Updating the Netrunner Learn to Play Script: Our Reasoning

The Turin Netrunner community started doing demos for the game in summer 2025. We've done 3 events since and we have found some possible improvements in the demo decks and scripts. The updated decks and scripts are described here.

This article lists the changes and provides some reasoning.

List of changes - Runner

List of changes - Corp

Our approach to demos

Due to limited space and people we heavily prioritized doing demos for two people at a time, one running and one corping.

We generally ran the script and let people play the rest of the game while remaining available for questions.

When demoing only one person we played as the corp, running the script and then playing the rest of the game.

Sometimes a person would show up a second time to play the opposite side. In that case we played a normal game without the script.

Explanation of changes

We encountered a few issues with some of the cards present in the starter runner deck.

Wildcat Strike created a few headaches with its wording, which is especially difficult to read for people with English as a second language. Most often, people didn't understand that it's the corp player who chooses the effect.

This would be solved by having an Italian translation of the game, but with Elevation not being translated (yet?) we had to fix the problem in a different way, by replacing the card with the much easier to read Ritual.

Another problem card was T400 Memory Diamond. Analysis paralysis is already a massive problem for new players. T400 Memory Diamond creates confusion for the player for no benefit: this card does absolutely nothing in the demo game. It adds MU, which is useless for the runner's rig, and adds hand size, which is also useless since the corp is never getting a Clearinghouse or an Urtica that high.

Since we cut a bit of econ by replacing Wildcat Strike, we decided to remove T400 and put Side Hustle in the deck. This creates a little complexity since it has a different timing than Pennyshaver and Red Team, but that's not been a big problem. Another advantage of Side Hustle is that it encourages runner players to run a lot, leading to faster games.

The final problem card and by far the biggest pain point in the runner deck was Marjanah. People really struggled to understand that Marjanah exists only to go to the heap to boost Rising Tide, so kept tutoring and installing it with Mutual Favor. Removing them in favor of a third Rising Tide meant we can shortcut Fracter = Rising Tide and simply tell people that multiple copies of the same breaker are useless. This makes the runner slightly less efficient at breaking Palisade, but the runner deck is rich enough to manage.

This of course left us with 39 cards, and while we completely ignored influence because it's irrelevant for demos, we wanted to at least respect the deck size requirement, especially since the corp has a good amount of damage sources and can grind the runner out.

We landed with Devadatta Drone as the 40th card, with the hope that it would lead to slightly faster games with the triple access opportunity it provides by stacking with Jailbreak.

The power counter mechanic has not been an issue, by the time Devadatta shows up people have already used Red Team and Docklands Pass a bunch and Devadatta works similarly to both of those.

The runner script is generally very good except for a major pain point: the useless run on the remote on turn 3. While it's important to show the players how ice interactions work, it's also important to show the interaction of trashing assets by paying the trash cost.

To solve this problem we decided to change the runner script to click Red Team on HQ before running the remote This way the runner has enough money to trash the Regolith.

However, this change created two further problems:

A possible solution for the former is swapping the Offworld Office for an ice or an operation. The corp has a Sprint they can play to dig for agendas if they want to rush, but usually the first unscripted turn needs to be a setup turn anyway. We haven't tested that yet so it's not in the script.

The latter is much more important. When we are the ones playing corp it's easy to handle: just take a turn to credit credit Hedge Fund. However, new players almost never see that line and you either have to guide them to it or watch as they stay low on credits and have a miserable time.

As a solution, we decided to add a single copy of Predictive Planogram which gets played during the script. This way the corp starts their first unscripted turn at 5 credits and is automatically guided to play Hedge Fund. The Planogram play comes with the added advantage of showing people how to play operations, which work differently from every other card type on the corp side.

We have to remind players about tags not existing when they play this, but we have to do it when we explain the basic action card anyway. Beanstalk Royalties would be a slightly better card for this slot if only it existed.

We also decided to swap the Offworld Office and Above the Law to give the corp a little more gas, as by the time the corp would score the Above the Law the runner was usually finished using their first Red Team and didn't put down a second.

The other major change to the corp deck was removing Clearinghouse in favor of Urtica Cipher. After playing a few games we found that Clearinghouse was never firing for a kill, not even when we were the ones playing corp, since the runner is generally very good at busting the remote and a six-advanced card is a very obvious threat. This lead to longer and slower games, which were also generally a bit boring.

Urtica solves all of these problems. It's much more common to land a kill with Urtica and even when it doesn't kill the damage usually opens up a very wide scoring window for the corp. Both of these situations lead to shorter games. It also has the same advantages as Clearinghouse in demonstrating an advanceable asset and being a good card to trash during central accesses.

We generally explain Urtica to runner players by showing it, telling them that some cards can be bad to access, and reminding them to draw up before committing to a big run if they can. Generally, this doesn't seem to scare them off of running, probably thanks to all the run support in the runner deck. Corp players are generally excited by the bluffing option provided by Urtica and have fun both playing it and taunting the runner about it.

That's it for changes for now, I will keep updating this article with new developments if any happen.