Android: Netrunner

I’m going to write this one knowing the game’s out of print and the tournament scene has mostly moved on, because none of that changes what happens when you actually deal out a corp deck and a runner deck across the table from someone who knows what they’re doing. Tricky enough to take seriously, loose enough to still play casual on a slow night, and the asymmetry between the two sides is the best executed version of that idea I’ve come across in this hobby.

The corp is building something in secret and trying to advance it before the runner tears through their servers and steals it out from under them. That’s the whole game, and it stays that simple on paper while getting genuinely deep in practice, bluffing what’s behind an unrezzed ice, timing a run against a corp who might be bluffing an ambush, reading tells in how someone’s spending their clicks. I’ve taught this to people who play a lot of Magic and watched them go quiet about twenty minutes in once they realize how much of the game lives in information they don’t have. It teaches rough, I won’t pretend otherwise, there’s real vocabulary to absorb before a new player’s making real decisions instead of just reacting.

The one thing that dates it, and it’s worth saying plainly, is the metagame calcified before the game stopped getting support. A handful of decks and cards ended up doing most of the work in constructed play, and if you came to this late looking for the wide open design space people talk about from the early cycles, you’re mostly finding it in draft or in curated card pools now, not open constructed. That’s a real cost. It doesn’t undo what the core loop does at the table, but it’s why I’d point a new player toward a specific era of the card pool rather than just handing them everything.

Still the sharpest two player design I own. I don’t think anything’s replaced it for me yet.