How to Play Cyberpunk TCG

Chapter 1

The goal of the game

Cyberpunk TCG is a game for two players. You each lead a crew in Night City and compete for Gigs, the jobs that turn a nobody into a legend. Every Gig is a physical die. Over the course of the game each player brings their own dice into play, and the crews fight over who holds them.

You win if you have seven or more Gig dice in your Gig area when your turn begins. You do not need high numbers on those dice: the count of dice is what matters, so two low dice beat one high die when it comes to winning. The values matter for card effects and for your Street Cred, which is explained below.

There are two other ways the game can end. If you ever have to draw a card and your deck is empty, you lose on the spot. And the game goes into overtime once each player has taken a full turn with no dice left to roll in, which normally means after each player's seventh turn. Overtime is sudden death: the first player to hold seven Gigs at any moment wins immediately, without waiting for the start of a turn.

Chapter 2

What you need

To play with physical cards, each player brings two things:

• A deck. It has exactly three Legend cards, all with different names, plus a main deck of at least 40 and at most 50 other cards. You may include up to three copies of any one card, and every card has to fit within the RAM limits set by your Legends (see RAM and deck building).
• A set of six dice: one each of a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20. These are your Gigs.

The eight ready-made decks in Go Solo, the two official starter decks and six tournament lists, follow these rules: each has three Legends and a 40-card main deck. You can read every list on the ready-made decks page. In Go Solo you do not need cards or dice at all; the game shuffles, rolls and keeps track of everything for you.

Two names are useful from the start. Your opponent is called your Rival. Things you control are friendly, and things your Rival controls are rival: a friendly Unit, a rival Gig and so on.

Chapter 3

Card types

Every card has a type, printed in its top right corner. There are 4 types, and the card database lets you filter by each one.

Legend (27 cards)

The three famous characters your deck is built around. They start face-down and give your crew lasting effects once they are face-up. Some can also enter the field and fight.

Unit (73 cards)

The members of your crew. Units go on the field, attack rival Units and steal Gigs.

Gear (17 cards)

Weapons, cyberware and other upgrades. You attach a Gear to one of your Units or face-up Legends to give it extra power, new text or both.

Program (34 cards)

One-shot effects. You pay the cost, do what the card says, and the card goes straight to your trash.

Legends in more detail

Your three Legends sit in their own area, face-down and in an order nobody knows. Once per turn you can pay 1 to Call a Legend and turn one of them face-up. Many Legends' text works as soon as they are face-up in the Legends area, so calling your Legends early is often how a deck gets going.

Legends are also money. You can spend any of your Legends in the Legends area to pay 1 toward a cost, whether they are face-up or still face-down. A face-up Legend can only do this if it has a sell tag, which all six starter deck Legends do.

Some Legends have a printed cost and power. You can pay that cost to move the Legend onto the field, where it counts as both a Legend and a Unit. Played this way it arrives with Lag, like any new Unit (Lag is explained in your turn). Legends with the Go Solo keyword have a faster route: they arrive ready and can attack straight away. A Legend whose cost is a dash cannot be played to the field at all.

A Legend only exists in the Legends area or on the field. If it would go anywhere else, such as the trash or your hand, it is removed from the game instead.

Gear in more detail

A Gear card has two text boxes. The top one applies while you play the Gear. The bottom one is passed on to the Unit or Legend it is attached to: read it as if it were printed on that card. The Gear's power is added to that card's power too. There is no limit on how many Gears one card can carry. When the equipped card leaves its area, for example because it is defeated, its Gear goes with it.

Chapter 4

The play areas

Each player has the same set of areas in front of them.

Deck

Your shuffled main deck, face-down. You draw from the top. Nobody may look through it, but anyone can count it.

Hand

The cards you have drawn. Only you see them, though your Rival may always know how many you hold. There is no hand size limit.

Legends area

Your three Legends. Face-down Legends are hidden from both players; face-up ones can be read by anyone.

Fixer area

Where your six dice wait at the start of the game. Dice here are not Gigs yet: you do not control them and they do not count for anything.

