Up and Over Is Now Available for Android: Netrunner

“Unlimited Energy. Reasonable Prices.”

Up and Over, the fourth Data Pack in the Lunar Cycle for Android: Netrunner, is now available at your local retailer and online through our webstore!

Throughout the first half of the Lunar Cycle, we’ve seen the Corps and Runners of Android: Netrunner jolted by their transit to the moon. At first, everything appeared to be different. There was reduced gravity, recycled air, lag times, and wave fields. The Corps came first, the early game could become the late game, and the late game could become the early game all over again.

On the moon, ghostly echoes of signals transmitted long ago acquire a sort of permanence and interfere with new data. Lunar ice mutates, changing from barrier to code gate, and back again. Powerful trace attempts destroy hardware even when they fail, and Runners have begun to unlock fragments of the legendary source code.

Now, as both sides scramble over each other, seeking to adjust to the new environment, they realize there is one truth that remains perpetually inviolable: Credits are king.

In Heinlein as elsewhere, you still need credits to advance your agendas, to assemble your rig, to rez your ice, and to power your breakers. Without credits, you’re just a shell that’s waiting to be shattered. That’s why nearly all of the sixty new cards of Up and Over (three copies each of twenty different cards) present new economic efficiencies that you can use throughout the cyberstruggles you wage in this new lunar environment.

Reduce. Reuse. Rebuild.

One of the most interesting and game-changing new economy cards is the Weyland Consortium identity, Blue Sun (Up and Over, 68). Of course, an identity is far more than just another economy card, but Blue Sun’s motto is “Unlimited energy. Reasonable prices.” It begs us to explore its economic potential.

The first thing we realize is that Blue Sun’s motto is no empty boast. The energy plant specializes in nuclear fusion, and its special ability allows you to return a rezzed card to HQ to gain credits equal to the card’s rez cost. Immediately, it transforms the effects of an asset like Adonis Campaign (Core Set, 56) into something more akin to a reusable operation. If you install Adonis Campaign and wait to rez it until the Runner has expended his last click, then on your next turn you can gain three credits and return Adonis Campaign to your hand to regain the four credits you just spent to rez it. You can them repeat this play as often as you want, provided the Runner doesn’t access your Adonis Campaign and spend three credits to trash it.

However, your investments into Blue Sun also offer additional dividends as the identity adds misdirection to raw economy. When you bounce a card to your hand and then install a card, you’re daring the Runner to believe that you’ve just reinstalled the card you recycled, and you’re challenging the Runner to calculate his next run based upon that information.

Let’s explore the idea of this recycled asset once again, but now you replace the Adonis Campaign with a Snare! (Core Set, 70). You install it, then take it back to your hand to gain zero credits, but now the Runner knows you have a Snare!. You both know that you’re using your Snare! as a bluff, so once you install your next facedown card into an unprotected remote server, the question is whether or not the Runner will run on it.

Blue Sun is one of very few Corp cards that allow you to play this sort of shell game, sharing some carefully selected information in order to divert attention from other information.

Pressurized Atmospheres

Blue Sun is just one of the many cards from Up and Over that allow you to play with your economic efficiencies in new and interesting ways. Each of the other Corps gain their fair share, as do the Runners.

However, the efficiencies that the cards from Up and Over promote differ from those developed while the game was still back on Earth. They aren’t simple marketing campaigns like Adonis Campaign or five-for-nine investment strategies like Hedge Fund (Core Set, 110). They offer efficiencies rooted in the variable interactions between Corp and Runner. Like Architect (Up and Over, 61) and Reversed Accounts (Up and Over, 67), the economic strategies permitted by Up and Over are devious and aggressive, and they’re perfect for cyberstruggles originating within the moon’s pressurized atmosphere.

Whether you’re protecting Corporate servers or trying to burrow through them, you need credits. In Up and Over, you’ll find new ways to collect, new ways to dig for them, new ways to Inject (Up and Over, 73) them into your system, and new ways to bleed them from your opponent.

After all, in the game of data, credits are king.

Up and Over is now available. Pick up your copy today!

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