Boot Up and Dive In! What Makes Neuroscape Different and How to Get Started

Neuroscape started life as a Kickstarter TCG, and it has enough good ideas in it to last longer than most crowdfunded card games do. Genesis Unlimited, the retail print of the first set, has landed in the Brisbane City store, so it's time you got the low down on this cyberpunk-themed* trading card game.

There's a lot going on under the hood here, and quite a bit of it works like the card games you might already play, but the way those pieces fit together is its own thing. So this post covers how a game of Neuroscape runs, the mechanics that make it its own thing, what you'll find inside Genesis Unlimited, and the easiest way for you to get a deck in your hands.

How Neuroscape TCG Plays

To begin with, you sit down at the table with three things: a mainframe (the card that represents your system), a cyberdeck (your deck of 50-255 cards) and a RAM deck (a 25-card dedicated resource deck).

Think of your mainframe like a legend in Riftbound, or your commander in a game of Magic: the Gathering Commander. You aren't restricted to the factions you put in your deck, but your mainframe hands you bonus abilities when you match the factions printed on it, so there's a good reason to lean that way.

Your cyberdeck holds between 50 and 255 cards, and it's where your characters, gear and programs live. Characters are deployed to the field and are what you attack and block with. Gear is deployed onto your characters to improve their stats or hand them new abilities. Programs affect the game and then head to the bin, much like sorceries in Magic, or they stay in play as “persistents”, either attached to a mainframe (more on that below) or sitting in the environment with a global effect, like stadiums in the Pokemon TCG.

You start on 20 bioframe health and 20 mainframe health, and most characters deal damage to one or the other.

Each turn moves through five phases, where you refresh your board state, install RAM or draw cards (or one of each), play your cards, resolve any triggers waiting to go off, and then attack. Knock out either of your opponent's health totals and you've won, and if a card happens to tell you that you win the game, that counts too!

What Makes Neuroscape TCG Different

Two Health Totals To Build Around

Bioframe health and mainframe health are tracked separately, and either of them hitting zero ends your game. Every character's attack value is colour coded to tell you which pool it damages, so a red number chews through bioframe health and a blue number goes at the mainframe. You only need to reduce one of these to zero to win, and that shapes your deck building. Do you chase mainframe damage or bioframe damage? Is that character who deals bioframe damage worth a slot in your mainframe-targeting deck? You can see this distinction in the starter decks, where the Hacker deck hunts your opponent's mainframe while the Cybernetic deck comes after your opponent's bioframe.

Your Resources Live In Their Own Deck

RAM is never drawn into your hand. Each turn you get two picks, and each pick is either a card off the top of your cyberdeck or a RAM card installed straight into your RAM bank, so you might take two cards, two RAM, or one of each. You also get to see what your first pick gives you before you commit to the second. Whoever takes the first turn of the game only gets one pick.

Keeping RAM in a separate deck means your hand never clogs up with resources you don't need, and choosing between a RAM install and a draw gives you something to chew on every single turn. Do you need fuel or ammunition? It's also why cheap characters that install extra RAM for you, like Trustfund Baby (GEN#067) and Scrapper (GEN#033), earn their slot in most decks.

Your Characters Hold Onto Their RAM

Play a character and the RAM you spent becomes committed to it, sliding underneath the card and staying there for as long as that character stays on the field. If the character leaves, the RAM returns to your bank, turned sideways as already spent. A wide board ties up a lot of your resources, so the more bodies you have out, the less you have spare for programs, gear and tricks.

That commitment opens up a few tricks. The start of your turn includes a FORCE QUIT step, where you can destroy your own characters on purpose, and any RAM freed up this way comes back to your RAM bank readied and able to be spent immediately. Once a character has done its job, even if that job was just soaking up an attack, you can cut it loose and put the RAM towards something better on the same turn.

Committed RAM also gives you a way to attack your opponent's board. At the very top of a turn, the game checks whether every character a player controls still has enough RAM committed to it, and any character that has fallen short becomes unstable. That triggers a stability check, where you roll to see whether the character stays on the field. Raising the cost of a character raises the RAM it needs, and destroying committed RAM leaves your opponent scrambling to top the character back up before they lose it on their next turn.

Your Mainframe Powers Up with Faction Synergy and Protocols

Your mainframe sits in its own zone and can't be destroyed. Its abilities switch on as you build up cards of the right faction alongside enough cards in play overall. That faction synergy drives your deck building without locking it down the way Commander does, so a good Hacker card can still go in your Mystic deck.

Faction synergy matters for deployment too. Plenty of cards carry a faction requirement in the top right corner, so you need to control something of that faction before you can play them.

Your mainframe also has three protocol slots, where you can install programs that affect your game with static or triggered effects. Your opponent can install protocols into your mainframe as well. Keep an eye out for Trojans, a type of protocol your opponent plays face down into your mainframe and then flips over at the most inopportune moment.

