So lately I’ve been reading a book about the history of chess called “The Immortal Game” by David Shenk. It is a great read for anybody interested in strategic gaming and competitive communities. While reading, I was struck by the similarities between competitive level chess and competitive Netrunner.

First of all, the different play styles of chess can be said to match a few different play styles, or skill levels, of Netrunner. In the early days of chess, most players played a style that would later be called ‘romantic’. It was mostly flashy tactical moves, trying to capture your opponents big pieces early with brash moves and little thought to the end game. Most amateur chess players go through a phase of playing ‘romantic’ chess when they start playing the game. A parallel can be drawn here to the play style of most newer Netrunner players I’ve met (and the type of player I was when I started). Most new players are drawn to corp kill decks or runner decks that destroy ice. The destructive and tactical element of the game seems to attract people at first, and they favor a play style of all or nothing tactical plays that do not necessarily help them develop towards a strong endgame.

One quote from Shenk’s book referring to ‘romantic’ chess also resonated with me as a Netrunner player who struggled to finally accept netdecking and the Tier 1 system after years of competitive play:

“There are more and less sophisticated ways to play the game, and those unwilling to face-up to the reality of chess knowledge will be consigned forever to be ineffective, ignorant underachievers.”

I am sure the author did not mean any ill will towards amateur chess players. And I certainly do not mean to offend any amateur Netrunner players by quoting the line above. There are two distinct formats of Netrunner, casual and tournament, and I respect players who enjoy the game casually. But when I read online how some players think that Tier 1 is too constrained or that there are not enough playable decks or that they ‘hate netdeckers’, I can’t help but feel that these players are being ignorant. Netdecking and playing Tier 1 decks is the equivalent of studying chess openings and famous chess games for competitive chess players. The fact that these players complain about people netdecking as if they are cheating, shows that they do not understand the purpose of high level competition. The whole point is to bring the game to the highest level of sophistication and strategy. Watching, or, luck permitting, playing the finals in a big tournament is to be in the presence of a game elevated to the level of an art-form.

The long term strategic style of chess that would develop later was called ‘positional’ chess. Here players would make calculated decisions and work towards gaining a long term advantage over their opponent. One of the breakthroughs Netrunner players need to make if they want to play the game seriously, is understanding how their deck can achieve a more powerful board-state than their opponents. Knowing how to pilot each match-up means that competitive players need to practice every match-up for their decks and have a strategy for all of the decks they are likely to see at a tournament. In my opinion, the number of playable decks is about right to make the game manageable for skilled pilots to go into tournaments with a certain level of confidence. If there were too many playable decks and too many different deck archetypes to tech against, competitions would become too random, a matter of who ever got matched up with decks that were weak against theirs, would come out the winner. The biggest thing that keeps me into competitive Netrunner (other than a deep love for the game) is the fact that I know I can make it to the top with enough dedication and practice.

In his book, David Shenk quotes an essay Benjamin Franklin wrote about chess in 1786. These four ‘morals’ of chess were reasons Franklin posed as making the game a worthy pursuit:

Foresight – looking ahead to the long-term consequence of any action

Circumspection – surveying the entire scene, observing hidden dynamics and unseen possibilities

Caution – avoiding haste and unnecessary blunders

Perseverance – refusing to give up in dim circumstances, continually pushing to improve one’s position

Any serious player of Netrunner will easily see the parallels between Benjamin Franklin’s ‘morals’ and the qualities that separate the mediocre players from the professional pilots. All four of these lessons must be learned for players to reach the higher level of serious play. They almost seem sequential in their difficulty to master, I personally know I still sometimes make misplays which deal with the last two points. Since I’ve won matches with ‘hail mary’ plays, I sometimes rush and make unnecessary blunders even when my opponent is not on game point. I have also lost my confidence in ‘dim circumstances’, what we would call ’tilting’, and not played optimally with the resources at hand. Since Netrunner has an element of chance, good players know better than to give up, for odds are, if you’ve been getting bad draws, your good draws will be coming next.

And obviously, there are stark differences between Android: Netrunner and chess. A card game will always have a certain amount of luck involved, but I think Netrunner is designed in such a way as the mitigate the luck to a reasonable frequency. As the famous board game designer Reiner Knizia once said, a really well designed game should have “enough strategy to make the winner feel as if he deserved to win, but enough luck to make the loser feel he was simply dealt a bad draw.” The format of Netrunner, as a very niche and complicated card game with hundreds of cards, means it would never reach the popularity and social impact that chess has reached historically (it could even be argued that as the game becomes increasingly harder to get into, we may reach a plateau in the number of players). Yet I believe, as a long time player, that we have created and taken part in on of the greatest and most sophisticated games in the history of strategic gaming.

As for the future of the game? Well, after the ‘positional’ style of chess, a ‘scientific’ style of play was developed, where rigid rules were set out on how to win consistently. And in response to this, the latest development in chess has been the ‘hypermodern’ school, which has found openings and defenses to break the rigid rules of the previous play styles. I obviously respect players who ‘homebrew’, test news cards, and strive to make the new archetype that will ‘break the meta’, they keep the game fresh and exciting. Unlike chess, Netrunner is continually injected with new paths to victory and ways to disrupt your opponent. We cannot predict exactly what types of decks will be the forerunners in the next season of play, just as chess masters were constantly being defeated by chess ‘savants’ that would begin training at younger and younger ages. Although we could say, that when it comes down to new archetypes, decks will always exist within a spectrum of early threats (such as fast advance, butchershop) and late game engines (such as glacier and big rigs). And in both of these great games games, the key to victory has always been knowledge, dedication and perseverance.