Like most firefights in Night City, every match of the upcoming Cyberpunk TCG is over pretty quickly. That may wind up being one of the game’s strongest selling points as it moves toward a full launch later this year.
I sat down for a 30-minute playtest at PAX East 2026 — before its ongoing Kickstarter campaign became the highest-funded game on a crowdfunding platform ever — and came within spitting distance of winning against my random opponent. That lag was only due to us both being unfamiliar with the mechanics and having to call over a proctor for rules clarifications several times. By design, a single match of Cyberpunk TCG is meant to end in about seven turns, and if it lasts that long, it enters overtime.
Each player starts the game with six Gig Dice in their “fixer” zone to the left side of the playmat, representing job offers lined up by your fixer. After drawing a card at the start of each turn, a player selects and rolls one from among the d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20 (though the d20 has to come last). That dice then goes into the “gigs” zone, with the cumulative value representing your overall “Street Cred.”
Some cards have bonus effects once your Street Cred reaches a certain threshold. One example is the gear card Dying Night: V’s Pistol, a weapon your units can equip. When the equipped unit or legend attacks and you have seven or more Street Cred, it defeats a rival gear card that costs 2 (a maneuver that inspired visible frustration in my opponent at one point when I destroyed the Mantis Blades that boosted his unit by two power).
To win a game of Cyberpunk TCG, you simply have to have six gig dice at the start of your turn. While you might be tempted to jump right for the d12 on your first roll to get full use out of Dying Night ASAP, that can prove risky. If a unit attacks their opponent directly and isn’t blocked, they get to steal a gig dice of their choice — and for every 10 power that unit has, they steal an additional gig. It’s therefore beneficial to pace yourself and more gradually fill out your boardstate, so you can properly defend against these attacks.
Similar to other TCGs like Lorcana, you basically have to sacrifice a card to create a resource once per turn. Cards with a sell tag (€$) to the top-left corner can be sold for Eddies, and they get played facedown as a tappable resource you spend to play other cards. These cards, and the units you use to attack with, tap sideways when used. Cyberpunk TCG calls this effect “spent.”
Each player starts every match with three shuffled Legend cards placed facedown that can also be spent to generate Eddies. Spend two Eddies, and you can flip a Legend face-up. Then they become something similar to Commanders in Magic: The Gathering. Some can then be played as units with powerful abilities, while others offer passive benefits. In my opponent’s Arasaka-themed deck, one Legend boosted all Arasaka units’ power by one every time they attacked. Another let him draw a card the first time an Arasaka unit attacked each turn.
I learned about this part long after our match, but Legend cards also have a RAM color (border color) and RAM value (top-right) that determines what color cards you can have in your 40- to 50-card deck. Their cumulative combined RAM value also puts a hard limit on the RAM value of cards you can include.
In the case of my Edgerunners-themed deck, V: Corporate Exile and Jackie Welles: Pour One Out for Me are both blue, with a RAM value of two each. So my blue cards can have a RAM value of up to four. Then, Viktor Vektor: Sit Down and Relax has two yellow RAM. As such, this preconstructed deck has some more powerful blue cards and slightly weaker yellow cards.
It’s hard to grok so far with the simple alpha decks, but RAM colors do seem to correspond to general strategies. Some cards in my deck let me draw more or peek at my facedown Legends. Others let me send a card back to its owner’s hand or provide a quick buff to my unit’s power. The red-green Arasaka-themed deck was far more straightforward and aggressive with lots of units and gear to buff them.
I tried, somewhat successfully, to generate as many Eddies as quickly as possible in our match, tossing out whatever units I drew. But my opponent’s deck was faster. Late in the match, he played one of his best units: Goro Takemura: Losing His Way, for four Eddies. Goro has a base of five power and gets +1 for each face-up Legend on his side of the board, which in this case was a net +2. On my opponent’s next turn, he attached a Sandevistan gear (shoutout to David Martinez from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners!) to Goro which added another three power.
Things were looking very bleak for me, since a 10-power unit can mow down almost anything in either of these decks. I blocked with a very weak Secondhand Bombus I had in play to take the hit. On my following turn, I drew a miracle: Floor It. You return a spent unit with a cost of four or less to its owner’s hand. Goro had cost four. I raised my hand and called over the proctor. “What happens to attached gear when a unit is removed from play?” I asked.
“It goes in the trash,” he said. I laughed — I love that the discard pile is just called TRASH.
“I’m so sorry,” I said nervously to my opponent as I sent Goro back to his hand. This move sent his valuable Sandy right into the trash. Then I attacked directly to steal a gig dice, making my total five and my opponent’s three. Right at that moment, the proctor clapped his hands once and signaled that the playtest was at an end. It felt a bit abrupt and unsatisfying to have the match cut short, especially because it felt like I was about to win, but the entire match probably lasted something closer to 25 minutes, or even less.
Compared to a drawn-out Magic Arena match that can last about 45 minutes, my Cyberpunk TCG playtest felt like a pretty exciting introduction to a game that now has more than $15.75 million behind it on Kickstarter. That’s a whole lot of Eddies to invest in what’s already a solid foundation for a trading card game.