After over two years of work, I have finally finished my new game, Sysrunner, a cyberpunk solo card game.

In a dystopian near-future, you are a cyberpunk hacker known as a ‘Runner’. The evil corporation Chisei Psitech specialises in brain enhancements and plans to extend its corrupt hold on the city.

To stop them, you must hack into their corporate server and thwart their schemes before their cyber-defences can track you down.

It is a race against time, with only one winner…

How it works

You begin with a deck of basic cards. On your turn, you buy and play cards to improve your deck and to hack into the corp’s network.

The corp’s network is defended by Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (‘ice’). You must defeat the ice to access their server and win.

When you run out of cards in your deck, you shuffle the discards with any cards you have added to make a new deck. This way your deck gets stronger and you will be able to break more ice and reach the server.

Meanwhile, the corp is trying to hinder you and track you down. You are protected from the corp by links in cyberspace. If the corp can trace your links, they will capture you and you lose.

There are 108 cards in the game, and I had to do 66 hand drawn illustrations for them. This is what took me most of the two years after I had completed the structure and flow of the game itself.

I find writing rules and doing layout and design work easy and almost addictive, but I found doing the artwork very stressful. The big thing was that I wanted to do colour artwork like you get in proper card games, and I have never done any art in colour before. At least not since school, over forty years ago, and that hardly counts. In the past I have done comic art in pencil and ink, and the art for my previous game Innsmouth Mystery was black and white, so doing this was a big step.

It did get less stressy as time went on and I developed better skills and learned how to use Procreate on my iPad. I mostly settled on a ‘loose’ style which appeals to me a lot.

Here are some example cards, all of which are my original design and artwork:

I have uploaded all 108 cards, the rulebook, and the box cover art to the website at thegamecrafter.com, and have ordered my initial creator’s review copy. Once that arrives I can check everything looks ok and publish the game for sale on the site. I also plan to record a video walkthrough. This will likely be sometime in the new year.

In case you are interested, chisei is Japanese approximating intellect, which represents their evil work on the brain and psionics.

Celine is an alternate spelling of Selene, who is the Ancient Greek goddess of the Moon. Bouclier is French for shield. So she is the Night Guard and your enemy and rightly to be feared.

Sysrunner will be available for purchase from Gamecrafter once I publish it.