Director Haas crumples the data-foil in her fist. She continues to glare out of the panoramic window, her back to the conference room.

The last of the C-Levels closes the door hurriedly behind him. Only her virtual assistant remains in the room. Its holo-visage is deliberately bland and neutral.

At this altitude, the window looks out above the city smog. Sunlight streams into the room, highlighting the meeting table and chairs in a golden glow. Despite this, Haas’s face is dark.

“Where is he?” she snarls, “Where is my idiot son?”

“His ‘find-my-family’ locator places Thomas in…” her V-A pauses, “…in the nightclub Wyldside, ma’am.”

“At three in the afternoon?” Haas’s mouth tightens, “Typical.”

The V-A is silent.

“Fifty-five billion dollars,” Haas mutters. “Fifty-five billion dollars. Gone.”

“Ma’am?”

“Get out.” she says.

“Ma’am?”

“Get. Out!”

“I’m sorry, but my holo-console is fixed to your desk.”

Haas turns. Her V-A somehow manages to avoid eye-contact.

The crumpled data-foil flies through its transparent head and bounces off the wall.

+––––––+

“Darling!”

Thomas Haas looks up as the girl slides into the booth next to him. He smiles and waves at the nearest servo-droid. “Hey, baby.” he says, his words almost drowned by the pounding retro-techno bass.

The girl’s drink slops in her cocktail glass as she snuggles up to him. “Where were you last night?” she asks, “Lucy and I missed you at the party!”

Thomas smirks, “I was so out of it. You should have been there!”

The girl giggles into her drink. “You are so naughty,” she says and runs her fingers through his hair.

Thomas leans in closer. “I’ll make it up to you tonight,” he says.

Her hand drifts behind his ear and dances on the contacts of the cyber-socket in his neck.

“I’m sure you will,” she says, “I’m sure you will.”

+––––––+

“What?!”

The early rays of the morning sun gleam behind the holographic eyes of the V-A, lending it an almost supernatural appearance.

“The share price, ma’am. It is down 1000 points.”

Out in the street, startled commuters look up as a scream of rage echoes down from the penthouse high above.

+============+

Creation and Control is the first large box expansion for Android: Netrunner. It is great because it contains two full set of cards to build preconstructed decks, one for the Haas-Bioroid corp and one for the Shaper (green) runner.

Add these to the four corp decks and three runner decks in the base set and you now have 20 combinations.

The two decks have nice new mechanics, and both are centred around alternate ways to pay for stuff.

The Haas deck focuses on having big ICE and using tricks to install and rez them cheaply without needing many credits.

The shaper deck (Rielle ‘Kit’ Peddler) has lots of gear that gives recurring credits to fund the use of icebreakers and other programs.

I played a couple of games with these decks, and found the corp deck more fiddly to get the hang of. The bioroid ICE can be broken by spending time (without needing an icebreaker), which means a single piece of ICE is not real protection. Two or more is fine because the runner doesn’t have enough clicks in one turn to breeze past them all.

It was fun using tricky cards to rez huge ICE like Heimdall 2.0 which normally costs 11 credits, for free.

There a few corp cards that do brain damage, including a new ambush, but I found it was sometimes worth the runner taking the damage to push through and steal an agenda.

Having new variants of icebreakers with different special effects was also nice.

Saving up enough money to finance a run is often the toughest part of being a runner, and the new cards that provide recurring credits every turn help to alleviate that problem.

You do need to get the right combinations of these though, as some credits are only useful on certain cards. For example, make sure the program you put on an Omni Drive is one you are going to use often.

I liked this Rielle shaper deck a lot, and I think I will try it out against the other corp decks.