Hubworld: Aidalon
Hubworld: Aidalon claims to be the spiritual successor of Android: Netrunner. My gaming group and I got some preview decks. Let me tell you about our experience.
I have a group of friends that get together every Wed night to play board games. We first met back in 2013 when we all played in an Android: Netrunner league and we were all pretty bummed when Fantasy Flight Games discontinued the game in 2018. Since then, we have moved on to other games, but there has always been that empty spot in our bioroid hearts that no game has been able to fill.
Hubworld: Aidalon claims to be the spiritual successor of Netrunner. If you are not familiar with Netrunner then just watch the Learn to Play Video. If you are familiar with Netrunner, then I'm going to dive into why you might want to give Aidalon a try.
Similarities to Netrunner
Both are living card games as opposed to a collectible card game. When you buy each set, you get a full playset of every card in that set. There is no hunting for cards on a secondary market or pay-to-win aspect to the game. I believe Fantasy Flight Games has trademarked the term Living Card Game, so they are calling Aidalon an expandable card game. Potayto, potahto.
Both games revolve around the protection or pilfering of certain scorable cards. The main objective of both is to hide/defend your scorable cards from your opponent and try to steal their scorable cards.
Both games have lane-based attack and defense. Three different lanes sit in front of a player's deck, hand, and discard pile. Opponents attack these lanes in order to access cards in the associated location in an attempt to find certain cards that earn them points. Players play cards in their tableau to defend these lanes from attackers.
Both games rely heavily on setting up a strong board state as the defender (or at least bluffing that you have one) to try to deter your opponent from challenging you. Conversely, as the attacker, you want to bluff weakness and catch your opponent off guard.
Both games rely heavily on managing your economy, i.e. cards and currency. If an opponent is low on currency then that might be an opportunity to attack since their response will likely be limited due to lack of funds.
Differences from Netrunner
Let's start with the vibe. Netrunner was a cyberpunk-themed game set in a dystopian future dominated by ruthless megacorporations. Aidalon is set on a remote planet that used to be a bustling galactic trade hub but has become obsolete and forgotten by the rest of the galaxy. The local factions are now left to their own devices and are engaged in a perpetual struggle for control over the carcass of this declining world.
Mechanically, Netrunner was asymmetric. One player played as the corp and needed to protect their servers to advance and score agendas. The other player played as the runner and needed to infiltrate the corp player's servers to access and steal their agendas before the corp player scored them. Aidalon smushes these two play styles into one to create a symmetric gameplay experience for all players. In Aidalon, each player plays as a faction with exactly one seeker (analogous to the runner side in Netrunner) and exactly 6 agent cards in their deck (analogous to agendas from the corp side in Netrunner). Players have to protect their agents from each other. The only way to score points is to steal another player's agents. Score three agents and you win the game.
Because gameplay is symmetric, this unlocks the ability for a multiplayer format. Aidalon can be played with two to four players. The only difference between two-player and three-/four-player games is that players must steal agents from a player that they have not previously stolen from, if able. So in the case of a three-player game, you must steal an agent from both opponents, then your last one can come from either. In a four-player game, you must steal an agent from each opponent.
There are no remote servers like in Netrunner. Each player has exactly three lanes where cards can be played. Their deck is called the commons, their hand is called the council, and their discard pile is called the archives. Another deviation from Netrunner is that you cannot play an unlimited number of defenses in each lane. Each lane has exactly three spaces where cards can be played, making the player's tableau a 3x3 grid. The playmat implies that at some point in the future, there might be cards that can be attached to other played cards (like upgrades in Netrunner), but there aren't any of these cards in the preview decks.
Other noteworthy changes are in terminology. "Running" in Netrunner is called "delving" in Aidalon. It is functionally the same, but important to understand the new term as card abilities will refer to delving. Flavor-wise, delving seems to occur entirely in meat space. The seeker has to navigate physical terrain and interact with physical and social obstacles in order to reach their goal. There isn't the notion of a runner in some remote location jacked into a network and hacking into the corp's servers. This doesn't really impact gameplay much. It's just a note on the feel of the game.
"Installing" and "rezzing" in Netrunner are called "staging" and "forging" in Aidalon, but they are the same thing. To stage a card, place it face-down in any slot in your 3x3 tableau. Staging just takes an action. You can then forge a staged card by paying its forge cost and turning it face up. The main difference in Aidalon is that you can forge cards at instant speed anytime during your turn or an opponent's turn. This is because cards in your tableau aren't just defensive. They could be offensive as well, which makes forging them during one of your delves advantageous.
One interesting note about staging cards is that their position in your tableau isn't fixed. When you stage a card, it goes into a particular slot, but the "shift" basic action allows you to swap any two staged cards regardless of whether they are forged or not (you can swap a card and an empty slot). This gives you some fluidity about how you want to structure your lanes and allows you to adapt to changing conditions.
