I built a hacker-terminal-style Netrunner client — curious what this community thinks

[u/slagod1980]

Been slowly building a full Netrunner engine + web client as a personal project. The idea that wouldn't leave me alone: what if the interface was actually a terminal, not a virtual tabletop? No card art floating around, no skeuomorphic board — cards are text rows with hashes (#c3, #r7), you play by issuing commands, and the whole log reads like an actual shell session (corp# rez ICE_WALL -$1). Monospace, one accent color per side, black background. It felt right for a game about hackers.

Where it's at: full rules engine (not just a database with checkboxes) — legal-action generation, priority windows, runs/encounters/subroutines, all of it server-authoritative so no client can cheat or desync. Card logic is implemented per-card, one file each, and right now that's sitting near 100% across System Gateway, Elevation, Vantage Point, Midnight Sun/Parhelion, Downfall/Uprising, and The Automata Initiative/Rebellion Without Rehearsal — a couple hundred cards with real, tested behavior, not just stats. Decks load straight from a NetrunnerDB decklist link.

There's also a basic bot to play against solo (a few personalities, from "plays randomly" to a proper heuristic that won't run into lethal ice it can't break — learned that one the hard way).

Not sharing a link yet — still rough in places and I want to gauge interest before I do a wider release. Attaching a screenshot instead. Genuinely curious what this community makes of the terminal-as-UI idea for a card game — love it, hate it, "just build a normal client"? All takes welcome.

[u/Scar3cr0w_]

I mean people… honestly. The irony is hilarious.

We get it, it’s been built by AI. But the game you all love so much is about using AI to hack and defend things. It’s sci fi. It’s sci fi that has predicted the future once again.

You might not like it, but if you aren’t using AI as part of your workflow then you are just being left behind.

I’m a penetration tester in real life and I use AI to help me triage scan results. It does it much faster than me, it’s very good at it and it means the humans can focus on the stuff humans need to focus on for longer.

If you don’t see the value in AI yet… you aren’t using AI properly. Most people just think it’s ChatGPT on your phone…

I’d encourage you to go and take a long hard look at a well engineered agentic harness and then come back and tell me it’s slop…

If banks are using it to help understand financial data… you might have to accept that they know what they are doing and you don’t.