A New Distraction!

It's all been a bit quiet from me here since the end of AHPC VI. Reason for that is I stumbled on an active Netrunner community locally, and decided to take up the many opportunity for some gaming with cards. A new interest that came out of nowhere! 

Android: Netrunner is an asymmetric Cyberpunk Living Card Game by Fantasy Flight Games. One player plays a Mega-Corporation looking to advance their agendas while protecting their secrets and servers. Their opponent plays a plucky 'Runner' looking to hack servers and steal secrets, for reasons including profit and anarchism. It's huge fun to play from both perspectives, with the asymmetric design offering hidden information, bluffing and clever plays galore. 

This past month, I've been enjoying throwing myself into learning the game, which has a well-developed 'meta-game'. The theme and depth/complexity seems to draw an older crowd compared to its competitors, and the local players have been invariably friendly, welcoming, inclusive and generous with their time in showing new players like me the ropes. And I appreciate FFGs LCG format - no blind packs and artificial rarity of cards nonsense! 

I'm fortunate that there's two regular local meets a week, and a group of players that play over lunch at work. Those opportunities mean I've played something like 50 games over the past month - a bit embarrassing compared to how infrequently I tend to actually get minis onto the table. It's not entirely fair to compare with wargaming of course, with A:NR being a 20-40 minute game and hugely more transportable! 

A:NR is a great game, definitely recommended by me. But where does that leave wargaming? Well no change, really: I've been at it for ~20 years and it's always been a hobby that's waxed and waned with competing hobbies and pressures on time. Post-AHPC, I've been surveying my terrain collection and have been fixing and rebasing various little-used pieces to bring them up to scratch. I'll continue with that, until my enthusiasm gets fired up to paint some minis. My  fresh copy of the new version of Lardy rule set Sharp Practice is a likely candidate for that!