Chris Underwood is worried about his wife. Doing his best to ignore the 50 Netrunner players around him, he wanders the Loading Bar in Dalston, east London, like a ghost, taking furtive sips from a pint of beer. He’s the most anxious I’ve ever seen him, and I can’t stop laughing.

Chris is the cheery veteran of a dozen Netrunner tournaments, all of them gruelling, eight-hour affairs that leave players exhausted. I’ve been by his side for most of them. But today is his wife Cathy’s first tournament, and I’m having a great time watching him lose his mind.



“I can’t watch,” he tells me, shooting a glance over his shoulder. “This is worse than competing. It’s so, so hard.”



It’s not about mastery. It’s about constant tinkering and experimentation

Android: Netrunner is a geeky card game currently undergoing a uniquely un-geeky revival, with communities of players to be found in every major city and London playing host to the largest in the world.



If you’ve played Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone you’ll be aware of the game’s format. Netrunner players design decks of cards, often using online tools, and decks we build at home become our personal weapon outside it. New cards are released by the publishers about once a month, keeping the game in a constant state of flux. Netrunner’s unique, however, in that you actually build two decks.



One deck represents a sinister cyberpunk corporation, made from cards with names like “hedge fund” or “geothermal fracking”. The other deck? That’s your hacker, or “runner”, working to take the corp down. This is someone with a name, personality and even motivation. In this deck, you might find cards representing acts as laughably banal as “staying up all night” or “waking up early”, or maybe something a touch darker – a “sacrificial clone” or “hostage” helping your hacker as they hurriedly assemble a suite of hardware and programs.



A game of Netrunner sees one player’s runner taking on the other player’s monolithic corporation. The runner needs to rob the corp of the “agenda” cards shuffled into the corp’s deck that represent their dastardly plans, while the corporation has to slowly advance these plans to completion.

And here we arrive at Netrunner’s biggest selling point. Netrunner was originally created by Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield as a means of incorporating the bluffing and at-the-table play of poker into a collectible card game.

Five cards from Netrunner’s Breaker Bay expansion of the core set. Photograph: Fantasyflightgames

To this end, almost every card the corporation deploys is placed face-down. Servers are created, net security is hooked into place and agendas are advanced, with the runner having to take a blind guess at what these cards might be. Does that server contain the game-winning agenda, or is it a “cerebral overwriter”, which will leave them brain damaged if they touch it?



The runner, however, has an equally intimidating power. Rather than being limited to hacking into the strange geography of servers and intrusion counter measures the corporation creates on the table, they can hack straight into their opponent’s hand of cards, the top of the corp’s deck, or even their pile of discarded cards. For the corp, this is profoundly invasive and nerve-wracking. A not-uncommon situation is for the corporation to have a miserable hand of nothing but agenda cards, and then having to keep their cool when the runner announces a run on HQ – hacking into the corp’s hand – and afterwards faking surprise when the runner pulls an agenda, offering congratulations as if it were the only one in your hand.



What makes this a still more fascinating system, though, is that even if the runner doesn’t slip an agenda from your hand or deck, even if they rummage through your discard pile and come up empty, they still learn something about your deck, your plan, your problems. A clever runner will remember what they’ve seen to better help them guess at face-down cards. A clever corp will use this to their advantage. The runner saw an intimidating curtain wall off the top of your deck? Fantastic. You immediately put down a card to protect a server which secretly isn’t the curtain wall at all, but a cheap pop-up window. With luck, the runner will assume they can’t get into that server, and you’ve still got the Curtain Wall for later.

It’s a phenomenal game. I review board games for a living, but this is the one that’s taken over my life. But that’s only in part because of the game. It’s also because being a part of the community is such exceptional fun.



The meet I attend is in the basement of a London pub on Tuesday evenings, and after a year I’m more in love with it than ever. Originally Netrunner may have been aping poker, but it differs from it in one key respect: Netrunner is an almost unknowable game. It’s not simply that the game has a wealth of of different corporations, runners, strategies and playstyles. It’s that this balance is forever being undermined and warped by the release of new cards.



Netrunner offers tense, fascinating and often surprising games, yes, but it also offers bottomless conversations. Whether you’re preparing for a tournament, unwinding afterwards or just chatting about new cards, old cards or this new deck that’s supposedly dominating Berlin, Netrunner is something you can endlessly theorise, argue and enthuse about.



It’s also hugely creative. My girlfriend (also a games writer) put together a piece about learning Netrunner, concluding: “It’s not about mastery. It’s about constant tinkering and experimentation.” That’s a much healthier place for a game to be in than the alternative – an oppressive realm of ego and competition.



Here’s a game where you can lose miserably, but still be overjoyed at your opponent’s idea for a deck or the cunning play that took you by surprise.



Recently I’ve taken to running my own tournaments. I’m thanked for this, but it’s a selfish pursuit. Partly because I can create reserves of tickets for women and do my best to create a more diverse culture within board gaming, which makes me happy, but mostly because of the thrill I get as the first round begins. It’s a hell of a feeling to sit down 60 affable players across from each other, project the giant timer on the wall of the bar and wish everyone good luck. It’s because I know how nervous they all are, many of them deploying precious ideas that they’ve been refining for weeks, months, even years.



Cathy ended up claiming fifth place at that tournament, which sent a cheer up from her friends. Her complimentary cocktail was set aflame and the winners filed up to claim their prizes. Chris was grinning ear to ear, and so was I.



To learn more about Netrunner, a visit to the official site offers a decent video tutorial. After that, you want to buy a core set, a big box containing everything you need to start playing. Once you have your own decks and know the rules, a search for your city’s Netrunner community on Facebook, Netrunners.co.uk or the game’s Reddit board should let you know about your local meet.