A friend of mine started getting into Tabletop Simulator on steam. It’s a surprisingly robust platform for building board games, with the ability to shuffle cards, roll dice, place items on a board, etc. The simulator itself isn’t a game but there are a bunch of DLCs available which represent individual board games.

That’s neat and all, but what we didn’t realize until recently (and why we finally bought it) is there’s an entire workshop community with almost 100,000 fan-made games of questionable legality. All free. So naturally, I immediately started looking for cyberpunk board games.

The one I’m most excited about and wanted to share here is called Zaibatsu: Speedrunners. And it’s a legitimately free board game (what’s called a “Print & Play” because you can print the game pieces yourself). You can download the entire game (printable PDFs of the game pieces) here.

I haven’t played the game yet (either the Tabletop Simulator version or in real life) but it looks really cool. Each player represents a megacorp and you place hexagonal tiles on a table to build out regions of cyberspace, with the goal of your megacorp having majority control of the tiles. You take over regions of cyberspace (tiles) by placing one of your runners on it and using their Icebreaker ability. If a tile has Black ICE, that runner dies if they fail. So that’s fun. Also, you can obtain additional runners like Cleaners, Crackers, Gynoids, or the Idoru to help you. Lots of great cyberpunk references here.

There isn’t much information about the game on Board Game Geek and I can’t find any youtube videos of people playing the game at all, so it’s possible this game is more complicated than I’m willing to play. But I’m intrigued. Also, it’s my understanding that Zaibatsu: Speedrunners is a re-implementation of the original Zaibatsu, of which there’s even less information. The Tabletop Simulator version of the original Zaibatsu looks like it was better made than the Speedrunners version, though. Oh well.

Anyway, now that I’m taking a step into the world of Tabletop Simulator, definitely let me know if you have other recommendations for cyberpunk-themed board games. I’m not really into full-blown TTRPGs or CCGs though, those are way too complex for me. I like actual board games that I can finish within an hour or so.