NETRUNNER WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP
KEEP ON RUNNING
A whopping 361 players from 29 countries facing off in a game kept alive by the fans? Iain McAllister jacks into the Netrunner World Championships to gauge the state of this early collectible card game
Written by Iain McAllister
The sky above Edinburgh is the colour of television tuned to a dead channel. To be fair, that’s quite common for October in Scotland. The opening line of Neuromancer by William Gibson rang in my head as I drove across the city heading to the beating heart of a game I used to spend way too much time thinking about: Netrunner. This year, the Netrunner World Championship arrived in Edinburgh for a three-day event, supported entirely by fans that love the game.
Netrunner is a strange and compelling beast. One of the early collectible card games (CCGs), it was designed by Richard Garfield, the man who invented the genre with Magic: The Gathering. Netrunner chucked away that fantasy setting for the neon-soaked future of the cyberpunk genre. It also did away with players facing off against each other using mechanically similar decks, as each side of this two-player game has very different objectives.
On one side, you have the Corp: a megalithic organisation bent on advancing its nefarious Agendas. On the other side, the Runner: a scrappy hacker, looking to infiltrate the servers of the Corp for fun and profit. This duel takes place in cyberspace, the virtual environment that connects the globe.
All the points of the game are on the Agendas in the Corp’s deck. They must install them in servers, protect them with ICE programmes, traps and upgrades, and advance them until they can be completed and scored. The runner must break into these servers to fish for those precious points. Even the Corps deck, hand and discard pile are servers, so the Runner can dive wherever they predict those points are hiding. Although a fascinating asymmetric game, it didn’t achieve success among the CCG glut of the mid-’90s. Then Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) took an interest.