Announcing the Second Data Pack in the Lunar Cycle for Android: Netrunner

“All code is just input designed to process output. Used properly, lag is static, and static is another form of code.”
    –Tori Hanzo

Fantasy Flight Games is pleased to announce the upcoming release of The Spaces Between, the second Data Pack in the Lunar Cycle for Android: Netrunner!

As the Lunar Cycle re-establishes the game’s cyberstruggles amid the moon’s reduced gravity, recycled air, and corporate-sponsored colonies, it simultaneously re-examines one of the game’s fundamental conceits. What happens to events and operations after they’re played?

Events and operations represent a variety of ephemeral processes that occur both in the meat world and the virtual one. When they hit the discard pile, do their impacts just disappear? Or if they transmit signals into space, might their echoes ever linger, gain a sort of permanence in their repetition, and impact future events?

The sixty new cards from The Spaces Between (three copies each of twenty different cards), re-examine the essential natures of the game’s events and operations, and every faction gains a new current that resides in the data streams somewhere between a state of transience and a state of permanence.

Current Events and Operations

The Spaces Between asks, “What lies in the spaces between the data?” And part of the answer is comprised by the new current events and operations introduced for each of the game’s factions.

Currents are new forms of events and operations that aren’t immediately resolved and discarded. Instead, they all come with a shared line of text that carves out a niche somewhere between event and resource, between operation and asset.

• Each operation reads, “This card is not trashed until another current is played or an agenda is stolen.”
• Each event reads, “This card is not trashed until another current is played or an agenda is scored.”

Thus, the benefits a current offers its controller will echo throughout the network, persisting from turn to turn until another player triggers its discard. In fact, though currents are nominally events and operations, they are in some ways more permanent than resources or programs, hardware, assets, or upgrades. They can’t be blasted by ice that trash programs. They can’t be stolen or derezzed, and they can’t be trashed when a Runner sweeps through your servers. Indeed, their pseudo-permanence should be especially intriguing to the Corp because they force the Runner to play by your rules if he wants to disrupt your current…

All told, currents are likely to create an entirely new game within the game as Corp and Runner vie not only for control of the game’s data, but also for the spaces between the data.

• Will you allow the Corp to increase your Lag Time (The Spaces Between, 31)?
• How will you respond to an Anarch’s efforts to erode your ice with Scrubbed (The Spaces Between, 34)?

The different effects these currents introduce are too powerful to ignore, so you’ll have to decide:

• Will you fight fire with fire? You can pack your own contingent of current events or operations to control the flow of the game.
• Will you alter your tempo to score or steal agendas at critical moments, thus discarding your opponent’s currents without ever playing your own?
• Will you gamble that your opponent simply doesn’t play a current? Sometimes, if you focus your deck on other core efficiencies, you might just get lucky.

No matter how you respond to these new events and operations, you can expect to encounter them during your runs and system maintenance. As Android: Netrunner heads to the moon and looks to explore The Spaces Between, everything is new again, and the game is likely to be won by the player who can most quickly re-establish his center of gravity.

Temporal Resources and Persistent Threats

The new current events and operations aren’t the only new cards in The Spaces Between that blur the boundaries between card types. Will O’ the Wisp (The Spaces Between, 32) is an upgrade that functions much like an Ambush asset, and Cache (The Spaces Between, 37) is a virus that provides roughly the same effect as an event… except spread out over a timespan controlled by its owner.

How will you blur the boundaries between card types with The Spaces Between, and how will its new surprises help you control the flow of data? The Spaces Between is scheduled to arrive at retailers in the third quarter of 2014!

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