When we created and distributed Alpha kits for Cyberpunk TCG earlier this year, we did so for several reasons. Naturally, we wanted to share our game with passionate creators and players as early as possible. But our primary goal was to gather pre-launch community feedback and validate a few key game design decisions. We’re trying a lot of new things with this game, and while that creates a huge amount of fresh and exciting design space, it also makes this initial testing and validation period crucial. So, we wanted to learn from real players ASAP.
Thankfully, even pre-launch, an incredible community has risen up behind this game. Thanks to you, our Alpha phase was a huge success and provided us with a wealth of valuable insight that largely aligned with our developers’ planned tweaks to the ruleset — which is a great sign! With the community insight confirming we’re headed in the right direction, we’ve made a handful of small but highly impactful changes to our rules and core game systems.
Here are the main changes you’ll see as we transition from the Alpha period toward our Beta release.
Turn Structure Changes
In the Alpha build, Cyberpunk TCG followed a rigid turn structure. After the Ready phase at the start of their turn, players entered a flexible Play phase, then a fixed Attack phase where all attacks were made before the active player’s turn ended.
Our Beta ruleset has a much more dynamic turn structure. There are now only two phases during a player’s turn: Start (more on that in a moment) and Main.
Ready Phase is now the Start Phase
First, the Ready Phase has been renamed to the Start Phase. The order of actions within that phase has also been tweaked. Now, during their Start Phase, players will take the following actions in this order:
- Ready your spent Units, Legends, and Eddies
- Draw a card
- Gain a Gig from your fixer area
We learned during the Alpha that this was the order players naturally defaulted to, so the structure has been changed to align with what our players find most intuitive. We changed the phase name to draw a clearer distinction between the phase itself and the act of readying, which is just one part of it.
Play and Attack phases have been combined into the Main Phase
During the Main phase, players can do any of the following, in any order they please:
- Sell a card for an Eddie (once per turn)
- Call a Legend (once per turn)
- Play Units, Gear and Programs
- Activate effects on friendly Units and face-up Legends
During Alpha gameplay, players would often do things like forget to play a card before attacking. Then, once attacks were done, their turn immediately ended. We explicitly want to avoid “feel bad” moments like that.
By turning the Attack Phase into a Step that players can take multiple times during their Main Phase, we’re giving players more freedom and flexibility, and more opportunities to express their skill through powerful and varied sequences of plays. For example, if you have a card like “Carnage at the Colosseum” that cares about Gig values, you can now attack your Rival, steal a Gig with a high value, and then play the card for its reduced cost after, in that same turn.
This change adds depth to strategic decision-making, while also making turn structure and sequencing more intuitive. We think it’s an evolution that players of all experience levels are really going to enjoy.
Changes to Attacking
We’ve also made a few rule tweaks around Attacking itself to ensure it functions exactly as we want it to within our new flexible turn structure.
After a player declares an attack and chooses the attack’s target, their Rival has a “React” window where they can declare blockers, Call a Legend, and play cards or use abilities with the new QUICK keyword (which we’ll provide more detail around in another article next week). This React timing existed unofficially in the Alpha ruleset, but it was easy to miss. With more options for attacked Rivals coming soon, it was much cleaner to establish an explicit react window within the Attack Step.
Finally, players now attack their Rival’s Gig area when they want to steal a Gig, rather than attacking the Rival directly. There’s functionally no gameplay change here, but this distinction should make it much more intuitive for new players to understand the cause-and-effect between attacking and stealing a Gig.
Here's a simple overview of how the Attack phase flows now:
Other Changes
Cost to Call a Legend reduced from 2 €$ to 1 €$
Legends are an integral and iconic part of Cyberpunk TCG. We want them to be at your side for every step of your journey in Night City — from opening your favorite famous (or infamous) faces in packs and building your deck around them, to calling them in games to crush your Rivals.
During Alpha testing, we discovered that it was possible to win games consistently without flipping multiple Legends. While we don’t necessarily want players to have to flip all three of their Legends every game, we do want flipping Legends to be an exciting and impactful highlight in the vast majority of Cyberpunk TCG games.
So now, you only pay 1 €$ to Call a Legend! Reducing the required resource investment ensures that Legends show up in games more frequently. It’s easier to weave flipping a Legend into your turn alongside playing other impactful cards, and ultimately makes Legends feel more legendary.
Win condition changed from 6 Gig dice to 7
One of the main things we wanted to keep a close eye on throughout Alpha testing was the average length of Cyberpunk TCG games. While we were broadly very happy with the pacing we saw, we did find that the fastest games were faster than we wanted.
Changing our win condition to controlling 7 Gig dice at the start of your turn achieves a few different things at once. First, it makes all games slightly longer and ensures that players have plenty of time to make meaningful and interactive decisions in every single game.
Second, it requires players to control a majority of Gigs to win, which makes it easier to see which player is ahead at every stage of the game. It also means players must steal at least one Gig to win — a player going first can’t just stall out to win automatically.
Finally, Overtime is more intuitive with this change, as your goal will always be to control the majority of Gigs (just with sudden death). Again, this combination of adding clarity while achieving our aims for game length and decision-making has already generated a lot of positive feedback from our playtesters, and we’re confident you’re all going to enjoy it too.
What else to expect as we transition from Alpha to Beta
Those are all of the big game and rule changes we’re making. But there will also be changes coming to individual card stats and effects, card keywords and templating, and small but important tweaks to the visual appearance of Cyberpunk TCG cards.
We’ll have more articles for you exploring those changes in detail over the next couple of weeks. We’ll also be updating all of our instructional content, including our main learn to play video. An updated version of our Gameplay Guide will also be live very soon.
These updated rules are in effect starting today! Players who have booked demo sessions with us at UK Games Expo this weekend will be learning the Beta version of the game. We suggest that players using our Alpha kit and print-and-play decks follow these new rules going forward, and let us know how they feel about the new gameplay experience over on our official Discord server, discord.gg/cyberpunktcg. We've just added a new channel for rules questions, so if you've got anything you'd like to ask or clarify with our development team, you can reach us there directly.