I posted about this briefly but I realized there were no good pictures of it online, so here's a little bit of what the game looks like.
It's the kind of "card game" where you use the cards to build a map. The blue cards are systems, which you assemble into a "network" at the outset. Then you draw "indials" that get you started, and begin rolling to get root, which grants you access to neighboring links. You then roll to beat the security on each machine you want to hop to.
There are event cards of course, like CONGRESSIONAL INQUIRY (lol); I really like "Whoops" because, yeah, no, that probably happened. hm. I wonder what Steve Jackson could possibly have been referring to. Hm. Hm.
If you mess up and draw the attention of a sysadmin, they'll "clean house", kicking all hackers (it's multiplayer ofc) off the system. To that end, you can also crash a system, creating a firewall (in the firefighting sense) to keep your fellow players from leveraging a node, but as soon as it comes back up, the admin will clean house. Then you have to roll to avoid getting traced and swatted.
The black card at the top is your "deck" - which is not some Gibsonian cyberdeck, it's a fucking PC. You start out with an IBM clone, then you can get a Hackintosh or even an Amoeba 3000. It's so wild to see these parodies - they'd feel almost like corny tryhard humor now, but these were current machines.
Whoever controls the largest number of systems is the "Net Ninja" and gets a +1 to all hacking attempts. This is by far the most entertaining board game I've ever played. Nothing else compares. It's been out of print for a long time afaik but man, I am becoming tempted to pirate this game into Tabletop Simulator. It'd be appropriate, right?
