Renegade

Renegade takes place in a cyber punk setting. Some supercomputer controls mankind and some underground guys, called “Renegades” try to hack into the computer and shut it off. The game is fairly abstract and plays like a hybrid of Mage Knight and Pandemic. It´s fully cooperative and players do their actions by generating command points due to cardplay. Players have their personal starting decks wich differ only in very few cards. These decks can be improved by buying cards from an offer. The advanced cards generate more points and also come with specific actions. This all feels very Mage Knight – like. in addition to these cards though, you often need to generate markers (Viruses, Replicants and others) that are required for actions or simply make them more effective.  There are also countermeasure tokens generated and controlled by the game. They feel a little like the cubes in Pandemic. If you allow them to pile up for too long, you´ll loose control and they expand and heavily hurt you.

Each game plays through three stages, some kind of challenges. If you are successful, you´ll get a reward before starting the next one, otherwise you´ll be penalized. If you survive all three, you win. They increase in difficulty and of every stage you´ll find about ten, so there are lots of combinations possible. The game has a modular map that offers countless setup variants.

The artwork is one of the best I´ve ever seen. For me it feels still a little too abstract, but I´ll definitely gonna bring it on the table now and then. You can see me doing a playthrough here.