How it plays:
Nemesis is a cooperative survival experience that can support up to 5 players. The premise is simple; You awake from cryosleep disoriented. You’re too groggy to recall the layout of the ship but must ensure the ship is going the right way and that things are still functioning. Oh yeah, something bad may have made its way onboard too…
At the start of the game each player is dealt two characters, from which they may keep one. Each character has their own deck of possible actions, a character specific weapon, and two items that may be acquired by completing a side objective. There’s a character for just about every generic sci-if archetype. Players are also dealt two random game objectives, one personal and one corporate. More on these in a bit.
The board, or the “ship”, is comprised of overturned hexagons that represent rooms. These rooms are connected by a spiderweb of halls, corridors, and vents. Each room also has a overturned triangular marker present. These represent modifiers to the room and can be as minuscule as literally nothing or as damning as a fire or malfunctioning piece of equipment. Each time a character moves into an unexplored room, they reveal both the function of the room they just entered in addition to any potential complications. On top of that, you didn’t forget that these spacefarers were being stalked by horrible alien monsters right? Good, because each time a player enters an unoccupied room, even if its been previously explored, they must roll to see how much noise they create and what that noise brings.
An average turn starts with the player drawing up to 5 cards. A player has two actions available. They may spend one card to move, spend whatever number of cards required to perform a room action (search for items, shower, check engines, etc.) or play a character card as an action. During their turn if they move into an unoccupied room they’ll roll the noise die and place a noise token in the hallway or corridor that corresponds with the result. If there’s already a noise token there then that player encounter an Intruder.
Intruders are the not Ridley Scott’s aliens that stowed away on your ship, and boy are they mean. There are 5 different types of Intruders that can be encountered and they each represent a different stage in the lifecycle of the alien monstrosity. Not only does each iteration of this cosmic progeny have the power to hurt and potentially kill your character, but many attacks leave behind nasty contamination. These are represented by adding a contamination card into your discard pile and reshuffling it back into your deck the next time you go to draw. These contamination cards cannot be used by your character in any way, they’re just dead weight effectively making a 5 card hand 4 if you draw the contamination. Dealing with contamination is a huge part of the game for anyone who finds themselves in combat. You’ll need to take care of them before the end of the game or risk bringing a new baby chest burster into this world just when you thought you’d survived.
Speaking of winning the game. Now’s the time to circle back to player objectives. When the first intruder is encountered, you choose one of your two objectives to keep and then discard the other. Now remember, one of these was a personal objective and the other was corporate. The idea here is that by the time the first specks of alien shit hit the fan, you can decide which of your two goals are more realistic. This may potentially lead to a player deciding that grabbing an alien carcass and bee lining it to the escape pods makes a lot more sense than leading a head on assault on the alien queen and burning down her nest. Sometimes player objectives will coincide, other times they will not. The priorities for each player is staying alive and completing their objective.
What we thought:
Well first off let me say this was a long time coming. We’ve had our eye on this game for quite some time but it was nearly impossible to get a hold of. The company that makes Nemesis, Awaken Realms, is kind of like a boutique board game company. They make real high quality stuff that people generally love, and do very limited manufacturing and releasing of their products. Needless to say, if you want a complete edition of Nemesis along with some of the expansion and kickstarter content you’re looking upwards of $400-$500. Luckily for us, while we were waiting out our local shutdown we happened to find a very functional version of Nemesis on a popular tabletop simulator game. For those of you interested in Nemesis but not looking to take out a small loan, I’m sure you can figure out the same way we managed to play.
Now, on to our actual thoughts on the game! Nemesis was both everything we wanted and while also somewhat underwhelming in the area that matters most.
Most of Nemesis is fantastic. Mechanically everything is pretty sound. Exploration feels exciting and stress inducing. Rooms are randomized and full of things to interact with. Combat is dangerous. Characters are unique and each bring their own strengths and weaknesses. It is truly a game that is more concerned with the narrative its weaving in your play session as opposed to every player feeling powerful. There’s a good chance some players will die, there’s even a pretty good chance that someone will die during that first Intruder encounter if they don’t high-tail it out of there. These are the best parts of Nemesis. Every game has the potential to surprise you or fill you with dread.
One major bone that we have to pick with Nemesis are player objectives. Really it’s more of a conversation about incentive to play the bad guy. As it stands, during the beginning of the game you get your two objectives. One corporate and one personal. Now, the corporate objective is almost always the “bad” one and vice versa for the personal objective. The thing is, almost all of the corporate objectives create a much more difficult win condition than just taking the personal objective and reasoning with the other players. Here’s a couple example “bad” objectives: Eliminate Player (1-5), Be the only survivor. Alternatively, many of the “good” objectives are super easy: Send the signal and hibernate, ensure the ship reaches earth, discover intruder weaknesses. The issue here is that there is no incentive to take the “bad” or antagonistic objective. Many times peoples “good” objectives will even overlap. We encountered this which lead to a funny situation where one person ensured the engines were working and that the ship was on track to earth. We all had slight variations on making sure we got back to earth in one piece so after his hard work we enjoyed a nice nap risk free. We all won…or no one did. I’m not sure what the solution is here, but I’ve been thinking about how assigning objective point values might help. If those antagonistic objectives are so difficult why not make them worth more points? Give a player a convincing reason to release an airlock and blast their friend into space, even if that reason is just a point or two more than the 3 schmucks who all tied because they were cooperating.
All said and done Nemesis is still one of the best survival board games we’ve played with friends and it’ll be a mainstay in our group for some time to come. Every game offers a fresh and random sci-fi horror flick for you and your friends to live out. It certainly won’t hold your hand, and you may not have a ton of legitimate reason to want to be the bad guy, but you’ll have a blast romping through an alien infested space ship with some friends.
*At the time of this writing Awaken Realms, creators of Nemesis, have successfully kickstarted the 4th expansion for Nemesis, “Lockdown”*
All images courtesy of Awaken Realms, http://awakenrealms.com/