Gig area

The Gigs you control, including any you have stolen. The total of their values is your Street Cred.

Field

Where your Units (and any Legends you bring out) fight. There is no limit on how many Units you can have here.

Eddies area

Cards you have sold, lying face-down. Each one is an Eddie, the money you spend to play cards.

Trash

Your discard pile, face-up. Defeated Units, used Programs and discarded cards end up here, and either player may look through it.

Cards on the table are either ready (upright) or spent (turned sideways). Spending a card is how you pay with it or use it, and a spent card stays spent until it is readied again, normally at the start of your next turn.

Chapter 5

Setup and who goes first

1. Choose who decides. Pick a player at random. The usual way is for both players to roll the d20 and reroll ties; the higher roll wins. That player chooses whether to go first or second.
2. Shuffle your main deck and put it in your deck area.
3. Shuffle your three Legends and lay them face-down in the Legends area, so neither player knows which is which.
4. Balance the first turn. The player going first turns their two left-most Legends sideways. Those two stay spent through that player's first turn, which limits how much they can pay for on turn one.
5. Put your six dice in the fixer area.
6. Draw six cards. If you do not like your opening hand, you may take one mulligan: shuffle the whole hand back into your deck and draw six new cards. The player going first decides on their mulligan before the other player does.

In Go Solo both sides roll a d20 at the start of the game, and the winner chooses who starts, just like at the table.

Chapter 6

Your turn, step by step

Every turn has two phases: the start phase, where everything happens automatically and in a fixed order, and the main phase, where you make your decisions.

Start phase

1. Check for a win. If you control seven or more Gigs, you win the game right now.
2. Start-of-turn effects on your cards happen, and effects that lasted "until your next turn" end.
3. Ready. Turn all your spent cards upright: Units, Legends and Eddies.
4. Draw one card. If your deck is empty, you lose instead.
5. Roll in a Gig. Pick a die from your fixer area, roll it and put it in your Gig area showing the number you rolled. You may pick any die you like, except that the d20 always comes last: you can only take it once the other five are gone.

Main phase

Now you can do any of the following, as often as you like and in any order, unless a limit is given:

• Sell a card (once per turn) to gain an Eddie. See Eddies.
• Play a card from your hand by paying its cost.
• Call a Legend (once per turn) by paying 1 to flip a face-down Legend face-up.
• Use an activated effect on one of your Units or Legends, such as a Spend effect.
• Attack with a ready Unit. See attacks.

When you are done, you pass the turn. Effects that happen "at the end of your turn" resolve, effects that lasted "this turn" wear off, and your Rival's turn begins.

Lag

Every Unit that enters the field arrives with Lag. A lagging Unit cannot attack and cannot use its own Spend effects. Lag wears off at the end of the turn, so a Unit you play today is ready to go on your next turn. A few cards break this rule: Adrenaline lets a Unit attack the turn it arrives, and a Legend that uses Go Solo can attack that turn as well.

Chapter 7

Eddies and paying costs

Eddies are the money of Night City, and nothing gets played for free. The number in a card's top left corner is its cost: to play the card, you spend (turn sideways) that many Eddies.

Your Eddies area starts empty, and you fill it by selling cards. Once per turn, during your main phase, you can take a card from your hand that has a sell tag in its top left corner, show it to your Rival and place it face-down in your Eddies area. From then on it is one Eddie. It does not matter how expensive the card was: an Eddie is always worth exactly 1, and once you spend it, it stays spent until your next turn unless a card readies it. Almost every Gear, Program and Legend has a sell tag, while Units almost never do.

You can also pay with your Legends. Each Legend in your Legends area can be spent for 1, whether it is face-up or face-down (a face-up Legend needs a sell tag for this). Spending a Legend this way does not turn it into an Eddie, and it readies again at the start of your turn like everything else.

On cards, the symbol €$ means "Eddies or Legends spent to pay". When an effect lowers what you pay, the card's printed cost does not change; only the payment does. Selling is the only steady source of money, so most turns start with a choice: which card in your hand is worth more as an Eddie than as a card?

