UK Regionals 2024

A (mostly) stats free review of the UK Regionals season

I hadn't heard of Netrunner in 2019—when the last regional level event happened in the UK—but by this time last year I had heard a lot about Regionals. They were a constant talking point when discussing the “good old days” of Netrunner—a time when people frequently travelled across the country to attend events, and when getting 40 people into a room to play Netrunner wasn’t rare.

So, when a random CO collided with a birthday party and a trip to Warhammer World, there was some pretty excited chattering amongst the group about organising some mid-level events. The idea for the events was pretty simple—fill a room with netrunner players, but without anyone having to commit their whole weekend to it.

There were lots of questions we had to answer. Would anyone come? How do we make one day events of this size work? How do these fit into the OP calendar?

What we agreed on was a select series of six tournaments spread across the country, using totally unique prizing, and completely separate from the NSG tournament structure. We hoped to get 30-35 players to at least a few of these events…

…what we ended up with was 5 of our 6 events having 40+ players, 2 of the events having to change venues to fit more people, 158 unique players across the whole series, and players attending from as far afield as Ireland, France, Italy, America and Australia!

Brindelmold’s beautiful designs must take a lot of the credit for getting the community so excited about Regionals. Highly regarded amongst netrunner alt art aficionados for his unique style, Brindelmold really knocked it out of the park with visually striking takes on Oppo Research, Wage Workers and Hannah “Wheels” Pilantra, as well as a faintly post-apocalyptic Angel of the North playmat.

Our decision to spread the different alt arts across different tournaments—as well as playmats for the top 8—seems to have been a big success. Dozens of players travelled to multiple tournaments to collect the full series, as well as to get another shot at a top cut mat.

On top of this, every one of our events was able to offer something unique to one another. From fun competitions like Bioroids vs Humans vs Clones or table-number-bingo, to additional alt art prizing and vendors selling merch, each of the individual TOs did something special to make their event extraordinary.

The idea of a single elim top 8 cuts raised quite a few eyebrows—not least within the team that was organising Regionals!—but they have proved more successful than we ever expected, and will likely be something we continue to explore. Keeping these events contained to a single day has been another important factor in getting people to attend.

Personally, Regionals have been wonderful for me. In 2022, CobraBubbles convinced me to jump in a car and head to Stevenage for a 10 player circuit opener and I was highly sceptical. Why travel for hours to play with strangers, when we play in the pub every week?

But in the relatively short period of time in which I have been playing competitive netrunner I have totally fallen in love with it. I now have friends all across the country and Regionals just felt like a good excuse for us to meet up every fortnight and get to play the best card game all day long.

I got out to five of the events (shout out to Nicky3.0 who made it out to all six!) I had an absolutely brilliant time at all of them, meeting up with friends the night before the tournament, making new friends the night after, sticking around and watching the cut live, all of it was a wonderful experience that I look forward to repeating next year.

With changes to NSG’s OP season incorporating mid-sized events and shaking up the whole calendar, expect to see Regionals return in 2025 but perhaps with a few adjustments.

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Congratulations to all of our winners: Ollie, Jan Tuno, Augustus Caesar, CobraBubbles, Kikai and Rotom Appliance—each of whom has won a free ticket to UK Nationals.

UK Nationals this year is at SPARKS in Bristol, 15th - 17th November. If you enjoyed your time at Regionals as much as I did then please buy a ticket! We’ll be doing everything we can to make it an extra special time and it really is the highlight of the UK calendar.