So I'd heard about Shadowrun Anarchy, but haven't messed with it at all. I'm wondering if others have.

I also found out it has a Kickstarter for Anarchy 2.0 that might be ending soon and is almost funded up to its top perk. It's nice to see Shadowrun is still popular with about 3,000 backing this and it being funded in the first nine minutes.

I do wonder if it would work better for forum based play where crunchy combat is really rough.

I GM'd a play-by-post campaign of Anarchy 1.0 but never had a chance to play it as a PC. (There was one game I was going to play in where things fell apart - in classic PbP fashion - even before we met the Johnson.)

Like every single Shadowrun edition, there was a lot to like about it, but also a lot of flaws. Chargen was an absolute breeze, maybe 10-15 minutes once you knew what to do. I can't even do my shopping/equipment that fast in other editions. Combat could be finished in the time it would take to do a single initiative pass in another edition. The decentralized nature of GMing took a while to wrap your head around, but once you did it was liberating. Another GM told me a good example which I thought was illustrative. A player asked him, "Can I do that?" and he said, "I don't know. Can you?" The system really puts player agency at the forefront. If you have players with the right mindset who appreciate what the system can do, it can be an absolute blast.

Downsides included the armor system, which basically acted as hit points that you would stack on top of your condition monitor. As fast as combat was, it took even longer than necessary because you had to chew through a grunt's armor before you could start chipping away at the condition monitor. I implemented some house rules to make armor avoidance more accessible. Also, while play-by-post is great for narrative games, one of the systems of Anarchy is to use Plot Points to switch things up, often interrupting something in progress. That's something that would work well in person around a table, but doesn't really function as well in an asynchronous environment like PbP when a single post can advance things well past your intended intercession. I learned to tell the players, "Post up to this point, but don't go past that" so that they didn't race off into the distance.

But in the end I had a positive impression of Anarchy, enough so that I Kickstarted 2.0. I think the PDF might be floating around but I hate reading PDFs so I'm waiting for the dead tree version. I got notice on Thursday that the shipping addresses will be locked at the end of the month. I'm hoping that means I'll have it in hand relatively soon.