has fully taken hold in the world of Netrunner;7 megacities like SanSan (sprawling along the coast of California from San Francisco to San Diego) and Mumbad (reaching from Mumbai to Ahmedabad) have formed and are densely-populated by people with rich and varied regional origins, gender identities, and biological realities. Ji “Noise” Reilly, is a mall-punk of Chinese and Irish heritage that grew up in New Angeles. Kate McCaffrey is from BosWash and is biracial; her son Az is multiracial as well, but also happens to be a transgender man. Quetzal has gene-hacked herself to resemble the eponymous bird and refuses to “be a slave to her genetic heritage.” Adam is a specially-made bioroid, the would-be son of Cynthia Haas, the director of the Haas-Bioroid megacorporation. Characters take many different forms in Netrunner and the world does little to focus on this or to highlight it as an abnormality, worthy of either scorn or praise. Instead, it takes it as a given that its world is filled with many different types of people, and that those people can be good, evil, or amoral, regardless of the demographic categories they happen to fill. Although the game does deal heavily with themes of inequality and social justice—often centred around economic inequality or the rights of bioroids and clones—it is not about the modern real-world struggles faced by marginalized people. Those people simply exist in this world. I believe that this is part of the reason that Netrunner has developed such a diverse and welcoming community over its lifetime.
REPLICATING PERFECTION
Speaking of Netrunner’s lifetime: have you heard? Netrunner is dead. I know because I was there, in 2018 at the final world championship, the Magnum Opus. We were sad that it was ending but we were happy to send the game off with a bang, one final big weird friendly silly tournament. One guy did kick a hole in the wall though.8 Soon after that final champion was crowned however, there were rumours… whispers of something new. A Future for Netrunner. Sure enough, soon afterwards, a not-for-profit community organization dedicated to prolonging the life of Netrunner, Null Signal Games (née Nisei), was born. The game about justice-oriented communities resisting the corporate malfeasance that was ruining the world had been cancelled due to corporate malfeasance and was now being inherited by a justice-oriented community. Funny, that.
The game barely missed a beat. Since then, NSG has continuously supported the game with new cards, new balancing and ban lists, initiatives to attract new players, and, of course, organized competitive play. The first “unofficial” world championship was held in Rotterdam in 2019, and subsequent ones have been hosted in Toronto and Barcelona. Whereas “official” Netrunner world championships had only been held in Roseville, a suburb of Minneapolis in the United States, NSG has committed to hosting the game’s highest-level tourmanent in both North America and Europe, in alternating years. When a certain worldwide pandemic made it impossible to play Netrunner in person, the game moved online, and dozens of tournaments (including two world championships) were hosted virtually. The game now lives in both cyberspace and meatspace, with some players even playing exclusively on the browser-based and completely-free jinteki.net (lovingly known as “j-net”).9
The community is, of course, as friendly as ever. I have met new players whose first tournament was the world championship and still had a great time. I know players whose competitive aspirations are completely subsumed by their desire to do Something Strange and Funny, and yet attend every competitive event possible, completely undeterred by the possibility of defeat. I know players who are absolutely god-tier, who have an understanding for the game etched into their DNA and have instincts so finely honed that they could be mistaken for telepathy, and yet are as pleasant and patient and helpful with new players as they are with one another. I know a player who is blind and can only play with an oracle by his side who reads his cards for him. He is one of the best players in the world and a proud son of our meta (and is, of course, as friendly and helpful as all the others). This is why Netrunner still thrives, despite having been “cancelled.” This is why the game still accumulates new players, despite having effectively-zero official promotion or marketing. This is why I have played the game for 10 years and will continue to do so as long as there is a local community for it.
