Teaching My Sister Netrunner Over Video Call

My sister moved out to Ohio a couple years back for work and we’ve been trying, on and off, to find something we can actually do together that isn’t just a phone call where one of us is half paying attention to something else. She got into a Discord server that plays board games online and mentioned it offhand, and I got a little too excited and said I’d teach her Netrunner, which in hindsight was maybe not the gentlest entry point I could’ve picked.

I underestimated how much of teaching this game in person depends on being able to just point at the table. Here’s the unrezzed ice, here’s what happens if you run into it, here’s why I’m holding my hand this way. None of that translates cleanly through a laptop camera propped up against a stack of books, angled badly, half the cards catching glare from the window behind her. I ended up describing board states out loud like I was calling a very slow, very confusing radio broadcast, and about twenty minutes in she just started laughing and said this is the nerdiest phone call we’ve ever had, which, fair.

It went better than I expected once we switched to an actual online client instead of trying to fake it with a physical deck and a camera. Something about not having to manage the physical table freed up enough of her attention that the actual decisions started landing. She got the corp side, I ran the corp deck, and about the third game in she pulled off a run I genuinely didn’t see coming, went straight for a server I’d left thin because I assumed she wouldn’t have the economy for it yet. She did.

We’ve kept doing it every couple weeks since, whatever her schedule allows. Doesn’t fully replace being at the same table. Good enough that I stopped minding the six hundred miles quite as much as I used to.

What surprised me most was how differently she plays than anyone I’ve taught in person. In person, I can watch someone’s hand hover over a card and step in before they commit to a mistake, which I do constantly without really meaning to, it’s the same instinct as walking a client through a dosage before they misread it off the label. Over video call I can’t do that. By the time I notice her hovering over something, the decision’s already made, the click already happened on her end, and I have to just let it play out instead of catching it. Took me a few sessions to stop reflexively trying to jump in and just let her make the bad runs and learn from the fallout instead.

That turned out to be the better way to teach it, honestly, even though it felt worse in the moment. She got burned running into an unrezzed piece of ice early on, lost a chunk of her stack for nothing, and instead of me explaining why that was risky beforehand, she just felt it happen and asked me afterward why I’d left that server so exposed looking. Learned the actual lesson instead of the version I would’ve handed her preemptively.

We’ve got a rough weekly rhythm now, screen share instead of camera, actual online client so the cards render properly instead of me squinting at glare off her webcam. She’s started texting me screenshots of interesting board states between sessions, asking what she should’ve done differently, which is new, and which I like a lot more than I expected to. My sister asking me rules questions over text at eleven at night her time is not a thing I saw coming when this started as one slightly-too-eager offer to teach her a complicated card game she’d never seen.

Corp side’s still hers. I don’t think I could get her to switch even if I tried at this point, she’s gotten too good at reading what I’m setting up before I finish setting it up.