How to play the Cyberpunk TCG

How you win

You win by starting your turn with 7 or more Gig dice in your Gig area. You own six dice of your own, so the winning one has to be taken from your rival. That is the whole shape of the game: you cannot simply build up in your own corner, you have to attack.

There are two other ways a game ends. If you are ever required to draw from an empty deck, you lose immediately and your rival wins. And if neither player has won by the time both have finished seven turns, the game goes to Overtime: sudden death, where the first player to hold a majority of the Gig dice on the table wins.

Setting up

Both players roll a d20 for play order, and the winner chooses whether to go first. Each player then draws six cards and may take a single mulligan: keep the hand you have, or shuffle it back and draw a fresh six. There is only one, so it is a real decision.

Your three Legends are placed face down in random order beside the board. They stay hidden from everyone, including you, until they are Called. That randomness is part of the game rather than a limitation of the simulator.

What happens on your turn

A turn has a start phase that resolves on its own, then a main phase where you act freely, then an end.

The start phase does three things in order: every spent card of yours readies, you draw one card, and you gain a Gig. Gaining a Gig means taking one die from your Fixer area, rolling it, and placing the result in your Gig area. Your d20 is always the last of the six you take, so the biggest die arrives late.

• Sell one card from your hand for 1 Eddie. Any card is worth exactly 1, and you may only do this once per turn.
• Play Units, Programs and Gear by paying Eddies.
• Call one Legend for 1 Eddie, flipping it face up for its effect. Once per turn.
• Attack with any of your ready Units.

Eddies and Street Cred

Eddies are the currency, kept face down in your Eddies area. You make them by selling a card from your hand, one per turn, and every card sells for exactly 1 Eddie regardless of what it is. A Legend can also be spent as a single Eddie instead of being Called, which is often the harder choice of the two.

Street Cred is the sum of the values showing on your Gig dice. Nothing is spent from it. It is a threshold that some cards check, so a lucky roll is worth more than the die count alone suggests.

Attacking

Attacking spends the attacking Unit, which is why a Unit attacks once per turn. You then choose what it is attacking: either a spent rival Unit, or your rival’s Gig area directly. A ready Unit cannot normally be attacked, so the board is a question of who is spent and when.

Before anything resolves, your rival gets a window to react. They may Call a Legend, use a {Quick} effect, or use a {Blocker} to redirect the attack onto a Unit of their choosing.

If the attack lands on a Unit, the two powers are compared: the higher power wins and the loser is defeated. Equal powers defeat both. If the attack lands on the Gig area instead, it is a raid, and the attacker steals Gig dice.

Stealing Gigs

A raid steals one Gig die, plus one more for every full 10 power the attacking Unit has. The attacker chooses which dice to take, which matters more than it sounds: taking the d20 moves the largest die on the table, and some cards care about exactly which die was taken.

Two exceptions are worth committing to memory. A Unit with 0 power steals nothing at all, so debuffing an attacker to zero blanks the raid entirely. And an attack redirected by a {Blocker} steals no Gigs even if the attacking Unit wins the fight that follows.

• Power 1 to 9: steals 1 Gig.
• Power 10 to 19: steals 2 Gigs.
• Power 20 or more: steals 3 Gigs.
• Power 0: steals nothing.

Card text beats the rulebook

Every rule on this page can be overridden by a card that says otherwise, and that is the intended way to read them. A card that lets you attack a ready Unit does exactly that. A card that says a Unit may attack the turn it arrives removes the restriction that normally stops it.

When the two disagree, the card is right. This simulator scripts all of Set 1, so a card that contradicts this page is doing so on purpose.