I own the original core set FFG put out reviving Richard Garfield’s 1996 CCG, and setup here is about as quick as any two-player game with two full decks can be, sort your ice into the servers, shuffle up, sit down. What it isn’t quick to do is teach. This is properly two rulebooks stitched into one box, one for the corp defending servers and hiding agendas among the ice, one for the runner trying to breach those same servers before the corp can score three of them out, and getting a new player through both sides in one sitting takes real patience.

That asymmetry is also the entire reason this is one of the best two-player games I’ve played, full stop, not a caveat on the rating. Bluffing as the corp, deciding whether that unrezzed piece of ice is a real threat or an empty bluff, and reading the runner’s tempo as they decide whether to run now or build up resources first, creates a kind of tension I haven’t found replicated in a symmetric card game. A theme genuinely earns its mechanics here too, servers actually feel like servers, running feels like running, in a way a lot of licensed or pasted-on themes never manage. The card art holds up completely, and the rulebook, while dense, is at least trying to be thorough even when it occasionally leaves a term undefined that a total newcomer needs spelled out.

The real problem, and it’s the same one everyone hits eventually, is that this only sings with a real ongoing metagame, a group who’ll keep bringing new decks to the table, and the influence-budget deckbuilding system takes real study to use well. Play it once as a one-off and you’ll miss most of what makes it worth owning. Setup and teardown are trivial, the actual investment is in the players, not the box. Five stars for what it is at its best, with the honest caveat that its best requires more than a casual commitment.