The cyberpunk-hacker-versus-corp theme has aged a little oddly next to the actual internet we all live with now, but underneath that dated skin is one of the tightest two-player card games I own, extremely asymmetric, over in thirty to forty-five minutes once you both know your side. Risk management is the entire game regardless of which seat you’re in, move too cautiously as the runner and the corp scores you out, push too hard and you’re flatlined before you learn anything useful about their board.

The rulebook is genuinely the weak point, it leans hard on flavor-heavy “thematic” wording that makes some interactions harder to parse than they need to be, and I’d tell anyone starting out to just sit down with someone who already knows it rather than trying to learn cold from the book, it clicks fast with a teacher and drags without one. Once you’re through that hump the asymmetry is the whole appeal, corp and runner aren’t mirror-image decks, they’re playing entirely different games against each other, servers and ice on one side, breakers and runs on the other, and that structural imbalance somehow nets out fair almost every game.

I did sell off most of my expansion cards at one point when the terminology and mechanics started rotating harder than I wanted to keep up with, which cost this game some of its long-term legs for me, getting back into it after a break got noticeably harder once the card pool had moved on without me. That’s my one real regret with this one, not the game’s fault exactly, more a hobby-maintenance problem, but worth knowing if you’re the type who takes breaks between games and comes back later.

Five stars anyway. Even scaled back to just the core box and a couple of early data packs, this is still one of the best two-player card games I’ve ever sat down to.