Chapter 8

Gigs and how you win

Each die is one Gig, and its value is the number on top. A Gig showing its lowest number (always 1) is a min Gig; one showing its highest number, such as a 6 on a d6, is a max Gig.

Street Cred is the total of all the Gig values in your Gig area. Many cards check it, either against a fixed number ("if you have 20 or more Street Cred") or against your Rival's ("if you have more Street Cred than a Rival"). If you have no Gigs at all, your Street Cred is not zero but nothing, and it counts as lower than zero.

Cards change Gigs in several ways:

• Adjust means change a Gig's value: increase it, decrease it or set it to a number. A Gig can only show numbers that exist on that die, and changing a value to the number it already shows does nothing. Choosing to adjust by 0 is allowed, but it does not count as adjusting.
• Steal means take a rival Gig and move it to your Gig area, keeping its value. Attacks are the usual way to steal.
• Swap means trade one of your Gigs for one of your Rival's at the same time. A swap is not a steal, so effects that care about stealing do not trigger.
• A value-pair is two dice with the same value in the same Gig area. Each die can only belong to one pair.

You roll in one die per turn and own only six dice, so you can never reach seven Gigs without stealing at least one from your Rival. And because the win is checked at the start of your turn, your Rival always gets a full turn to steal some back. Plan your attacks so you still hold seven when your next turn begins.

Chapter 9

Attacks, fights and stealing

Each attack is made by one Unit and is finished completely before the next Unit attacks. To attack, choose a ready Unit without Lag (see Lag for the exceptions), pick a target and spend the Unit. There are only two kinds of target:

• A spent rival Unit. This starts a fight. Ready Units cannot be attacked.
• Your Rival's Gig area, as long as it has at least one Gig. This is an attempt to steal.

1. Attack effects

As soon as the attacker is spent, its Attack effects and anything else triggered by spending it happen. If the attacker or the target leaves the field during this step, the attack is over.

2. Your Rival reacts

Now the defending player may react, as many times as they like:

• Call a Legend, if they have not done so yet this turn.
• Use effects or play Programs that have the Quick keyword.
• Spend a ready Unit with Blocker to become the new target of the attack. More than one Blocker can be used in a row; the last one becomes the target.

3a. The fight

If the target is a Unit (including a Blocker), the two Units compare power. The Unit with more power wins and defeats the other one, which goes to its owner's trash (a Legend on the field is removed from the game instead). If the power is equal, both Units lose and both are defeated. A Unit with 0 power never defeats anything in a fight. A Unit's power is its printed power plus the power of its Gear and any bonuses or penalties currently on it; a total below zero counts as zero.

3b. The steal

If the target is the Gig area, the attacker steals Gigs based on its power. You choose which ones, regardless of their values, and they move to your Gig area with their values unchanged.

If a Blocker steps in front of an attack on your Rival's Gig area, there is no steal at all: the attacker fights the Blocker instead, and even if it wins, it takes no Gigs. The same is true whenever an effect stops or redirects a direct attack.

Choosing when to attack

Attacking has a cost: an attacking Unit is spent, and spent Units are exactly what your Rival can attack on their turn. A Unit that stays ready cannot be attacked, but it also cannot protect your Gigs unless it has Blocker or a Quick effect. So most of the time the real question is not whether to attack but which Units you can afford to leave spent, and which Gigs you can afford to lose back.

Chapter 10

Reading card effects

A few general principles settle most questions about how a card works:

• The card wins. If a card's text contradicts the normal rules, follow the card.
• "Can't" beats "can". If one effect allows something and another forbids it, it is forbidden.
• Do as much as you can. If you cannot complete an effect fully, do the parts you can, in the order they are written. Only the parts marked "you may" are optional.
• "Up to" includes zero. An effect that lets you do something "up to" a number lets you choose none.
• Order of triggers. When several of your effects trigger at the same moment, you pick the order. If both players have effects waiting, the player whose turn it is resolves all of theirs first.
• Activated effects need their cost. Text before a colon is a cost you pay to use the effect. If you cannot pay all of it, you cannot use it.

