I was wondering what everyone thought of the new rule book. I’ve not thoroughly read it yet but it seems much better.
I’ve played a couple of games with the recommended first decks and I think they’re really good for the purpose. Boggs commented on a podcast once that his favourite way to teach netrunner was just to slam some cards together and ignore factions and influence and stuff so I think you can see his hand in those deck lists.
I like the way it’s split into basic and advanced rules and how the initial deck lists miss out the ‘advanced’ stuff like traces and tags.
On my skim through I found a couple of examples of fairly clunky wording but so far it seems a big improvement.
I liked it, the only thing I wish was included would have been the “second book” that they do in other games (LIke GoT 2.0) which is more or less a glossary for key words. In ANR, if I recall correctly, they just point you to a website for that.
Someone pointed out on the Reddit that the “advanced rules section” doesn’t cover mulligans or unique cards. I do think it would have been good to have those included, or to have some sort of “now that you’re moving on from the core set, here are the most important rules you need to learn” document. The Rules Reference is basically presented as “look here if you want more details,” so I don’t think new players are likely to go reading through it looking for new sub-steps in game set up.
Aside from that, though, it looks like a huge improvement. The learn-to-play book seems much clearer than the equivalent material in the original rule book, though I think we’ll have to wait and hear from people who’ve actually learned to play from it to know for sure. And I definitely like having the full rules all in one up-to-date document.