CYBERNETICS FOR ANYONE
So, how do you get into this dead game? Well, as previously intimated, the game is now approximately-free to play. The minimum cost to play the game in-person is some sleeves from your local gaming store and a few printed sheets from your library.10 That’s because NSG makes all of its card available for free in print-on-demand PDF files. Cards that were not released by NSG are easy to proxy11 and are legal at every competitive level, including the world championship.12 Local communities for the game are now self-organized and self-maintained, with direct relationships to NSG. So, googling, for example, “toronto netrunner” might lead you to find TorSaug City Grid, the Netrunner community that serves the Greater Toronto Area and is home to both Scumlords and Kings alike. Perhaps your city does not have an active Netrunner scene though, or perhaps you prefer the cool static of cyberspace over the loud and unpredictable meatspace. No problem. You can play for free on the aforementioned j-net, find starter decks on NRDB, and learn how to play the game from Netrunner’s best streamer. NSG even created a set, System Gateway, designed specifically as a starting point for new players that can act as a launching pad into the broader standard format of the game or subsist on its own as a two-player boardgame, suitable for “kitchen Netrunner.” You are, at this moment, a few hours from being able to play as much Netrunner as your cybernetic heart desires for free online, and even perhaps only a few days away from joining a new community of welcoming and like-minded Netrunner players. So, I guess you just have to ask yourself… Access?
Some final errant thoughts:
- Do you like Slay the Spire? You’ll never guess which cyberpunk card game its creators love.
- Netrunner’s funniest and most on-theme scandal happened a few weeks before the world championship in 2017. Known as “The Scrape,” it consisted of a group of players (several of whom had been competitively-successful in the past) exploiting a vulnerability in the deckbuilding website NRDB in order to view private decklists. They had been secretly viewing the decks of many of the top players for months in the lead-up to worlds. In the wake of this scandal, several of the guilty players apologized and, in penance, announced that they had elected not to attend the world championship that year. However, the funniest outcome was when one of the guilty players—indeed, the chief engineer of The Scrape, it is said—posted a video to the main Netrunner Facebook group, weeping and explaining through tears how sorry he was, but that he would still be attending the world championship regardless. He came in 54th! Good for him.
- One time they played Netrunner in the show “Billions.” It’s mostly accurate and apparently they consulted with a two-time world champion in order to ensure authenticity.
- I wasn’t kidding about Netrunner being the greatest game ever made. Netrunner players tend to be board game enthusiasts, but it’s commonly-accepted wisdom that Netrunner is the best board game, in addition to being a very fun competitive card game.
- This post will go live on Easter Sunday, a fitting day for a game that has died and been reborn anew.
Footnotes
Although an average rating of 7.9 may not seem that impressive, the denizens of BoardGameGeek are a discerning bunch. Netrunner is actually the 72nd best ranked game on the website and the highest-rated game has an average rating of 8.4.↩︎
The historically-minded and pedantically-inclined reader may recognize here that I have referenced cards that are not from the core set. This is because we slowly accumulated other sets of cards as we grew increasingly enamoured with the game. I have glossed over this development for the sake of brevity and narrativity, both of which have been undone by this footnote.↩︎
I posted in the Facebook event for the tournament, asking “What time is this cluing up?” A man who would later grow to be a friend of mine responded “I don’t know what that means.” This was perhaps the first time I learned that Newfoundlanders spoke a rich and sensuous dialect of English unfathomable to the mind of the average mainlander, and that many words and phrases I thought common in the anglo world would not be recognized in Canada. I clarified: “What time will this tournament end?”↩︎
The tournament organizer shushed the cheering crowd, as I was playing against a visitor from another city and he did not want us to seem rude or unwelcoming.↩︎
This was one of the very few unpleasant opponents I have had in my 10 years of playing Netrunner.↩︎
On which, more later.↩︎
The reader referenced in Footnote 2 may here find themselves yelling at their screen, “There is no world of Netrunner! It is called the world of Android!”, before googling my address and DMing me a photograph of the front of my house. To that reader, I say: Thank you. I hear you. I see you. You are valid.↩︎
He got permanently banned from the premises and solidified his place in Netrunner history as a nuisance and a pissant.↩︎
These players are also supported, with numerous NSG- and player-organized tournaments taking place all across the planet’s many timezones.↩︎
Even cheaper than that, I suppose, would be to just borrow some decks from a player in your local meta, who would be positively thrilled to have you, I’ve no doubt.↩︎
NSG have also been aggressively rotating these cards out of the standard legal card pool, so this becomes less of a concern each year.↩︎
Worlds 2022 literally had a printer set up for players to print their proxies.↩︎