Let the Run Begin

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s officially 2020. In my mind, this means that it’s time to break out the NetRunner cards and pretty much play all year. In case you don’t know, NetRunner is a card game that was created by Richard Garfield. It initially had a 3-year run as a product of Wizards of the Coast, starting in 1996. After that, it had an 11-year run of not being in print. In 2012, Fantasy Flight Games was given license to publish NetRunner, and they publish it under the name Android: Netrunner. This went along for about 6 years, and then they did not renew their license with Wizards of the Coast.

I seem to be late to the game with NetRunner every single time. I first played around 2001 or 2002 when the game was already out of print. While I technically did play the Fantasy Flight version a few times, I was largely checked out on their version of the game even though there weren’t really that many differences. For some reason, I just felt like playing the original game if I was going to play it at all.

Over the years, I’ve considered the idea of trying to figure out how to acclimate to the Fantasy Flight versions of the cards by playing them with the original NetRunner game. I think that part of my issue was learning entirely new cards all at once. I realize how dumb this sounds given that people get used to new Magic the Gathering sets quickly enough. I simply had some sort of mental block to this version of the game. It’s because during the lean years there was a hope that the game would be picked back up, but I think we always presumed that you would be able to mix in your old cards.

I think the problem was twofold. The first is that while Fantasy Flight acquired the license to use the NetRunner game, I don’t think that they acquired the ability to use the Cyberpunk 2020 backdrop. This is likely why they went ahead and used their own IP of Android, which was a board game they published with its own characters and setting. The second reason they maybe didn’t make the cards playable with the old card backs of the original NetRunner game is because they included a trademark known as DeckMaster which was a Wizards of the Coast trademark that they abandoned after a few games. It probably would have made it awkward to use that when DeckMaster doesn’t even exist anymore.

Luckily, with the use of card sleeves I can probably mix some cards in and see how they play, so I can get used to them. I think one thing that I’d like to do going forward is perhaps even figure out combinations of cards that might actually work as interesting decks to play. It really just depends on how much opportunity I get to play NetRunner, and whether or not the cards even really mix that well.

I can already see issues with having to clarify that Walls and Barriers are effectively the same thing for all rules. Actions are effectively the same as clicks for all rules. Meanwhile, for the sake of balance I would imagine that there would have to be effectively two mechanics: one known as Trace and one unofficially known as Android Trace, so that the trace cards from the different games play differently.

There may be other rules to figure out a workaround, but I’m actually okay with the idea of trying to figure all this out over the course of 2020. This isn’t something that I’m going to hold myself to. It’s just something that I can do if time and opportunity permits.