Cyberpunk 2077: Gangs of Night City - Review of the competitive tabletop adaptation of the famous video game

Perhaps every successful video game will eventually get a tabletop adaptation. Sometimes it works out great, sometimes worse. Fortunately for Cyberpunk 2077, the board game subtitled Gangs of Night City was taken under the wing of CMON, a studio that rarely releases a downright bad game. In Gangs of Nightcity, as the name suggests, you become the boss of a gang that fights with others in the streets for control of the city.

As with most CMON games of late, it's a classic Area Control game, where you have a map with squares that you occupy with figures and use the resources they provide to do other mischief. However, Cyberpunk spices up this established system with a series of missions and an accompanying story.

Moreover, the missions aren't just single scenarios that don't affect anything. On the contrary, they branch out depending on how you make decisions in the games. This doesn't make Cyberpunk an outright story game like, say, Venice Brotherhood of Assassins, but rather a sort of mix of Ctulhu: Even Death Can Die and Blood Rage. Which is at least some change from the classic, soulless board controls.

There are three types of Gangsters that you deploy on the game plan. There's the Solist, a kind of classic fighter who walks around and destroys opponents. Then there's the Technician, who can hire mercenaries in the shop or earn contracts, which are smaller side quests with rewards. And the last is the Networker, who hacks into corporate networks in a mini-game where you use dice rolls to overcome the firewall, unlocking various in-game bonuses.

Depending on which gang you choose, your henchmen potentially have different extra abilities, and it must be left to the developers that all gangs operate equally and none are overpowered or too weak at first glance. In addition to the basic dummies, you can also recruit Outliers who serve as classic mercenaries/heroes with special abilities.

You'll find some familiar video game faces among them (though Johnny Silverhand doesn't exactly look like Keanu Reeves in this small scale...), but this is where the developers have gone a little wrong in terms of balancing them. In fact, some of the Outliers are super-strong, while others are completely incompetent.

Since their supply is randomly drawn, someone can go and hire a hero that generates victory points automatically at the end of the round, while another player can again have heroes on offer that only generate victory points if certain conditions are met (not to mention Outliers that only do some minor buffs). Which is already quite unfair on the first sight. 

The basic mechanics are fairly simple, which means it's no problem to explain the game to a complete novice in five minutes and you're good to go. Once you have a figure in a zone, he can occupy shops, collect rewards (whether money, victory points or contraband for purchases) or build a hideout and recruit new gangsters from it.

Combat is done through simultaneous revelation of combat cards, which are secretly purchased from a arms dealer. These usually have some special properties as well, but the main one is the attack power, which is compared between opponents. Again, very simple mechanics, and with exaggeration that's pretty much all that's needed to play.

Units are activated by type, and the actions (represented by custom tokens) are purely gangster activations plus special actions of buying weapons, building a hideout, and an activation joker where you can play any action. And managing these actions is one of the more interesting systems in the game.

You can always play two of the six possible actions on your turn, which will exhaust the six possible actions. Therefore, every fourth turn at the latest, instead of taking an action (because you've exhausted them all), you must take a upkeep turn where the parts of the city you occupy earn money/points, recruit new gangsters, and restart your actions.

Which brings up an interesting tactical element, where you're wondering whether to use some of your remaining actions in your next turn, even if they might not be as useful, or whether to do maintenance, make some money, recruit someone, and reset all your actions in this turn, making you ready for the next challenge. 

The game also has a solo mode, but it's primarily designed as a 2-4 player battle (or five with the Families and Outlaws expansion, but we'll talk about that another time). The game works quite well with two, but it's more fun in higher numbers, because that's when the real tug-of-war for resources comes in, and the game isn't so much about digging in somewhere and just pushing each other to the middle of the table. 

Unfortunately, a big downside of the game is the fact that it doesn't have much of a "cyperpunk feel" and it could easily be a generic Viking (or samurai or Egyptian mythology) game and it would work the same way. There are no character augmentation options or other elements inherent to the genre and the premise. The only thing that has any semblance of cyberpunk is the hacking minigame. But it doesn't really pull you in with its dice rolling and token sliding across the board that symbolizes the firewall. 

But the game board is generally speaking well made, and even in its basic cardboard version contains features that are often the exclusive preserve of neoprene pads bought separately for a extra money. It's not just a "game board" for moving pieces around, but it has built-in spaces for card decks (i.e. new weapons, contracts or recruiting Outliers), a victory point counter, a place for missions and even the aforementioned hacking minigame, which makes the game more manageable when everything has a place on the board.

Taken all around, Cyberpunk 2077: Gangs of Night City isn't a perfect game or the best tabletop adaptation of a video game, but at the same time it's not the worst either, and if you ignore the poorly used theme, you're left with an enjoyable and accessible area control that's spiced up with story missions and at least one themed minigame.

Verdict:

Cyberpunk 2077: Gangs of Night City is a good game, a fact that not every adaptation of the famous franchise manages to achieve. If you want to try the story-driven area control, which isn't super complex, you probably won't be disappointed. The game works great in this regard, making it suitable for newcomers or Cyberpunk video game fans who aren't die-hard board gamers but would like to stay in the video game world a while longer and experience something quite different, though the proper cyberpunk atmosphere has to be helped by themselves.