I guess this is transitioning into a Star Wars: Unlimited blog...? I'm not sure yet, but it's close enough to Netrunner, and I still have this site, so I might as well post here. I've been thinking a lot lately about this game, about our family, and about how following my son's obsession has led us back to a hobby I'd pretty much abandoned. I'm going to write a bit about that thinking here today...
Our family's obsession with Star Wars: Unlimited has been continuing. We've spent way too much on it (as happens with a TCG/CCG). Our son is really getting into it, and he's been looking up new cards daily, as it's spoiler season for the set releasing in November. That set, Twilight of the Republic, has cards set during the prequels, the Clone Wars, and related lore, which are his favorite. The picture here is him jotting down card names (and rarity!) so he can share them with a friend of his that he rides the bus with every day.
It's kind of ... magical to see this? It's not something I've experienced before, getting into a new game at the same time as your kid. And it's a great game, as well ā one that has tiresome old dudebasher bones, but does some interesting things with old mechanics. Don't get me wrong, Netrunner is by far the superior game, but it's also the refined, elusive, and frankly snobbier experience. The lore is ā or was, before Null Signal took over ā really interesting, but it's not got the same connection to one's lizard brain that Star Wars has for many people. And I think that makes a surprising amount of difference.
Star Wars: Unlimited is just a mess narratively, and I find myself enjoying that a lot. None of it makes narrative sense ā sometimes you're smashing a Millennium Falcon into a Star Destroyer and it has a bit of a feel of a movie. The rest of the time, you're, like, watching Kylo Ren fight Greedo. It's a mishmash of everything in the lore, and that's surprisingly... freeing? Weirdly fun?
I think my biggest insight is the following. I'm someone who was a Star Wars fan in childhood, grew into a snobby Star Trek fan shortly afterwards, and rationalized that Star Wars was shitty media for children intended to sell toys through most of my adulthood. The funny thing is ā I was right, and that's okay! Star Wars: Unlimited has the anarchic feel of playing with Star Wars toys at times. Sure, make your Rey leader do direct damage to the Dagobah Swamp. Go ahead, have Grogu disable Grand Moff Tarkin for a turn. Your Fett's Firespray just swooped down and killed my surgical droid!
They're toys. As cards. And toys are fun!
Back in 2014 or so, when I first started going to FFG Worlds for Netrunner, I remember the Netrunner players' arrogance and hubris. I felt a lot of that arrogance and hubris myself.
There were Call of Cthulhu LCG players there, playing in their final FFG tournament. We shared a big warehouse to play in the Netrunner Icebreaker tournament with Star Wars LCG players, which only had another year or two before it folded. Netrunner was still ascendant and the players had a real "we're the cool game" swagger to them ā which continued well into the rise of L5R (I remember Netrunner players making day two of L5R Worlds so they could play more Netrunner).
Now, of course, Netrunner is still alive, but of course, it really isn't. It's a game played primarily online by an offputtingly international player base. On the surface, the changes to Netrunner in the past 6-7 years have all been great āĀ increased attention to diversity in both the card game representation as well as the team of developers, increased professionalism in printing and distribution of cards (other than, ahem, the European store), and a real fervor for the game from a cadre of new players who'd never experienced the FFG game. That all sounds wonderful, but it's also frankly, deadening.
Why? I think SWU is helping me understand why, at least a little bit. Netrunner has become a game for the obsessives and there's not much room in it for casual players. The national and international events are now dominated by, it seems, an even smaller number of top-tier players than there were during the FFG days. The game's design seems to swing wildly as they have changed lead designers three times (not counting interims) in the past five years. And it's virtually impossible to get local communities built where there weren't any before.
SWU doesn't have that problem. I've been struck by how friendly and easygoing it is playing a new card game with a built-in fanbase. I might not particularly care about Star Wars as a thing, but I'm related to a boy who does, and that obsession has been a bit infectious. I've found myself learning what the "Adelphi Patrol Wing" is, the name of the character that rats on Rey, Han, Chewie, and Finn at Maz Kanata's castle in The Force Awakens, and I now remember exactly how many systems has bounties out on Doctor Evazan. All because of these cards.
Playing these games is supposed to be fun. And, with it in the rearview mirror, I see that Netrunner wasn't ever fun after the FFG days. It became a hotbed of player contention, lots of political infighting, and lots of desperate attempts to recruit people while the community withered. But never was it the same kind of silly, goofy, pass-the-time fun that it was before that. And that's because it lacked casuals ā at least where I was playing.
Games like these need people with incomplete collections to come in and try to swing wildly with whatever cards they have. They need people motivated more to make themely decks (something much more intelligible in a Star Wars game than Netrunner) to try and repeatedly fail at them. They need people who see the cards as cardboard toys first and foremost. They need... kids.
And that brings me back to the start. Playing with our son has been transformative for me. I tried to get him and his sister to play Netrunner, but there's no hook there for them. Frankly, there was no hook there with Magic or PokƩmon, either. By virtue of being a game based on the Star Wars license, there's a hook here, and one that I'm happy to get reeled in by.
Too bad it's so fucking expensive, though.
