Netrunner: Terminal Directive Review
Matt: This week, two of my Netrunner obsessed friends take a look at Terminal Directive, Netrunner’s newest, and most unusual expansion. Give Chris and Marc a warm welcome!
Chris flicks his wrist and a holo-display illuminates his face. “He’s late”. Chris was waiting to pick up Marc from the magrail station in Lonbridge. They’d been planning this weekend for a long time. As a robotic bioroid, Marc’s programming shouldn’t have let him be this late, “Oh well, thought Chris, if he’s malfunctioning this should be easier than I thought…”
Players: 2
Time: 30-60 min
Ages: 14+
Designer: Richard Garfield, Lukas Litzsinger
Artist: N/A
Publisher: Edge Entertainment, Fantasy Flight Games, Heidelberger Spieleverlag
Marc: Android: Netrunner, one of Fantasy Flight Games’s flagship Living Card Games, has just received a completely new kind of expansion! Terminal Directive is narrative driven, providing both a load of new cards to play with and a fuzzy, holographic window into the grotty, morally grey world that is the Android Universe.
But much like a vain corporate executive deciding what I want my personal robot butler to look like, I’m getting ahead of myself. Netrunner is the asymmetric 2 player card game set in a dystopian, cyberpunk future where corporate greed runs rampant and only the brave runners stand in their way. One player takes control of a Corp, seeking to advance agendas, while the other is a plucky runner attempting to hack their system, outwit their defences, and steal those agendas out from under their noses! It is a game of bluff and counter-bluff, careful manoeuvring and lightning fast raids. It has been tremendously of successful.
Netrunner has seen a steady stream of new releases in the form of “cycles”. A large deluxe expansion focused on a particular faction and half a dozen datapacks adding a bunch of new cards for each faction. Since there have been 7 of these cycles since the core set originally released, the card pool is crazily intimidating for new players. But as good as the core set is it is only a shadow of the full experience. Is Terminal Directive, then, the best way to get into Netrunner?
Terminal Directive is an excitingly large (seriously, it’s unnecessarily huge) box, containing cards for four of the seven main Netrunner factions and some neutral cards that can go anywhere (86 Corporation cards, 77 Runner Cards). As with all the expansions, you still need the Netrunner Core Set to play. The cards you get are legal for use in tournaments (if that’s your thing), and in this respect Terminal Directive is somewhat similar to the Deluxe expansions we mentioned above.
In addition to all the new cards this expansion brings, it also gives you all you need to play through a legacy campaign. This consists of two packs per side (Corp or Runner), that are tantalising marked with the phrase “Do Not Open”. If you are the sort of stubborn person that will ignore this, legacy style games are not for you! The central idea of a legacy game is that new game mechanics and components are revealed from sealed packs as you play through the game. In Terminal Directive these come in three types; cards that contain story to read and narrative choices, cards that are added to your available card pool from which you make your deck, and stickers that modify a player board (called a personal access device, or PAD) to give you objectives, tasks and abilities. These persist between games meaning that later games are influenced by decisions in early ones.
A new kind of Expansion
Chris: So with the proviso that the basic game of Netrunner is excellent, which it is as otherwise Marc and myself wouldn’t obsess over it, what does Terminal Directive bring to the table? Just like a triangle, or a square that’s had one of its corners stolen, there are three main points:
- It adds narrative elements
- It introduces special cards, abilities and goals that persist between games
- It encourages you to play sequential games with the same opponent and deckbuild according to previous games.
Adding a Narrative
Chris: One aspect of the campaign expansion is that it has a narrative that unfolds as you play. This comes from the narrative cards that feature a few paragraphs about a mysterious plot, then asks you to choose one of two options. It reminded me a lot of those choose-your-own-adventure books. However, the use of stickers and permanent card additions means there is no equivalent of keeping your fingers in the pages and flicking back if anything goes wrong!
