SemioNerd

Netrunner.

Two weeks ago a colleague, here in Tartu, invited me to play some card-games together. It isn't simple to find fellow gamers, and when it happens you immediately grasp the opportunity.

This colleague is madly in love with card-games He owns two thousand cards of Star Wars the Card Game, hundreds of Netrunner cards, a dozen of other card-games like Lord of The Rings the Card Game and Call of Chtulu and, of course, something like twelve millions of Magic the Gathering Cards. All this in a dozen of different languages. In my wildest dreams I imagine to shuffle all this cards and play an endless, multi-front game on a table of 20 meters long. With a wheelchair to move more quickly.

Anyway, when I first visited my cardaholic colleague we played Netrunner, and I immediately fell in love with this game. I don't know it enough to say that it is perfect, but I adored both its setting and its gameplay.

©Fantasy Flight Games

The gameplay is quite original because it is an asymmetric game. The two players have different cards, different strategies and different objectives.

On the one hand one play the Runner, an hacker who steal information and escapes the law. If you play the runner you need to steal cards from your opponent, installing software, gaining credits to pay for new hardware and so on.

On the other hand if you play the corporation your goal is to advance enough agendas in order to win. You have to conceal and protect them with ICE: dangerous programs that attack the intruders. If the runner has always to guess, the corporation's strategy is to lie and bluff.

Regarding the setting, it is a Cyberpunk game. As I teenager, out of curiosity, I bought Gibson's Neuromancer without knowing anything of it. The first sentence was love at first sight:

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”

I mean, that's it, no need to read anything else. All the cyberpunk genre is concentrated in this incipit. A single metaphor incarnate all the melancholy of a world in which a futuristic, yet malfunctioning, technology is inscribed in the body of ordinary people. After Neuromancer came Burning Chrome, and then nothing was like before.

Even the film Johnny Mnemonic, so awfully bad that it's nearly terrorism, wasn't able to change my mind. And as an Italian I'm proud to mention Nirvana as my favorite cyberpunk movie, one of the last bright example of Italian cinema.

Well, when you play Netrunner you really feel like an hacker, trying to put together enough money to buy good hardware, hoping to avoid been tracked down by the corporations. You patiently install icebreakers and software to penetrate the secrets of the powerful corporation and to hide from the authorities. Run after run you struggle for a better world or just for some more zeros in your bank account.

If you play as a corporation, on the other hand, you start immediately to be paranoid, to obsessively protect everything you own with as much ICE as possible. You start thinking how to trap the hacker, how to burn his/her criminal brain. You bluff, you sidetrack and, when the moment come, you kill, merciless as market laws, and in your spacious office in a crystal tower you erupt in the typical laugh of every villain: “Bwahahahahahaha!”.