Netrunner is a collectible card game with a very long history. in short:
- its first edition was designed by the Magic: The Gathering guy (with about as many greed and scarcity mechanics as Magic) and took place in the same universe as Cyberpunk 2077
- the second edition was published by Fantasy Flight Games, replaced the scarcity mechanics with Living Card Game expansion packs (you get all the cards in the set with one purchase) and a sliding window for tournament play card validity, and switched universes and names to Android: Netrunner
- the game went entirely out of print once Fantasy Flight dropped it
- the current “edition” of the game and its rules are maintained by a non-profit cooperative named Nullsignal (formerly NISEI), who also continued the story started in Android: Netrunner.
because the game is maintained by a non-profit (and actually appropriately fairly anti-corporate) cooperative, playing Netrunner ranges from free to relatively cheap:
- any recognizable proxy is valid even in tournament play with the right (opaque-backed) sleeves. this means that you can print out Nullsignal’s cards at home and sleeve them with a little bit of card stock for rigidity and be ready for tournament play. this also means you can sleeve a post-it note for the same effect, so long as both players can recognize which card you’re supposed to be playing
- you can buy a boxed set from Nullsignal if you’d like high quality cards, and they’ve also got on-demand manufacturing set up through DriveThruCards and MakePlayingCards
- or you can forget physical cards entirely and play on jinteki.net, a free service that lets you play an online game of Netrunner using every card ever published by Fantasy Flight and Nullsignal. the designers at Nullsignal also use Jinteki to beta test and pre-release sets, so you may also get access to cards that don’t physically exist yet
the gameplay of Netrunner is fucking great: it’s an asymmetric card game where one player is a corporation (or their sysadmin at least) and the other is a runner trying to hack and bring down that corporation. the gameplay feels a lot like a mix between a shell game, the bluffing parts of poker, the better bits of Magic (most of the rules you need are on the cards), and an aggressive cat and mouse struggle, all at once. it’s actually one of my favorite ways that decking and ICE have been translated into gameplay mechanics.
Nullsignal also does a great job on the story, art, and aesthetic of their new cards. modern Netrunner has a distinctive feel to it, but it’s clear that the folks behind it understand how to make good cyberpunk.