The idea of having an unfolding story is fantastic, especially in a world as interesting as the Android Universe. Netrunner already has brilliant theming, with card mechanics which often make sense in terms of how the cards are named or themed. The Corp wants to earn money? Play “Hedge fund”. Can’t get into the servers from the outside? Time for an “Inside Job”. Unfortunately the story that the campaign tells feels a little… weak. When unlocking new packs of cards, I was never gripped by the narrative surprises. Instead, I was looking forward to what new cards entered my deck or what abilities would be stuck to my PAD. Speaking of which…
Adding persistent effects
Marc: When you achieve your objective you receive new cards that you can add to your decks in future games and abilities you put on your PAD. The cards you get are usually quite powerful, as they aren’t legal for tournament play, so you get the impression that the designers had a lot of fun with them! The abilities on your PAD usually trigger off something happening in the game. These abilities are interesting, as you can build your deck to make the best use out of them, but they are a little fiddly to remember sometimes.
The other things that go on your PAD are cautions that force you to play somewhat inefficiently without telling you what the consequences of avoiding the cautions will be. One of the best moments of our games was when I was trying to balance advancing my game state whilst avoiding triggering a tricky caution, and I inadvertently triggered an easier to avoid caution, making the next game much more difficult. Brilliant!
In addition to the main objectives, you also get side objectives to complete that go on your PAD. These also trigger when you do something in game. Once you complete the objective, you open a pack that doesn’t advance the story but does give you a couple of paragraphs of flavour text alongside a bonus.
The way that we played the campaign was to choose story options based on the flavour text. This meant that we occasionally got new cards or abilities that didn’t synergise with the strategy we’d originally built our decks around. This was also true of the side objectives. This is either great, if you like the challenge of deckbuilding, or a flaw in the design if you don’t. However, if the latter is true, then you can just pick the story options based on their effects.
Playing a set campaign
Chris: The elephant in the room with campaign and legacy games is the issue of replayability. Even if you are only playing the campaign once, how many games is that? Well that will be dependent on how well you play. Whilst there is an upper estimate of 15 games this seems unlikely to occur for many people. In our campaign we played 9 games and this seems like a more reasonable estimate for players of a similar skill level. Though it could definitely be less if one player keeps winning, possibly as low as 5 games. Deck building between games to adjust to how your opponent keeps winning should help mitigate this, but there is a potential for snowballing nonetheless.
Whilst the campaign effects are interesting, only getting them for approximately 10 games sounds less than ideal. However, Terminal Directive is probably still the most replayable of all the games with legacy elements. Beside the campaign, you can keep playing Netrunner with the cards you get from this set. The basics of Netrunner are so very strong and there are so many different sorts of decks to explore. One of the main conclusions we had after playing the campaign was that the reason it was so enjoyable was that the game it’s based on is so good.
The best thing about the campaign isn’t the story or new mechanics, it’s that it encourages sitting down and playing the same match up multiple times, making incremental tweaks to your deck to try and surprise your opponent. We could have picked two random other factions and built and adjusted decks in a similar and still have a great experience. For example, in an early game I was being forced to play very boldly by one of my cautions, and thought I was safe from anything nasty because the faction Marc was playing aren’t known for their horrible traps. However, in Netrunner you are given a limited ability to put other faction cards in your deck, leading to me nearly being killed twice within the space of a couple of turns! The campaign concept also enhances it further as by playing multiple games in a row, these moments affect later games too. Knowing Marc had included traps led to me playing more cautiously in later games, so Marc could then remove the traps between games, replacing them with more useful cards, until I figured this out.
Whilst many of the campaign exclusive abilities and cards contributed to our enjoyment of the experience, they are a bonus rather than the substance. In a very tortuous metaphor, you could say the campaign elements are like the cherry on the cake, if the cherry is one use and you can keep eating the cake over and over again. And who doesn’t want infinite cake?
Missed Opportunities
Marc: A mechanic unique to legacy games, and something Pandemic Legacy did really well, was forcing you to make what I dub game vs. campaign decisions. In my eyes this mechanic defines legacy games; promoting inefficient plays for the sake of longer term goals. Although Terminal Directive does encourage you to make these game vs. campaign decisions, they don’t permeate the design in quite the same way as Pandemic Legacy. For example, the Corp gets three copies of a campaign agenda to include in their deck before the first game, which if you win a game having scored it, advances the story and gets you closer to winning the campaign. I expected this agenda to be quite difficult to score, leading you to make decisions like:
“Do I risk trying to score the campaign agenda when I could score this other agenda worth more points.”
