Humanity has spread its wings and taken trade to the far reaches of the solar system, having colonized the Moon and Mars. Visionary corporations created braintaping techniques that have led to the development of lifelike artificial intelligence. But as these massive corporations guard their intellectual property on the network behind layers of ice, netrunners seek to expose their secrets, for ideological reasons or for profit.
Corporations seek to score agendas by advancing them. Doing so takes time and credits. To buy the time and earn the credits they need, they must secure their servers and data forts with “ice”. These security programs come in different varieties, from simple barriers, to code gates and aggressive sentries. They serve as the corporation’s virtual eyes, ears, and machine guns on the sprawling information superhighways of the network.
In turn, runners need to spend their time and credits acquiring a sufficient wealth of resources, purchasing the necessary hardware, and developing suitably powerful ice-breaker programs to hack past corporate security measures. Their jobs are always a little desperate, driven by tight timelines, and shrouded in mystery. When a runner jacks-in and starts a run at a corporate server, he risks having his best programs trashed or being caught by a trace program and left vulnerable to corporate countermeasures. It’s not uncommon for an unprepared runner to fail to bypass a nasty sentry and suffer massive brain damage as a result. Even if a runner gets through a data fort’s defenses, there’s no telling what it holds. Sometimes, the runner finds something of value. Sometimes, the best he can do is work to trash whatever the corporation was developing.
The first player to seven points wins the game, but not likely before he suffers some brain damage or bad publicity.
# of Players: 2
Playing Time: 45 minutes
Difficulty to learn: Moderate to Difficult
Library Catalog Record: We’re sorry; this game is somebody’s personal copy, so the library does not currently own a copy of this game. If you’d like to see this game or more like it in the library, let us know!
Fletcher Library Games 