I mentioned in my Arkham Horror LCG review that its action-point system borrows from somewhere, and this is the somewhere. One player builds a megacorporation trying to advance secret agendas, the other is a runner hacking in to steal them before they finish, and the asymmetry is total, you are never doing the same thing your opponent is doing, which is rare for a card game and even rarer for one that stays this balanced.

The bluffing is the actual game, more than the deckbuilding is. As corp you’re laying down cards face down that could be a trap, could be nothing, could be the agenda that wins you the game, and the runner has to decide whether to spend the resources to check. I have sat across the table doing genuine math in my head about what a specific person is likely to have done given how they played the last three games, which is a level of read-your-opponent tension I don’t get from almost anything else on my shelf.

The problem, and it’s a real one, is that this is out of production and the community has mostly scattered. Building a competitive deck used to mean tracking down old data packs, and I’ve heard people say it would’ve run them close to three hundred dollars to get a tournament-viable collection back when this was still supported, which is a genuinely bad barrier for a card game to have. Finding a second person who owns cards and wants to play regularly is the harder problem now, harder than the game itself ever was.

Two players only, which is fine, this was never meant to be anything else. Setup’s quick once decks are built, though building those decks the first time is its own small project. If you can find someone to play this with consistently, do it, it’s one of the best designs I own. If you can’t, it’s a beautiful thing to own and mostly not play, which is its own quiet kind of tragedy for a game this good.