Fantasy Flight Games is fast turning out to be my favourite gaming company, as it announces the return of another classic game. Android: Netrunner is an LCG (living card game) that is based on Netrunner, an old card game first conceived and released back in 1996, by Richard Garfield (yeap, the designer for Magic: the Gathering).

Set in the cyberpunk futuristic world of Android, the game pits a megacorporation and its massive resources against the subversive talents of lone runners.

Corporation players try to score points by advancing their agendas (we’ll have to see what that really means in game terms), and netrunners try to score points by breaking through the corporation’s defenses and stealing valuable data. The first player to seven points wins the game, but not likely before he suffers some brain damage or bad publicity.

I never caught on with the Netrunner fad, but it was pretty big when the game first landed here in the 1990s. There was a regular playgroup, which more or less left the game when it went south after only one expansion. It even had a “virtual expansion” (these were popular for a while, for games that were discontinued), and was ranked by many as one of the more underrated card games of the 1990s.

FFG is proving to be a force to be reckoned with, and cleverly picking on classic gems of nostalgia. Well, let’s wait till year-end when this game lands, and see how it is. Now, where’s the (official) Blood Bowl expansion dammit?

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