NEMESIS (2018)

PLAYERS	TIME	DESIGNER	ARTIST	PUBLISHER
1-5	120 mins	Adam Kwapinski	Piotr Foksowicz Patryk Jędraszek Ewa Labak Andrzej Półtoranos	Awaken Realms

METHOD

Players are the crew of the Nemesis who must survive an alien infestation on their ship and try to make it back to the safety of Earth.

Or crash into Mars. Or send the ship out into space. Or kill all of your crew mates. Or grab an alien sample for research purposes. Who really knows what everyone else is up to. Is the entire crew on the same page, working together to escape certain death? Or does another player have a darker, hidden agenda?

Who can you trust? And what was that noise?

POINTS OF INTEREST

Okay. Lets talk about the elephant in the room. This is Alien, just without the official name on the box. Awaken Realms have skirted as close as possible to teasing those copyright lawyers, and the game is all the better for it. It’s a spaceship containing a clueless crew who are being picked off by an ever so deadly alien (or two). But is that a bad thing?

When I first played this game several years ago, despite the theme and the Alien movie vibes, it just didn’t click with me. I found the constant flow of alien creatures frustrating. I found dealing with my backstabby crew mates to be less fun that trying to ice skate uphill. And it came across as production over gameplay.

But, upon giving the game another chance in 2025, all of these ‘problems’ sort of went away.

One of my favourite games of all time is DEAD OF WINTER. I love the tight survival aspect of it as your colony fends off hordes of zombies while you precious resources dwindle. But the really fun part of that game is the hidden traitor mechanic. Knowing that there is one player out there making things more difficult for the team is fine, but not knowing for sure leads to ‘The Thing‘ levels of mistrust, making teamwork a double edged sword. Players accusing players and no one being sure if anyone really is a traitor after all. A lack of trust could be your downfall.

NEMESIS does something very similar, and to great effect. But instead of having one potential traitor, the game makes it possible for every player to double cross you. Better still, it holds back this decision, allowing you all to see the lay of the land first, before a moment triggers the choice. And then, each player must pick which of their two missions they will follow for the rest of the game. The ‘nice’ one, or the ‘mean’ one. All kept secret.

It’s a beautiful design choice and really adds to the tension, especially when you find yourself in a sticky situation (perhaps literally!) and you’re not sure if that player closest to you will assist or leave you to die. After all, helping you might clash with their plans. But do they make it obvious now, or play nice and hope another chance appears later when they themselves are in a better position? The constant uncertainty between all the players is just so juicy.

And that’s before we add the Xenomorphs. I mean Intruders.

Let’s be clear. You might have some cool looking, weapon totting, crew characters here, but you’re not the best fit to go up against these things. They’re bigger than you (mostly), tougher than you, and they’ll absolutely keep coming.

The noise mechanic that brings these things in is genius. Walk down a corridor and roll a dice (more DEAD OF WINTER vibes here). This makes noise in one of the four directions off the room you’ve just entered. If a noise token already sits on that direction – boom! Drop an alien miniature in the room with you.

Every time you dart from room to room, it silences the whole table who wait to see what’s coming in. The ship board itself, while quite large, doesn’t seem too busy when you first look at it. The amount of rooms seems manageable. But as soon as you find you need to go from one end to the other, making noise and attracting unwanted guests all the way, the ship will feel a mile long, with untold danger between you and your destination. Aliens, players, fires. It’s a deathtrap of a ship.

But what can you do to make it out alive? Well, each player has a hand of cards, some similar, some character specific, that you’ll use to carry out various actions. But the cards themselves are usually the cost for the actions too. So your hand of five each round might look like it’s bristling with posibilities, but when a really cool action requires you to dicard two other cards, the limitations set in.

So on top of everything else trying to kill you, your hand managment isn’t really trying to help either. It makes every choice you make critical. There will be things you want to do right now that you can’t. You need to heal, but you’d love to barricade that door behind you too and block off Player 3. Well, it’s up to you which of those is most important.

While you have a set number of standard cards in your hand, there are other cards you can get hold of during the game. Some you’ll want. Others you most definitely won’t.

Rooms have items in them. Useful items like bandages, ammo, or better weapons. Everything a crew member fighting for their life could want. You’ll enter rooms and use an action to search and gain items based on the type of room you’re in.

But there’s another card that you’ll get every time you have a bad meeting with an alien. It’s a Contamination card.

Contaminiation cards mean you might be expecting a bouncing baby alien in your near future. Mechanically, the card means you’re going to have a clogged up deck, and you might automatically lose the game, even if you think you’ve won.

They are horrible cards, containing hidden information, that only get revealed at two possible moments. One is if you decide to use a medical room and ‘see’ if you’ve been impregnated. This is a tougher choice than it sounds as it can actuially make things worse for you. The other is at the games end. When everything is totted up and the winners and losers are announced, people who think they are okay will check their contaminiation cards to see if they die and lose anyway.

Like movement, this risk of contamination makes your dealings with the aliens a tough choice too. Sure, you might have a fully loaded flame thrower or shot gun, but you’re one bad roll away from becoming an parent. In spaaaace!

