Fans have taken back Android: Netrunner, the popular card game discontinued in 2018
On Oct. 22, 2018, publisher Fantasy Flight Games stopped producing the cyberpunk card game Android: Netrunner. It was one of their most popular titles, and the competitive scene, a desirable feature for any game, analog or digital, was robust. Netrunner was alive and then, all of the sudden, it wasn’t. Now, four years after its termination, it’s suddenly thriving, all thanks to its dedicated community.
Netrunner is a fierce, asymmetric experience where one player takes on the role of a powerful corporation executing crooked agendas. The other player is the eponymous “netrunner,” a troublemaker who jacks into the corporation’s servers to sow anarchy. Players go back and forth, attacking and countering each other, until the climactic final few rounds. Unlike Magic: The Gathering, however, the original game wasn’t a collectible one. It was branded as a Living Card Game where everyone is always working from the same set of cards and sharing the same tools — even when building decks from scratch.
It’s absolutely fitting then that this game’s modern legacy is now in the hands of a nonprofit fan collective known as Project NISEI. This group of over 60 individuals — game designers, marketers, and artists — has given themselves completely to rebooting a game that never deserved to die. As a result, Netrunner feels more punk than ever.
“Everyone constantly judges us by comparison to what FFG did,” said Serenity “SwearyPrincess” Westfield, NISEI’s vice president of engagement. “Our first six months we were constantly getting doubted and all our decisions second-guessed. […] However, considering that the most common thing people said to me at UKGE was that [the new starter set] is the best core set this game has had, I think we’ve
Read more on polygon.com
