If you don't like card games, it's best to turn away now.
Now for the strange people that do: Android Netrunner is an asymmetric LCG published by Fantasy Flight Games. They are mostly known for Warhammer board games, Game of Thrones LCG and The Lord of the Rings LCG. Netrunner is a relatively new position in their line-up (the Core Set being published 2012), however its mechanics significantly differ from the stuff we've gotten used to since this small TCG you might have heard of known as Magic the Gathering.
The most important part of Netrunner is the fact that it's asymmetric. This means you have two different rule sets for the two sides of the game - the Corporation and the Runner. The corp player wins by scoring Agenda cards worth 7 points, while protecting himself using defence cards called ICE (Intrusion Countermeasure Equipment) or by killing (aka flatlining) the runner by making them discard a card while they have no cards in hand (Do X meat/net damage = The runner discards X cards at random). The runner has to steal the 7 points worth of agendas to win or mill the corporation's deck. The fact that the game is asymmetric makes it necessary to have two decks built if you're planning to compete in any tournaments (and considering this is an FFG game, there are quite a few of those tournaments pretty much everywhere). However you can still play Netrunner online using OCTGN or, more preferably, the site http://jinteki.net.
One of the most interesting features of Netrunner is that your deck (R&D), your discard pile (Archives) and the cards in your hand (HQ) play a very important role in that if you leave them unprotected, the Runner can just steal cards as he sees fit. It requires quite a bit of strategy to bounce your important cards between your hand and the play area so that you can score them effectively.
Also, Netrunner has some really nice lore behind it. As a corporation player, you pick a division of one of the four Megacorps:
- Weyland Consortium - they basically built the first space elevator and earn tons of cash from moving stuff between the Earth and the Moon. Ideally they are meant to focus killing the runner (you don't really need much game knowledge to know that Scorched Earth is a really mean card) however in practice Weyland is currently competitively unviable because as someone nicely put it "prophecies say that FFG will someday print a Weyland card that doesn't work better in NBN".
- NBN - a media company that controls pretty much the entirety of the entertainment and news industry. In theory meant to score really small agendas and get to victory in small steps, in practice they are the best at killing the runner.
- Haas-Bioroid - HB focuses on manufacturing a type of robots called bioroids. They often build huge towers of ICE and score agendas behind them.
- Jinteki - Cheeky Japs that use veryannoyingtraps to get the runner killed or similarly to HB build large towers of very annoying ice to score agendas behind them.
As a runner you can pick one of the three main factions (although the new deluxe pack added three new ones and we don't really know much about their future):
- Anarch - focuses on doing a lot of damage, milling through the corp's deck or attacking its Archives (discard pile).
- Criminal - focuses on getting money, stealing cash from the corp and running against its HQ (hand).
- Shaper - focuses on getting a lot of cards on the board and running against R&D (deck).
Not gonna tell you much about runners as I mostly play corporations.
I've been playing this game on and off for about a month and it is a fantastic game. On the face of it, it seems relatively simple, but the more you play the more you realise the nuances of what is going on.
Oh God, yes. I played this game a long time ago but stopped when my local game store closed. I'd be up to playing a few games here and again; I'll poke you later.
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