Instead, the story agenda is one of the best agendas in the game in terms of the points it gives you relative to how difficult it is to score. There is therefore incentive to score it at the game and the campaign level, removing some of the decisions that make legacy mechanics so brilliant.
Another issue with this expansion is that typos, ambiguous wording and poor card templating plague the box, reducing the quality of the product. Often the intent is clear, and Fantasy Flight Games have since released an official FAQ to clear up confusion, but as a product directed towards newer players it’s going to be confusing. We had to extrapolate rulings we know about from cards already printed to card interactions in Terminal Directive, which a newer player without knowledge of these rulings wouldn’t be able to do. It seems an oversight not to have a section of the rulebook which clarifies these interactions. It could even have been marked as “only read this if you have opened set X”, when the clarifications involve campaign only cards.
Who should buy this?
Marc: For people who are already playing lots of Netrunner it is a must buy, as the new cards alone will be a big draw and the campaign elements offer a fun bonus. For people who dabble in the game, or loved it in the past but haven’t been playing as much recently, I’d also recommend this expansion strongly, as the restricted format makes it feel like the Netrunner you probably remember playing, and removes the need for knowledge about current popular cards or powerful combos. But what about those who have only played the Core set?
A question I asked after playing the Core set of Netrunner a few times and really enjoying it was “What next?”. The route I went was to buy a data pack each time I went to a weekly Netrunner meetup, then treating myself to or being gifted the deluxe expansions. The problem with the deluxe boxes is that they are specific to one Runner and one Corp faction. The problem with data packs is that they give a few cards to each faction, and often the cards require cards from other packs to make the most of them. Terminal Directive is therefore a fantastic next purchase after Core just in terms of the non-campaign cards, giving you a lot of extra cards for two Runner and two Corp factions.
However, while it’s a great purchase to expand your pool of cards, I feel that to fully appreciate the campaign experience you need a reasonable knowledge of how to play the game and how to build decks that have a particular strategy. You get given abilities to put on your PAD and new toys to put in your deck throughout the campaign, but some of the interesting tricks they let you perform require building your deck to make the most of them or require a more intimate knowledge of how card abilities interact. Meanwhile, your opponent acquires powerful abilities which you might need to build your deck around to mitigate.
Newer players might not have the skills needed to deckbuild due to the Core Netrunner box completely circumventing the requirement to build decks. You get faction specific cards for each of the seven factions and a set of neutral cards for Corp and Runner. To build a legal deck you can just mash together the faction specific cards with the neutral cards, no deckbuilding required. For many, this is how they play Netrunner, not worrying about building a deck with a particular plan and effectively playing Netrunner like a board game. Going from doing that to playing the Terminal Directive campaign I think would be an incredibly jarring experience, as determining how to best leverage the abilities and new cards you’ve been given is not always easy.
Additionally, thinking about those things was one of the most interesting parts of the experience for me, and playing without that might cause the box to lose some of its magic. If you’ve just got a Core set and haven’t dabbled with deckbuilding, I wouldn’t recommend doing the campaign straight away. Instead, I’d recommend using the non-campaign cards from Terminal Directive to build some decks and play them a few times, making tweaks to them in between games. This will give you an idea of the process of deckbuilding, and also give you a chance to work out which side, Corp or Runner, you want to play and which faction you want to play when you do the campaign properly.
Chris: In conclusion, Netrunner is a fantastic game. It’s got tension, bluffing, and dynamic player interactions. Terminal Directive gives you a whole chunk of cards to expand the experience available in the Core Set. The campaign, while not perfect in terms of its narrative, is a great experience for you and a friend to play through. To get the most out of it a certain level of deckbuilding is required, but perhaps learning that process via the campaign is an experience you can share with someone of a similar skill level. I’ll be fascinated to see if FFG decide to make another narrative expansion, and if they do, whether they’ll address the opportunities we feel like they missed this time around.
Rating: Successful Field Test
This copy of Netrunner: Terminal Directive was provided for review by Esdevium Games. You can find a copy at your local game store for £39.99 RRP.
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