Introducing JNRO

Play Netrunner in your browser now at https://j.nro.run

On the 10th of July 2023 I began learning Netrunner.

I realised very quickly that a large portion of my social circle would not be able to get to grips with the existing online client, JNET.

On the 16th of July 2023 I began working on a solution.

On the 5th of January 2025, I released the first internal alpha client to a small group of testers.

It is the 25th of February 2026, 961 days since work began, and today I release the first publicly accessible beta version of NRO: JNRO.

J?

NRO is a few things composed together. At its core is the simulator, a robust, rules complete, fully accurate simulation of the Netrunner Comprehensive Rules. Building this was a gargantuan undertaking and took up the vast majority of the 961 days of this project. I was, incidentally, helped by the work of the NSG Rules Team who simplified several rules underneath me and made my life much easier as time went on (removing NCIGS and non-fungible credits).

On top of both of these sits the game server, which is in charge of letting people manage their account, create lobbies, join games, and handles making sure we don’t leak information we shouldn’t be.

On top of that sits the game client, of which there are two: J, and Nulla. J started out as an internal development tool and was very much not intended for anyone to actually use. An early version of Nulla was the client that was released in the January 2025 closed alpha test. Over time, it became clear that for the sake of rapidly prototyping and progressing the client from its minimal state to an optimised and ergonomic play experience, that the J client would need to evolve. It gradually moved from a series of unadorned boxes, with no graphics and purely textual content for me to interact with, to a full recreation of the user experience you can expect from the Nulla client when it finally comes out.

So what differences remain between J and Nulla, and why not just replace J with Nulla?

  • J is built on top of web technologies, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Web Assembly. This makes it a significantly more limited technology to build on top of for implementing many advanced graphical features. Nulla is built in the Bevy Game Engine and so has access to a much richer suite of tools.
  • Because of this, J entirely lacks animations, and currently also lacks audio cues of any kind. Audio might be added once I can determine an appropriate set of sound effects, but dynamic animations are explicitly excluded from the plan for the document and will live entirely in Nulla. This means there will not be nice effects of cards moving between locations to help you follow the changes in the game state, and things simply update immediately and snap into their destination location in a fashion people are already used to with the existing client JNET.
  • Nulla, being built in a full game engine, is able to take advantage of your hardware far more efficiently as a native desktop application, while J is built entirely into the browser. It will be possible to play on the Nulla client inside the browser via Web Assembly, but this is generally a less typical form for a video game to be presented and so having a native client is important to us.

Monetisation

During the initial period of public beta testing, JNRO will have no monetization. I am footing the bill for the server, and if you want to help with that you may make a donation here. Under the terms of my agreement with NSG, these donations can only be used to fund the servers and infrastructure maintenance, and the donation portal will be disabled if more than 3 years of expected runtime costs are received.

In the future, there are three main monetisation pathways we will be exploring in the interest of creating a more sustainable ecosystem for this game.

  • Partnerships with community artists, through which popular alt arts will be made available for digital purchase in the client, with artists receiving a portion of the business profits through a creator profit sharing program.
  • An in game subscription that will provide a more sustainable base of funding, giving access to advanced power-user tooling. We will never put features required for typical gameplay behind a paywall, but advanced tooling (such as the Simulator currently available in JNRO), collaborative tools (intended to support the needs of testing groups), and select novelty features might be placed behind a subscription program.
  • In order to make this subscription program appealing to a broader audience than just power-users, we may commission artists for specific arts made available for a limited time only through the subscription process in something resembling the battle passes that have proven effective in many other games, though we will always strive to make this system fair and not exploitative of our players.

Our goal in this is straightforward, we want to be part of the solution to the economic unsustainability of Netrunner. As it stands, huge amounts of the game are made possible only through unpaid volunteer labour, and outside of artists this has become an expected norm. We want compensated labour to eventually become the norm for Netrunner.

We hope that through the creation of a mature and automated client, additional funding may also come in other aspects of the game; creating a rising tide of sustainability. Through a more visually accessible client, we hope a creator economy might be able to become sustainable, and look forward to a day when there are many full time Netrunner content creators. By growing the player base of the game through a more accessible pathway from no-knowledge to regular-player, we hope the playerbase and thus economic base for NSGs product sales can expand. We believe Netrunner is perhaps the greatest board or card game ever created, and it deserves to be celebrated. The community agreed with us enough to keep it alive after it was killed, and we truly hope that through the quality of that community it can grow to greater heights than it has ever reached before.

We?

While this started out as a solo project, and almost the entirety of the codebase for JNRO is code that I have written, the team has grown slightly. Most prominently, nxsupert has been with me from around half way through, working on the Nulla client as the main frontend game and graphics developer. But I am also set up to draft some other members of my local meta who are software engineers to help me with card implementations. Eventually, I’d like to grow that team further, but right now we’re focusing on what is economically sustainable.

Roadmap

Right now, only System Gateway is implemented in NRO. The following is our set release roadmap. These give you our intended order of set releases, but we will not place fixed timelines on the completion of currently unpaid labour.

  • Chat Functionality
  • Elevation, the Core Set Format becomes available
  • Vantage Point, the Startup Format becomes available
  • Quickplay Lobby
  • The Automata Initiative
  • Rebellion Without Rehearsal, the Elevation Startup Retro Format becomes available
  • Downfall
  • Uprising
  • Midnight Sun
  • Parhelion, the Standard Format becomes available

If NSG releases its next set after Vantage Point before the completion of the above timeline, then it will be inserted into the schedule to keep the Startup Format available.

We will not put a release date or timeline on the Nulla client for similar reasons, nor attempt to guess when it will be ready by. It is a parallel workstream to the implementation of new cards (with the exception of a few bespoke UIs for specific game mechanics). We will continue to maintain and support JNRO even after Nulla is released, as it is a valuable iteration, prototyping, and debugging tool.

We have no planned Roadmap for implementing Monetization features, and will attempt to maintain parity between Nulla and JNRO on them. I expect we will not seek to implement these until after the Startup Format is available at the earliest, but it is entirely possible we wait until Standard is released.

How To Help Beta Test

If you’d like to help us beta test, you can do so at https://j.nro.run, simply make an account and organise to play with people. Some functionality is still on the roadmap, but for all currently implemented functionality you can test it simply by playing! If you encounter an issue, then you can get feedback to us in the dedicated channels on our discord.