Teaching My Sister Netrunner Over Video Call

My sister moved out to Ohio a couple years back for work and we’ve been trying, on and off, to find something we can actually do together that isn’t just a phone call where one of us is half paying attention to something else. She got into a Discord server that plays board games online and mentioned it offhand, and I got a little too excited and said I’d teach her Netrunner, which in hindsight was maybe not the gentlest entry point I could’ve picked.

I underestimated how much of teaching this game in person depends on being able to just point at the table. Here’s the unrezzed ice, here’s what happens if you run into it, here’s why I’m holding my hand this way. None of that translates cleanly through a laptop camera propped up against a stack of books, angled badly, half the cards catching glare from the window behind her. I ended up describing board states out loud like I was calling a very slow, very confusing radio broadcast, and about twenty minutes in she just started laughing and said this is the nerdiest phone call we’ve ever had, which, fair.

It went better than I expected once we switched to an actual online client instead of trying to fake it with a physical deck and a camera. Something about not having to manage the physical table freed up enough of her attention that the actual decisions started landing. She got the corp side, I ran the corp deck, and about the third game in she pulled off a run I genuinely didn’t see coming, went straight for a server I’d left thin because I assumed she wouldn’t have the economy for it yet. She did.

We’ve kept doing it every couple weeks since, whatever her schedule allows. Doesn’t fully replace being at the same table. Good enough that I stopped minding the six hundred miles quite as much as I used to.