Metrorunner

• Designer: Stephen Kerr
• Publisher: Thunderworks Games
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 14
• TIme: 30-90 minutes
• Played with copy provided by publisher

Being a runner in Mirror City’s underworld ain’t easy, but you’re determined to make a name for yourself amidst all the opportunities a dystopian future has to offer. After all, you’re the sharpest hacker in your district, right? Keep a wary bio-enhanced eye over your shoulder as you ride the Metro, though, because other runners are determined to cut in on your action!

Metrorunner is a competitive worker-movement and resource-collection game for 1-5 players set in a high-tech neon future featuring a tile-puzzle mini-game. Circling the districts of Mirror City on the Metro line, you compete for resources as you race to fulfill contracts for the ruthless and greedy mega-corporations. Grow your influence and gain reputation, squeezing every credit you can from corrupt factions, while you secretly steal their data for your home district!

Carefully plot your path around the city to avoid and cut off other runners, while taking opportunities to use your skills and upgrades to hack into network nodes. Manipulate the circuitry of a central tile grid, cleverly altering the pathways of an ever-changing puzzle to breach the firewalls.  Secure your influence and notoriety by completing tricky jobs across the city, hijacking black market tech, and spending your hard-earned credits wisely. Only then will you rise above the competition, earning a coveted place within the power struggle of Mirror City.  At the end of the line, will you win the respect of the underworld, or fade into obscurity?

To set up, the game board is placed on the table and a job market of 4 cards is set up above it.  Next the contract cards are placed over the job cards and the ten contract tokens are randomly placed on the spaces on the cards.  The network cards are split up and placed on the two spaces near the center of the board.  The PANOP tiles are randomized onto the 3×3 grid in the center of the table.

Each player gets a runner board and a random character card, 2 upgrade tokens in their color and a starting job card in their color.  The other starting materials are outlined on their board.  The runner figure is placed on the hack action space in their matching color district on the board. The influence and notoriety markers are stacked in random order on the start space of each respective track.

On a turn, the player must first move their runner, then they take an action, and finally clean up.  At any point in their turn, they can also buy Boosts to help them.

To move, the player’s runner must move at least one space clockwise on the track.  The first two spaces of movement are free, then any additional step costs one cube of any color.  Alternatively, once per move or action, you can discard a job card in lieu of a cube.   You may not stop on a space with another player’s runner on it – though this space also does not count as a space moved; it is simply ignored.

Once the runner has moved, the player takes one action – based on either the specific location (*) of your runner or the general district.

• *Acquire jobs – draw 2 job cards either from the faceup market or top of the deck
• *Collect assets – gain 2 cubes as shown
• *Contact Agents – Gain 1-3 cubes based on your notoriety track position.
• *Hack – solve a network card by manipulating the PANOP tiles (see below)
• Collect A District Asset – gain a cube matching the district you’re in, and then collect all the cubes from the district’s resource space
• Complete a job card – the card must match the district you’re in, you pay the cost on the card, then gain the rewards at the bottom.  Place the card in one of the 3 completed job slots at the edge of your board, and then take the slot bonus. Note that some job cards provide ongoing benefits once completed.  You can only have 3 completed jobs per slot.  Finally, collect all the cubes from the district’s resource space

The different boosts are found on your player board.  You can buy as many as you can afford with the limitation that you can only but each particular one once per turn.

• Car Service – $1 to move to any location
• Crash Job Boards – $1 to refresh the cards in the job offer
• Viral Marketing – $2 to move your lagging marker (Notoriety/Influence) forward one space.  As you move up on the Influence track, you can earn upgrades to your hacking ability.  As you move up on the Notoriety track, you can gain cube bonuses.
• Strong Arm Locals – $2 to take a second legal action after your first action

Finally, to clean up, a player discards excess job cards and cubes – the limit is 5 job cards and 10 cubes.

When you try to Hack the Network, you use the PANOP tiles found in the center of the table. You can first cycle one of the two cards. Then you declare which one you are trying to do.  The goal is to connect the two green spaces shown on the card with pathways on the PANOP tiles.  If you have gained alpha and beta hacks, you can also add those spaces into the pathway for bonuses.  Then you may manipulate the tiles up to two times for free, and then spend a cube for each manipulation after that.  You can rotate any tile by 90 degrees, you can swap the position of any two adjacent tiles or you can shift the tiles in any row or column.   You can also place a brute force token once per hack action to convert that space into a four-way connected space.  Additionally, each character has a unique manipulation rule which is found on the character card.  There is a skull tile which blocks all paths – this cannot be covered by a brute force token. If you are successful, gain the bonuses shown on the hack card as well as any bonuses you are eligible for.  Then, flip the network card over and place the cubes shown on the back onto the indicated resource spaces on the board.  