One of the main card types in Aidalon is "obstacle." Obstacles are like ICE in Netrunner, you play them in a lane to prevent opponents from infiltrating that lane. Unlike ICE, they have both a cost the seeker has to pay to overcome the obstacle and an optional cost the seeker can pay to exile the obstacle after overcoming it. If the seeker does not exile the obstacle then it will remain on the board and must be overcome again if a seeker delves there in the future.
There is no equivalent to ICE breakers in Aidalon (at least, not in the preview decks). Seekers must overcome obstacles by paying a certain amount of money. There are some cards that reduce the strength of obstacles, but they seem to be more of a luxury than a necessity. Perhaps these will take the place of ICE breakers, but it is important for the defender to know that specific types of offensive cards are not required to overcome most obstacles. The seeker simply has to have enough money.
Another main card type is "source." Sources are played in your tableau like obstacles, but they do not provide any protection. Instead, they offer some sort of triggered, activated, or static ability after they have been forged. They can be exiled for their printed exile cost when accessed during a delve or ignored if the seeker wants to save their money.
Unlike agendas in Netrunner, when played on the board, agents often have built-in obstacles that the seeker must overcome to access them, and if forged, they have powerful abilities, so exposing your agents to your opponent(s) is a calculated risk.
In Netrunner, runners access one card by default after a successful run on R&D or HQ. In Aidalon, the seeker accesses zero cards by default. In order to access cards, the seeker must pay money prior to accessing to add heat to the defender. The amount paid is one more than the number of heat that the defender already has. So the first heat costs one shard, the second costs two shards, etc. Heat persists so players tend to gain more and more heat as the game progresses. The seeker then accesses cards equal to the amount of heat on the defender. There are cards where part of the ability is to put heat on an opponent or reduce the heat on you. Heat might also be taken as a negative side effect of an extraordinarily powerful card ability.
Accessing the archives is different in Aidalon than in Netrunner. When accessing cards in the archives, the seeker does not access them all. Instead, they access a number of random cards equal to the heat on the defender. The seeker can steal any agents accessed and exile any other cards accessed so they won't be accessed again during future delves into archives.
The turn structure is different in Aidalon. In Netrunner, each player took a number of actions all at once (usually three for the corps and four for the runner) and then passed to the other player. In Aidalon, each player takes one action and then passes the turn. When every player has taken three actions, the round ends and a reset phase triggers where actions are replenished, income is gained, and exhausted cards are refreshed.
Finally, there is a currency limit of ten that is enforced at the end of the round. Each player that has more than ten shards (the game's currency) must place the excess back in the general supply.
My Experience
My gaming group and I bought preview decks and played a four-player game recently. There are four different seekers you can choose from with the preview decks so we each chose a different one. Other than the selected seekers, all of our decks were identical. In a real game though, we each would have constructed our own unique deck rather than using the same preconstructed deck, but this is just a preview.
Since we had all played Netrunner, our initial instincts were to hide our agents from each other, but we soon discovered that the agents' abilities are pretty powerful so exposing them isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Since all you need to overcome obstacles is shards, it seemed like nowhere was particularly safe. But that's what the 10-shard limit is for. Players can't just stockpile shards and be able to access anything they like. It takes careful planning to be able to set up a successful delve on a well-protected lane. You'll have to stage sources and agents in your tableau and forge them during a delve to catch an opponent by surprise.
The rule stating that you must steal an agent from a player you have not stolen from if able seems a little odd to me. I get it though. You don't want three players ganging up on one player with a weak board, but it also has some other consequences. If all of my opponents have already stolen an agent from me, then I don't have to worry about defense anymore. I can take as much heat as I want and don't have to play any more obstacles since there is no benefit for delving me anymore. This makes for an interesting dynamic where some players go fully offensive in the mid/late game because they have nothing to lose while others still have to defend their agents. I suppose it's a catch-up mechanic of sorts since the offensive player is probably losing at this point.
As far as we can tell from the preview decks, there is no analog to meat/net/brain damage. The seeker cannot be killed so the only danger when delving seems to be wasting money on an unsuccessful delve. Perhaps this will change in the future. It seems like a mechanic that could be introduced later on with the addition of cards that inflict damage. I'm thinking about how Wizards of the Coast introduced poison counters as a win condition in Magic: the Gathering.
Final Thoughts
Hubworld: Aidalon is fun! It's similar enough to Android: Netrunner to scratch that itch but different enough that it feels like its own game. The fact that you can play it with up to four players is a big plus for us as we have moved away from competitive gaming into more social gaming as we have gotten older, have families, etc. I'll definitely be backing it when the Gamefound campaign goes live. I can't wait to see the full card pool and throw together some decks.