The fine folks over at Fantasy Flight Games made my day yesterday with the announcement of their first big box expansion for Android: Netrunner.  Dubbed “Creation & Control“, this boxed set introduces a whole slew of new cards for the Shaper faction of runners and the Haas-Bioroid corporation.

Android: Netrunner is part of Fantasy Flight’s line of Living Card Games.  Since it’s release at Gencon 2012 last summer, the game has garnered some hefty praise from fans and critics alike.  The theme has players entering a cyberpunk world of giant, malicious corporations and the quasi-heroic Runners who hack into their servers to steal data and disrupt the status quo.  Haas-Bioroid stands as one of the largest and most influential corporations in the Android universe and is behind the influx of biotic labor – mass produced androids that are taking peoples’ jobs.  The Shapers, on the other hand, are the artistes of the Runner community.  They aren’t trying to make the big bucks or topple regimes like their Criminal or Anarch comrades.  For the Shapers, running is simply a fantastic challenge and each line of code they write to bypass corporate ICE is a work of art.

Even though I tend to favor NBN as a Corp and the Anarchs as my runners of choice, I think there will be plenty to love in this box for me and every other Netrunner player.  The ability to include a limited number of cross-faction cards in any given deck means that players can find a lot to love in Creation and Control.