My wife and I began playing tonight and don't understand what it means and how it works. Any help would be appreciated.

Someone else had trouble with this, I covered it for them in this thread . Hope it helps.

Brilliant explanation. Thank you!

What I like about Traces is that it really feels immersive, and learning the mechanics is a function of thinking of it as the story being told.

In every tv show and movie with hackers, the hacker will say something like "I'm bouncing my signal through routers in Amsterdam, Singapore, Dubai, Argentina and Belarus. They'll never find me."

The links between all those servers represent the base difficulty of how hard the runner is to trace.

Also in every TV show and Movie you've ever seen, the cops or the spies will start a trace attempt on the hacker, with pretty fictitious graphics of their trace bouncing from Belarus to Argentina to Dubai, and they'll say "sixty seconds to complete!" That's their trace attempt, and the trace strength is how much processing power they put into it.

The runner realizes he's being traced and he says something like "Oh, you think you're so clever, but I wrote the book on this..." and start countering the attempt to break down his security measures. That's the runner boosting his link strength.

In the end, either the men in the slick clothing throw up their hands in frustration, or else the grubby hacker dives behind the wall of monitors and starts yanking out cables, stuffing anything important that isn't nailed down into a backpack, screaming "we have to go NOW!"

Or in the case of some traces, their hacking rig explodes in their face (I love Flare )