Characters Have Gear Ports

Characters have up to four gear ports covering the head, left arm, right arm and body, and each one has a level marked by gold pips along that edge of the card. Gear only attaches to a port of matching level or higher, and each port only takes one piece at a time, so working out which character gets which weapon or piece of cyberware is part of the puzzle. There's a type of gear from the Dustrunner faction called TETHER that links two characters together and gives them new abilities, with the catch that you can lose both if one of them is removed from play. There's also MALICIOUS gear that you can deploy onto your opponent's characters to make their life difficult. Do keep in mind that gear behaves more like Auras than Equipment from Magic: the Gathering, so it's destroyed when the character wearing it leaves play.

Cyberpsychosis Is Real And Dangerous

The game wouldn't be complete without bringing in the dangers of losing your humanity while chroming out. A fair bit of gear (and, in some cases, drugs) gives a character PSYCHOSIS. These cards come with a serious power boost at the expense of the character's mental wellbeing! If that character ever attacks or runs (Neuroscape's term for 'exhausting'), its controller rolls a d20, and if the result comes in under that character's total PSYCHOSIS, the damage lands on its controller instead. It's always risky to go full borg.

What's In Genesis Unlimited

Genesis is a 255 card set. Each 15 card booster gives you 10 commons, 3 uncommons, 1 rare or quantum rare, and 1 hardware card, and a booster display holds 24 packs. The art comes from 43 artists whose credits include Magic: The Gathering, Cyberpunk 2077, Netrunner and Warhammer 40,000, which is a fair chunk of why the cards look the way they do.

Rarity is easy to read once you know where to look, since the hexagon around a card's faction icon is filled copper for commons, silver for uncommons, gold for rares, and iridescent for quantum rares, art rares, source code cards and promos. For collectors, the Unlimited print adds three serialized source code cards you can only pull from these packs.

Booster boxes are $199.99 and available online, and loose boosters are $8.99 each over the counter at the Brisbane City store if you'd rather test the waters before committing to a box. The Master Diver Kit ($109.99) and the RAM Station ($45.99) can both be ordered in, so drop by to place an order in-store and they'll come through with the next shipment. The Master Diver Kit is the one to look at if you like your extras, since it comes with an exclusive holofoil promo of Astra, Cosmic Kitty (GENS2#001), a foil stamped storage box, a galaxy swirl liquid core resin d20 and all eight alt art holofoil faction RAM cards from Genesis. The RAM Station covers the less glamorous side of deckbuilding with 400 basic RAM cards.

How To Get Started

Start With The Starter Set

The Genesis Unlimited 2-Player Starter Set, Hacker/Cybernetic ($54.99) is the easiest way into the game, because you get two ready to play decks in the one box. You can split it with a friend and learn the game together rather than alone with a rulebook. Along with the decks you get two paper playmats with zones marked out, two fold out deck boxes, a Neuroscape d20, a sheet of 32 holofoil cardboard tokens and a Genesis Unlimited booster pack to crack open.

Mainframe Meltdown, the Hacker deck, lays trojan traps and then brings out hackers and programs to burn your opponent's mainframe down, while Circuit Surge, the Cybernetic deck, deploys heavy characters and loads them up with cyberware and drugs to batter the other player's bioframe. Both decks give you something solid to start swapping cards into once you've opened a few more packs.

Learn The Rules

The official How to Play page at neuroscapetcg.com is the best starting point, and the Neuroscape Comprehensive Rules v1.0 is there for the fiddly questions that come up once you're a few games in. The rules have gone through a fair few revisions on the way to Genesis Unlimited, and some older fan guides still quote deck sizes that no longer apply, so check the date on anything you read. As it stands, you need a cyberdeck of at least 50 cards and a RAM deck of exactly 25.

One early review found Neuroscape's learning materials hard going, and there is a lot to take in when you're starting out. Playing your first few games alongside someone else, with both of you learning at once and the rulebook open on a phone, will get you there far quicker than reading it cover to cover on your own. The starter set is built for exactly that.

Find Someone To Play With

Once you've got a deck together, you can book a table at Brisbane City or Clayfield and bring a mate along for a few games. If you're looking for opponents, the Vault Discord is the place to post, and it's also where you'll hear first if enough interest builds for something more organised.

FAQ

Where can I find the rules of the game?
You can find the rules of Neuroscape TCG on the Neuroscape website at neuroscapetcg.com/howtoplay.

Do I need to build a separate RAM deck?
Yes, every constructed deck needs a RAM deck of exactly 25 RAM cards alongside your cyberdeck and mainframe. Basic RAM is exempt from the usual four copy limit, so you can run as much of it as you like, and the RAM Station is a cheap way to stock up.

How many copies of a card can I run?
Up to four copies of any card across your cyberdeck, sideboard and RAM deck combined, with basic cards as the exception. Iconic cards follow the same limit, although you can only have one iconic card with a given name in play at a time.

Can I play Neuroscape with more than two people?
You can! The comprehensive rules cover 2v2 team games and free for all, and the game supports draft and sealed as well.

What's the difference between Genesis and Genesis Unlimited?
Genesis Unlimited is the retail print of the Genesis set, and it adds three serialized source code cards found only in this print run.

If any of that sounds like your kind of game, grab a starter set, come and say hi in store, and see you in the simulation!

*Not to be confused with Cyberpunk TCG, a soon-to-be released trading card game set in the ACTUAL Cyberpunk 2077 universe.