The game continues until one of the three end conditions are met: 1) A player has crossed either end-game line on the notoriety or influence track, 2) a player has 9 job cards completed, or 3) the job deck is empty.  The current round finishes (so that all players have had the same number of turns), and then each player gets one more turn before the game moves into final scoring.

• Job Cards – points for each completed job card as shown on the card
• Contracts – if you can match the icons on a contract card with the contracts in one of your completed job slots, score points for that contract.  Each slot can only be used for one contract.  As you have only three slots, you can only ever score three of the four possibilities.
• Influence track – points based on final position
• Notoriety track – points based on final position
• District Majority – 5 points to the player who has completed more jobs matching their starting location.  2 points each if multiple players tied for the most
• Leftover cubes/tokens/job cards – 1 point per five things left over

The player with the most points wins. Ties are broken in favor of the player furthest along the influence track.

My thoughts on the game

In a way, Metro Runner is a rondel game – though more in a definitional sense.  You must move along the track in a clockwise manner, and your position determines your options.  Unlike a lot of other games that use a rondel for action selection, there isn’t a lot of tightness to the selection.  You always have the option of the district actions if you don’t like your space.  You can always pay for extra spaces if you need an action on a specific space.  You can also just use the Car Service boost to move to any available space.   So, there are a number of rules to govern your movement, but even more ways to get around those limitations.   The challenge here is trying to get the action you want at the lowest cost.  Resources can be tight, so spending credits or cubes to move around might hamstring you from doing other things.

Points come from a number of different sources, and you’ll need to complete lots of job cards as well as advance on the two tracks to do well.  You’ll need to gain cubes and credits to do those things, so most actions will move yourself towards a point scoring goal in some way.  The hacks are a really good way to gain multiple track bumps and stuff, but they also can slow the game down to a crawl.

The puzzle in the hack is challenging (and FWIW it’s my favorite part of the game), but it’s something that is only done by the active player, and it’s hard to work on it in advance because of the way the tiles and/or hack cards can change between turns.  So, each time someone chooses to hack, the rest of the table can kind of take a break to chat with each other as the active player concentrates on their job at the moment.  Often, the active player has to look at the hack to decide if they can do it or afford to do it – if they can’t, then they start their turn planning anew now looking for the next best option.   Once the advanced hacks are activated, the puzzle becomes more complex and often takes even more time to complete as players generally like to get one or more of the bonus rewards.   More than one gamer I have played with wished that we each had our own personal puzzle board so that we could work on things on our own  between turns – we’d each get the fun of hacking but maybe make it not so time consuming.

The game encourages you to be efficient in your actions.  Being able to spend less cubes/job cards in movement will give you more resources to complete job cards or finish hacks.  Using fewer actions in hacks gives you the same benefit.  And, overall, the more efficient you are in completing job cards will keep you ahead of your opponents in the race to reach one of the end conditions of 9 completed job cards.

The game slowly but surely ramps up in tempo (well, hack interludes aside) – as you move forward on the tracks, you’ll get the alpha and beta hacks available to you which increases the benefits of each hack action which gives you proportionally more things to use to score points.  As people do more hacks, more cubes get put into the resource spaces in the board regions, and this also leads to more things to use.    In a recent game, one player took an interesting strategy of never hacking – but instead tried to move around the board to pick up the bonus cubes that are pooped out from the completed hack cards.  In this way, he ended up with so many cubes and was able to do the higher scoring job cards.  

Credits are mostly used for boosts, and their powers should not be ignored.  All four of the boost actions are strong, and they will all be useful at the right time.  Most of the time, I end up spending one buck for the ability to move anywhere – as mentioned above – this takes a lot of the suspense out of the rondel aspect, but at the same time, the cost is relatively high, so you’re not doing it every turn.  

The artwork is futuristic and thematic for the cyberpunk setting.  Each job card has individual art and some of the illustrations are striking.  The icons are easy to parse, and this helps the game move along quickly.  The player boards are well done and they have a hidden second layer with a cutout found underneath the board – this allows the completed job cards to be slid underneath without having to move the board. 

Metro Runner is an interesting puzzle game that is engaging at times, but the stop-start action with the hacks keeps it from being immersive.  Everything in the game works, but there is not a sense of tightness or pressure.  The contracts are not a race; all players can score them – so there’s no pressure to complete contracts in a particular order.  And, as I have noted, you have a lot of access to different action spaces/regions on the board, so there isn’t as much pressure in the planning of your actions.

The game gives you multiple options to choose your action, and in any event, most actions turn out to give you a forward movement – so even if you don’t get your most ideal action, you’re generally never wasting a turn.  Metro Runner turns out to be a peaceful sort of game where you do what you can on your turn – one better suited for my more casual game nights.  You could search for the optimal move out of all of your choices, but the relaxed nature of the game usually lets you settle for the first choice that seems good enough.  It’s a game that I’d be happy to play again if asked.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor