Android:Netrunner

It’s a trap!

The world falls away. Momentary vertigo lurches in his stomach as his senses adjust, the adrenaline spike riding on the rush of the ‘phettes.

Orienting himself, Noise aims for the clonefarmocology district. His mouth is dry and sweat beads on his neck, but here in cyberspace none of that matters. He hits the GoTo and the sensation of speed thrills down his spine.

This will be the biggest run of his career. The target is a new datafort on the outskirts of the Jinteki infrastructure. Newly-installed, its defences are incomplete. Trashing its storage and corrupting its data will bleed back into the rest of their corporate datamines, teaching Jinteki a well-deserved lesson.

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Running R&D – What are the chances?

I noticed several of my recent games were won by the runner stealing agendas from R&D (the corp player’s deck).

The corp has to spread his ICE across several servers, and in trying to protect a remote server often can’t help leaving R&D under-ICEed. Even if it cost a few credits to run past a couple of ICE into R&D, it seems always profitable for the runner to do so.

So how profitable? We need to look at the distribution of the agendas in the deck.

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The classic story of power and the press

18:03

Day job over, Kate exits her office building and walks toward the subway. She angles her head and checks the reflection in a shop window. A dark-windowed SUV is cruising down the street. It is the same one as this morning.

She keeps walking, flips open her wrist-terminal and starts a timer. It counts up in thousandths of a second as she quickly enters a series of commands. There is a pause and then behind her she hears the airbags in the SUV suddenly deploy.

Kate smiles. 3.009 seconds. A new record.

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Scorched earth policy

Swift Eddie’s feet scrabble for purchase in the alley puddle. Gabriel’s prosthetic hand holds him by the neck.

“Someone ordered the hit,” Gabriel hisses, “Who was it?”

“All I… urgh,” gasps Eddie, “All I know is someone from Weyland’s space exploration division was throwing his credits around in Wyldside last Tuesday. Everyone knows that’s where you go for…”

“…for a contract,” finishes Gabriel. His eyes follow the smoke still rising from the ruined city-block.

Eddie swallows. “I didn’t know they would go that far,” he pleads, “No-one could have known.”

Gabriel lets him go. Eddie slumps into the muddy water.

“No-one could have known,” he whimpers.

Gabriel looks up and down the alleyway.

“Where’s the nearest terminal?” he asks.

Eddie gestures at some neon flickering in the gloom. Gabriel hefts his go-bag on his shoulder and stalks towards it.

Eddie calls after him, “Make them pay!”

Gabriel pauses and looks back. The neon shines in his eye.

“I always do,” he says.

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Anarchy in the superhighway

I switched Android:Netrunner decks and played some games with the preconstructed Anarch runner vs the Haas-Bioroid corp.

The Anarch runners delight in trashing the corrupt corporate oligarchies. They are striking out on behalf of the oppressed millions.

The Haas-Bioroid corporation makes androids (called ‘bioroids’) and protects its monopoly using all possible means, both legal and illegal.

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Lots of expansion-y goodness

A lovely bunch of packages arrived for me with a whole load of add-on packs for Android Netrunner.

I now have the full set of six data packs in the Genesis cycle, and five out of the six data packs in the Spin cycle (get it?).

These are the usual Living Card Game add-ons with fixed sets of cards, so you know what you are getting. There is none of the ‘random boosters’ rubbish you get in Magic.

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Gab vs Jinteki – Our first run

We played our first game of Android: Netrunner. I was the corp Jinteki and Gab was the runner Kate McCaffrey. Gab won.

I did my usual trick of forgetting rules until half-way through the game. For example, Gab was only mildly disconcerted to suddenly discover she could only have five cards in her hand.

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Hack, hack, hackity-hack

I played my first run-through of Android: Netrunner. It went very slowly as I relearnt the rules.

I started with the suggested Shaper vs Jinteki pairing. The Shaper is Kate McCaffrey who can install hardware and programs cheaply, and Jinteki is the evil cloning corporation who specialises in doing surprise damage to the runner.

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A handy reference for Android: Netrunner

I wrote up my rules summary for the Android Netrunner card game. This helps me crystallize the basic rules, setup and turn structure. It isn’t a replacement for actually doing a run-though, but it makes that first run-through a bit smoother so I can focus more on how the cards behave in the play of the game.

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Cyberpunk hackers vs evil corporations

Gab always loved the Android board game, but it is a bit too intensive to play very often. We played it with my family in a four-player game and it took six hours. There are only 12 turns in the whole game and our brains hurt.

What Gab loves about it is the cyberpunk Android world. The clones and androids and seedy cops and nightclubs and jet-cars and conspiracies and corrupt corporations.

What Fantasy Flight Games did which was great was realise that even if the Android board game wasn’t a huge hit, they had some amazing IP in the world they created around the game. They published some Android novels and brought out a great heist game called Infiltration set in the same world. They also redesigned the old Netrunner card game with an Android theme.

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