If you’ve spent any time in Night City, you already know the world of cyberpunk tcg how to play is going to feel familiar the moment you pick up your first deck. The Cyberpunk Trading Card Game, developed by WeirdCo in partnership with CD Projekt Red, brings the factions, tech, and gritty street politics of Cyberpunk 2077 to a card game built from the ground up for competitive play. This guide covers everything you need to get started, whether you’ve never touched a TCG before or you’re a veteran looking to size up whether this one is worth your time.
What Is the Cyberpunk TCG?
The Cyberpunk TCG is a two-player competitive card game set in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. WeirdCo handles game design, with CD Projekt Red providing the IP, lore, and visual identity. If you’ve played the video game, you’ll recognise the factions, the slang, and the general vibe immediately. If you haven’t, none of that is required to play, but it helps.
The game is currently in its Alpha Kit phase as of March 2026, meaning a small preview set has been released to early playtesters ahead of the full Kickstarter launch on March 17, 2026. Some details, including the official names of the four colour factions, have not yet been confirmed. Where that applies, this guide will say so clearly.
The core design goal of the Cyberpunk TCG appears to be speed and aggression. Games are built around a central dice-based win condition, a streamlined resource system, and a turn structure that keeps the pressure on both players from the first round.
How Do You Win?
This is the most important thing to understand before anything else, because the win condition shapes every decision you make during a game.
Victory goes to the first player who collects 6 Gig Dice and holds all 6 at the start of their turn. Gig Dice (the dice mechanic central to the game’s progression system) are earned by completing Gigs, which are objectives tied to your board state and card play. There is also an instant win condition: if you ever collect 7 Gig Dice at any point, you win immediately, regardless of whose turn it is.
So the game has two win paths: hold 6 at the start of your turn, or race to 7 before your opponent can respond. Both matter strategically, and understanding the difference between them affects how aggressively you push versus how carefully you protect your current Gig Die count.
There is no life point system. There is no “reduce your opponent to zero” mechanic. The Gig Dice are the entire win condition, and almost everything else in the game exists to help you collect them faster or slow your opponent down.
How a Turn Works
A turn in the Cyberpunk TCG follows four phases in order. Each phase has a specific job. Here is how they break down:
Phase 1: Draw / Get Paid
At the start of your turn, you draw cards and receive your income for the turn. This phase sets up your resources before you do anything else. There is no hand size limit in the Cyberpunk TCG, so you can hold as many cards as you have without being forced to discard.
Phase 2: Deploy Gig Die
You place a Gig Die from your pool into play. This phase is where the win condition actively advances. Managing which Gig Die you deploy and when is a core part of mid-game decision making.
Phase 3: Build Board
This is your main action phase. You play cards from your hand, spending Eddies (the game’s currency, explained in detail below) to deploy Units, Programs, and Gear. You are building the board state you will attack with in Phase 4.
Phase 4: Attack
Your Units on the board attack. You assign attackers, your opponent assigns blockers, and damage resolves. Units that survive combat stay on the board for future turns. Units that are destroyed go to the discard pile.
After Phase 4, the turn passes to your opponent and the same sequence repeats.
Card Types
The Cyberpunk TCG uses four card types. Understanding what each one does is foundational to reading any deck or card list.
| Card Type | What It Does | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Units | Creatures/characters that occupy the board, attack, and block | The primary combat pieces in any deck |
| Programs | Spell-like cards with one-time or ongoing effects | Used for disruption, buffs, and tactical plays |
| Gear | Equipment cards that attach to Units and modify their stats or abilities | Upgrades your Units in play |
| Legends | Powerful leader cards that set your deck’s identity and colour limits | Start face down; 3 per deck; also called Leaders in some early materials |
Legends deserve extra attention. You include exactly 3 Legend cards in every deck, and they start face down at the beginning of the game. They are not drawn from your deck in the normal way. When a Legend flips or enters play, it brings a significant effect, and it also defines your deck’s RAM limits (see the Keywords section below). Your choice of Legends is, in many ways, the most important deckbuilding decision you make.
The Resource System: Eddies
Eddies are the currency of the Cyberpunk TCG. If you’ve played the video game, the name will be instantly familiar. In card game terms, Eddies work as the resource you spend to play cards during the Build Board phase.
Here is what makes the Cyberpunk TCG’s resource system unusual compared to most TCGs: you do not have a separate land or mana card type. Instead, you generate Eddies by selling cards directly from your hand. Any card in your hand can be sold for its Eddie value rather than played for its effect.
This creates a constant tension. Every card you hold is simultaneously a potential play and a potential resource. If you sell a card for Eddies, you get the currency but lose the option. If you play a card for its effect, you spend the Eddies but gain the board presence. Every turn involves evaluating this trade-off, and it is one of the more interesting design decisions in the game.
There is no hand size limit, which means you can hold a large hand and selectively sell cards to hit the exact Eddie cost you need on any given turn. This rewards card advantage and planning ahead.