And with all these choices around basic actions like movement and fighting, while also worrying if that player sat across from you secretly needs you to die now please, there are a whole bunch of spinning plates going on across the board to contend with.

First, coming out of hypersleep at the start of the game means you’re a litle foggy on ship layout. The room tiles are face tdown at the start of the game meaning you’re exploring your ship as you go. Great for suspence and variabilty. Odd for theme.

But these rooms come with their own problems. When revealed, tokens will let you know a couple of things. How many items are available (yay) becuase they are finite (booo), if the room is on fire, and if it’s even working. You see, pretty much every room has a function. From opening up certain areas of the ship to the vacum of space, to the afore mentioned medical room that lets you do a little DIY surgery, you’ll need to roam the ship and uncover them all to aid you in your missions.

And to make things more interesting, those fires and mechanical breakdowns can be a problem. Get too many and the ship explodes. Oh, and the engines might not be working, so someone honest and trustworthy needs to go check that. And does anyone know if we’re heading to Earth, Mars, or the far reaches of space? And why is that guy hanging around the Generator with his finger on the Self Destruct button?

Good luck.

All of this works together to make a chaotic, tense, and puzzley survival horror game. Every step brings potential danger. Every player could be friend or foe. The ship is dangerous even without the alien threat.

So why not top it all off with a countdown. Or two. That’s right. More tension.

There is a set number of rounds to the game. The players must have escaped the ship or aimed it at a specific desitination, befeore that timer runs out. On top of that, there is a self destruct sequence that kicks in part way through the game, and is shorter than the main time track. It can be deactivated, but not all players might want his. And then there are the escape pods, which can launch even if they are not full. Better reach one if you need it, before they all go away.

Every round, the tracks that are activated will count down one more. By the late stages of the game, chaos has errupted all around, the board is littered with alien miniatures, fires are burning, and there’s a single escape pod left. Can you make it to saftey, while still fullfilling your mission?

NEMESIS has a lot going on, and the game is trying to kill you at every turn. But the from the moment you step out of the cryotube, it’s chatoic fun of the best kind.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

Of course, as I mentioned, I didn’t gel too well with NEMESIS in the early days. This game will not be for everyone, and that’s okay. But it has some things to bear in mind if you’re thinking of getting a copy.

The biggest negative of the game is player elimination. You can die in NEMESIS, and there isn’t much for you to do afterwards. The game does have a mode that lets a player come in and do some alien stuff, but it’s not as fun as it sounds. And while player elimination isn’t always bad if it’s something that happens close to the end of a game, there is easily the possibilty of you getting knocked out 20 mnutes in to a 3 hour game. Not fun, right?

The game is a table hog. We play 4-player games and it takes every inch of our pretty decent sized table. There are so many pieces that need to be out on the table that it can all get a little busy. From aliens, to tokens, to cards, and more, it’s can be a little messy.

Luck is a big factor in the game. If you struggle with things being taken out of your control by the roll of a dice, then NEMESIS will potentially infuriate you on a regular basis. From getting noice tokens where you don’t want them, to aliens not being hit every single time, it can put you into tough situations over and over. Couple that with the luck of the draw from the Intruder bag, where I’ve seen the Queen be the first alien drawn on more than one occasion (or, if you’re my friend, straight after he’d just scared her off and was very near death, lol) and it’s a whole big puddle of unfair. Be warned.

But the biggest thing for me, and it comes with all games of this ilk with traitor mechanics, is it can be dependant on the group you play it with. There is a fair amount of take-that involved. Peoples missions, nice or not, will clash. Trust will go out the window. And I’m not just talking about having a player who makes it less fun for others and enjoys that way of playing. It matters how the group gets on and what they can handle being dished out to them. If people take things too personally, or target players for kicks and not because of a game mechanics, it can make the experience a bitter one. I did not enjoy my first few plays of this. Certain groups just didn’t work. It’s only by finding fun players to sit down with this year that I got to finally see what the hype was about. I’m lucky to have gotten a positive experience.

EXTRA CONTENT?

With this originally being a big box crowdfunded game, there is some extra content that game with it. Notable is Aftermath, a prologue game that picks up from the end of the main game and is a shorter, tighter affair. Void Seeders adds a different species of alien.

On top of that, there are the sequels. NEMESIS: LOCKDOWN adds a new planetary location with rules on powering sections of the board to mix things up. Then there is NEMESIS: RETALIATION, which goes the Aliens route and sends in the marines to a completely modular board.

I’ve not tried either, but am very interested to.

FOR 2-PLAYERS?

I’ve never played NEMESIS lower than 4-player. I’m not sure how it would work with just two as it would be a little easier to avoid other players and stay out of their way. It’s when people get too close for devious comfort that things get fun. That’s not to say it can’t work at two. It would certainly add to the isolated atmosphere with less people to rely on if you’re in a pickle. But I’m happy with the ‘more, the merrier’ philosophy on this one.

– – CONCLUSION – – NEMESIS is as close as you can get to an official Alien board game. Everything on that board is trying to kill you, maybe including the other players. The game makes everything difficult, but in a good way. Sure, player elimination is a big cloud hanging over the experience, but everything else about the game, from the production to the challenge makes this a couple of hours well spent with the right friends.

Review #0223