Words shown as highlighted badges on the cards are keywords and triggers, and they are all explained in the glossary below. Bold words in capitals, such as ARASAKA or BRAINDANCE, are tags: they refer to every card that has that tag in its classifications.

Chapter 11

RAM and deck building

Every card has a color (Red, Green, Blue or Yellow) and a RAM value. RAM is not a resource you pay during the game; it only decides which cards you may put in your deck.

Your Legends set your deck's RAM limits. Add up the RAM of your three Legends color by color, and that is the highest RAM a card of each color may have. A color with no Legend behind it has a limit of 0, so you cannot include cards of that color at all. If you want a Red card with 3 RAM, you need Red Legends worth at least 3 RAM between them.

For example, the starter deck The Heist (Mercs) uses V: Corporate Exile (2 Blue), Viktor Vektor: Sit Down and Relax (2 Yellow) and Jackie Welles: Pour One Out For Me (2 Blue). That gives it limits of 4 Blue and 2 Yellow, so it can run strong Blue cards but only lighter Yellow ones, and no Red or Green cards.

The full deck rules again: exactly three Legends with different names, 40 to 50 other cards, no more than three copies of the same card, and every card within your RAM limits. Two Legends that share a name, such as two versions of V, cannot go in the same deck.

Chapter 12

Keyword glossary

These are all the keywords and trigger words that appear on the cards in the card database. Card pages link each keyword straight to its entry here.

Adrenaline

A Unit with Adrenaline can attack on the turn it enters the field, even though it still has Lag. Lag still stops it from using its own Spend effects that turn.

Attack

A trigger: the effect happens as soon as you spend this Unit to attack, before your rival gets a chance to react.

Blocker

When a rival Unit attacks, you can spend this ready Unit to make the attack hit it instead. It works on the turn the Unit was played, but a Legend has to be on the field to block.

Call

A Legend trigger: the effect happens when you turn this Legend face-up with the Call a Legend action.

Defeated

A trigger: the effect happens when this Unit is defeated and moved to the trash. If something stops the defeat, the effect does not happen.

Go Solo

Pay this Legend's cost to move it from the Legends area to the field as a ready Unit that can attack this turn. If it ever leaves the field, it is removed from the game.

Play

A trigger: the effect happens when you play this card. Calling a Legend face-up does not count as playing it.

Quick

You can use this effect, or play this Program, as a reaction while a rival Unit is attacking, not only during your own main phase. You still pay its cost.

Spend

A cost: turn this Unit or Legend sideways to use the effect. A Unit cannot do this on the turn it entered the field, because of Lag.

Chapter 13

Other terms

Bottom-deck

Put cards on the bottom of your deck. If several go at once, they go in a random order, unless the card says you choose the order.

Call a Legend

Pay 1 to turn one of your face-down Legends face-up. You can do it once per turn, in your main phase or as a reaction to a rival attack. The Legend stays spent or ready, whichever it was.

Discard

Move a card from your hand to your trash.

Draw

Take the top card of your deck into your hand, one card at a time. Having to draw from an empty deck loses the game.

Search

Look at a number of cards from the top of your deck. The card tells you what you may take. Cards you do not take go back in the same order, unless the card says where to put them.

Trash (as an action)

Show the top card of your deck and put it in your trash. "Trash 2" means do it twice.

Removed from the game

The card leaves play for good and cannot come back unless an effect says so. This is what happens to a Legend that leaves the field.

Chapter 14

Practice against the AI

The fastest way to learn the rules is to play a few games. Go Solo is free, is built for your phone, runs in any modern browser and handles the shuffling, dice and bookkeeping, so you can focus on your decisions. Pick one of eight ready-made decks, choose how strong the AI should be and play a full game. The game is in English, with a Polish translation you can pick on the home screen, and the cards are the printed English ones.

Play now

Want to know your deck first? Read the ready-made deck guides or look up any card in the card database.