Deck Construction Rules
Building a legal deck in the Cyberpunk TCG follows these rules:
| Rule | Detail |
|---|---|
| Deck size | 40 to 50 cards |
| Legend cards | Exactly 3, included separately, start face down |
| Hand size limit | None |
| Colour restrictions | Set by your Legend cards via the RAM system |
The RAM system is the mechanism that determines which colour cards you can include in your deck. Your 3 Legend cards each have a RAM value tied to a specific colour (faction). The combined RAM of your Legends determines how many cards of each colour you are allowed to run. This means your Legends do not just provide powerful effects: they define the entire colour composition of your deck. If you want to run a heavy concentration of one colour, you need Legends that support that RAM allocation.
The Four Colours
The Cyberpunk TCG uses four colours representing different factions from the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. As of the Alpha Kit in March 2026, the official faction names have not been confirmed by WeirdCo. The four colours exist and the RAM system operates around them, but treat any specific faction name you see circulating in early community discussion as provisional until the full release confirms them.
Keywords Glossary
TCGs use shorthand keywords printed on cards so that common mechanics do not need to be spelled out in full every time. Here are all the confirmed keywords from the Alpha Kit:
| Keyword | What It Means |
|---|---|
| GO SOLO | This Unit attacks immediately when it is deployed during the Build Board phase, without waiting for the Attack phase. It effectively gets an attack on the turn it enters play. |
| BLOCKER | When an opponent attacks, all attacks are redirected to this Unit first. Your opponent cannot ignore a Unit with BLOCKER and attack your other Units or objectives freely. |
| Street Cred | A cost gate tied to your current Gig Die count. A card with a Street Cred requirement cannot be played until you have collected the specified number of Gig Dice. Higher Street Cred cards are more powerful but locked behind game progression. |
| RAM | The colour and resource limit system set by your Legend cards. Your Legends’ combined RAM determines which colours you can include in your deck and in what quantities. |
| Eddies | The currency generated by selling cards from your hand. Spent during the Build Board phase to play Units, Programs, and Gear. |
| Gigs | The dice mechanic central to the win condition. Completing Gigs earns you Gig Dice. Collect 6 and hold them at the start of your turn to win, or collect 7 for an instant win. |
About the Dice Win Condition
It would not be honest to write a beginner’s guide to the Cyberpunk TCG without addressing this directly. The Gig Dice win condition has been one of the most discussed elements among early playtesters, and the feedback has not been uniformly positive.
The concern is straightforward: in some early games, the dice mechanic has felt like it introduces variance that sits outside either player’s control. If Gig Dice generation can be spiked quickly or if certain strategies race to 7 faster than opponents can interact, the win condition risks feeling more like a runaway timer than a contested objective. Some playtesters have flagged that late-game comebacks can feel difficult when one player is already sitting on 5 or 6 Gig Dice.
WeirdCo is aware of this feedback. The Alpha Kit is explicitly a testing phase, and the Gig Dice system may be adjusted before or after the Kickstarter based on playtester input. It is also worth noting that early TCG playtesting, especially before the full card pool exists, tends to exaggerate these kinds of issues because the tools to interact with or slow down a given mechanic are not all in the set yet.
What you should expect as a new player: the dice win condition gives the game a distinct pace and feel that is different from most TCGs. It is not inherently broken, but it is genuinely different, and it will take a few games before it feels natural. If you are the kind of player who dislikes any RNG in competitive games, this is worth knowing going in.
Is the Cyberpunk TCG Worth Trying?
The honest answer is: probably yes, with appropriate expectations.
What the game does well is real. The resource system is genuinely interesting. Selling cards for Eddies creates decision points that feel meaningful on almost every turn, and the absence of a hand size limit means card advantage actually rewards forward planning rather than just card draw. The Legend system ties deckbuilding identity directly to your card selection in a way that feels cohesive. And the Cyberpunk 2077 setting is one of the most visually and thematically strong IPs to enter the TCG space in years.
The Gig Dice win condition is the main unknown. It is a bold design choice, and bold design choices can land badly or brilliantly depending on how the rest of the card pool develops. The Alpha Kit does not have enough cards to fully evaluate whether the game will balance around it well at a competitive level.
If you are a Cyberpunk 2077 fan who has never played a TCG before, this is a reasonable first game. The turn structure is clean, the resource system is intuitive once you grasp the sell-for-Eddies concept, and the theme will carry you through the learning curve.
If you are an experienced TCG player evaluating the game, the Kickstarter launch on March 17, 2026 is the right moment to look more closely. More card reveals, confirmed faction names, and refined rules should all be available by then, giving you a much clearer picture of what the full game looks like.
Keep an eye on this site for ongoing coverage as the Kickstarter goes live and new cards are revealed. There is a lot more to learn as the full set comes into focus.
cyberpunktcgguide 