The system is just bad. It's broken at multiple levels and will leave you frustrated trying to get them to work. It needs to be pulled off the market and remade with a real system.

An explanation of the blue symbol is on p123 and like other reviews it's almost unplayable.

I really wanted to like Altered Carbon, but this chaotic, cumbersome and incomplete mess is essentially unplayable. The rules are poorly explained, self-contradictory and often either shockingly clumsy or outright broken. Even simple things like tracking ammo and making purchases are made procedurally arduous for no gameplay advantage. Unnecessarily burdensome mechanics make the system an absolute drag to read through, let alone play. Worse still, the whole thing's so fundamentally limited. For a game based on a literally galaxy-spanning property where people live forever by swapping their old or damaged bodies for new or artificial ones, you're stuck in a single, poorly developed city getting constantly hit in the head with cumulative penalties for "resleeving" your character. Overall, this is the most poorly written and edited rulebook I've read in over 40 years of tabletop gaming, and the best advert for Eclipse Phase I've ever seen.

Though I like the system, it is essentially just “Cyberpunk.” The thing that makes “Altered Carbon” different from any other of the cyberpunk universes are the elder race, that are colloquially known as “Martians.” With in the story line, the Martians are responsible for and may still be acting through the technology that humanity currently utilizes. This gives the Altered Carbon story the feeling of a house built on a burial mound, but the Martians are barely given a mention in the core rule book. Here’s hoping that a source book on the subject comes out soon.

This game starts with a very interesting idea that it quickly betrays with a focus on style over substance.

The most egregious example is the overuse of icons/symbols. When reading you will encounter a little blue circle. It will not be defined, though it will obviously be very important as it is referenced many times. It is finally defined about 70 pages after its first use. This may seem like a minor quibble but it a major problem as there are many other icons used.

If you're reading on a smaller screen you'll often need to zoom in and try to figure out if this is the microchip looking one or the similar but not quite identical stack one. You can't use search on an icon to find where they are defined so if you ever forget what a given icon means you'll have to page back, or occasionally forward, until you can find the definition.

Just use words, I don't understand why the authors decided that words were the innapropriate medium for providing information instead of inscrutable, unsearchable icons.

Further, combat takes too long and the skill system can quickly reach a point where characters cannot mathematically fail without the GM imposing luck dice on them.

Luck Dice, of which there are several varieties, depending on whether they help, sort of help but maybe hurt, and definetly hurt, are presented as the sort of thing you talk your players into taking so they can do cool things, instead of doing the thing that they cannot mathematically fail at. When one possible consequence of failure is to be trapped in a VR Torture Hell for a subjective eternity you may find your players shying away from the luck dice.

I could go on, but in the end this is just another game that took a good idea and failed to implement it in a fun and playable way.

overly use of gimmicky symbols, poorly construct mechanics, no lore what so ever in the 300 so pages and use of fan baiting buzzword.

there (so far) betters games to play in the transhumanist age