What’s That Sound?
As you slowly regain consciousness, you become aware of a red glow enveloping you. You begin to recollect things. You’re on a ship. You’re part of a crew. You were in hibernation. But that sound is deafening. Is that the alarm?
As you step out of your stasis pod into the hibernatorium, you become even more aware of your surroundings. You’re now sure that’s the alarm. The red emergency lights bathing everything in crimson are a definite tell. Your crew mates are also emerging from their pods. But, wait. Is that?
One of your crew mates has been removed from their pod, and their body lies cold, lifeless, and mangled on the metal floor. Your mind is suffering from short-term amnesia from the deep sleep, so when one of your crew suggests that you all should investigate, this comes with some pangs of anxiety. You’re not even sure you remember these hallways.
The engine room and bridge are simple enough, since one is always in the back, and the other is always in the front. But the locations of the rest of the rooms are fuzzy right now. Everyone else is already going their separate ways, so you pick a dark hallway and move forward.
It was a short trip before you reached the armory. While here, you do some searching, and you manage to find some useful ammo and a weapon. You may need these. You press on, but on your trip through the next corridor, you swear you hear something moving in the vents. You can’t see anything, but the smell of grease and death are thick in the air, and every breath leaves a metallic taste in your mouth.
As you keep moving forward, and you pass through a couple more rooms, you begin to feel alone and in danger. What happened on this ship? A loud crackle breaks the silence, and the familiar, digitized voice of your ship’s onboard computer rings over the intercom, through the humid darkness: “Destination coordinates changed. Authorization code 18125.” That’s your crew’s scientist. Why did he change the destination? Where were we going, and where are we going now?
You pick up your pace and begin running through the halls toward the bridge. When you get to the next room you hear an immense crash as the lights on one side of the room explode in sparks, then go dark. You begin to recollect yourself when you hear it. A sound like a slithering, sticky mass in front of you.
Your adrenaline kicks in, and your hands begin to shake as you fumble for your flashlight. Turning it on, you raise it toward the noise. You wish you hadn’t. You’ve never seen anything like this. Its black, slimy carapace is highlighted in an almost fluorescent blue trim like a poisonous animal. Long, sickle-like blades protrude from where its hands would be. Its teeth are like jagged, metallic razors spilling out of its drooling mouth.
Is this what killed your crew mate? How many of these are there? Where did this come from? Questions begin to flood your mind as you raise your weapon to defend yourself. But it’s already too late. You feel the impact of a long blade tearing through your suit, into your stomach, pinning you against the wall. The beast leans in, and almost smiles at you as your vision begins to go dark. No one is going to make it off The Nemesis alive.
So…Alien, Right?
Kind of. You can definitely see the inspiration and the parallels to some other IP’s, like Alien, The Thing, or Dead Space. Nemesis, however, is its own beast. From the very onset of the game, seeing a dead crewmate on the floor of the ship’s hibernatorium, you know something isn’t good. The intensity is there the moment you take your first steps.
The big bad in Nemesis is a hostile group of creatures known in-game as Intruders. They come in various sizes and types, from small, slithering larvae, to her majesty, The Queen. However, as dangerous as these beasties are—and they are very dangerous—they aren’t the only threat on board this ill-fated ship. As if fighting for your life against massive, exo-skeletal bugs wasn’t enough, you’ll also be juggling trust in your crewmates.
At the beginning of the game, each player is given two Objective Cards. The Corporate Objectives will have you interacting with the other players in some fashion, while the Personal Objectives are better for players who like to follow their own path. Some Objective Cards will have more than one objective option on them, and some objectives aren’t very friendly or cooperative. As with most games, these objectives are kept hidden, and at the appearance of the first Intruder, players will decide which one of their two Objective Cards they’ll chase.
This means that you can never be too sure if you can trust the actions of the other players. Why did Player 2 change the destination of the ship, and why are they not telling anyone where we are going? What is Player 4 fiddling around with at Engine #1? Are they shutting it down or repairing it? Players can be as honest or as dishonest about their intentions and actions as they wish, and this amps up the tension to a whole new level. There will be piercing stares across the table as players try to figure each other out and decide which team everyone is on.
The Gameplay
In Nemesis, you’ll begin by simply picking a direction and hoping for the best. Whether you decide to travel with a teammate or go alone is totally up to you and the other player(s). I’d like to say I strongly recommend using the buddy system, but it can actually hurt you in this game because noise is a factor. The larger the group is, the more noise they make, and if you can hear yourself, other things might hear you, too. The game does mitigate this a bit by allowing you to discard extra cards in hand in order to move quietly.
Be cautious in discarding cards or holding onto them, as hand management is a big part of Nemesis. Each character will have a small, unique deck of 10 Action Cards. During the beginning of the Player Phase, players will draw five. These cards can either be used for their abilities, discarded to pay for Basic Actions (such as moving, attacking, or picking up an item), discarded when a player passes to make room for new cards, or kept to be used in the next Player Phase. Having so many different options makes hand planning and management a very strategic part of the game, and the wrong choice or acting too hastily can really make life difficult in future phases.
There are advantages and disadvantages to keeping or discarding cards in favor of new ones at the start of a new round. Keeping a card in hand during the discard step will allow you to save that card for use at a more opportune time. However, since your discard pile gets shuffled to become your new draw pile when your draw pile goes empty, that also means you could be risking not drawing a much more useful card when it’s needed most. This makes it very important to read the situation carefully and consider your decision wisely.
Each Basic Action, Room Action, Item Action, and Action Card comes with a cost. This cost can range from 0-2, and is paid by discarding that many cards from your hand. While this makes hand management much more difficult, it’s certainly made worse by Contamination Cards. These cards are basically junk cards acquired through encounters with the Intruders that are difficult to get rid of and take up space in your deck. They aren’t considered Action Cards, so while you can still discard them at the end of the Player Phase with other Action Cards, you cannot spend them to pay the cost of other actions.
The Enemy
While the crew is busy exploring the ship, monsters lurk in the dark recesses. While providing jump scares in a board game is likely impossible, this game gets close to it. Too much noise in the same corridor will alert Intruders to a player’s location. Nemesis does a great job at making their appearance sudden and menacing. One second you’ll have an empty room, then the next second, there is a towering monster in front of you. Sometimes it runs in from a noisy corridor, and sometimes it actually comes out of the vents.
The monsters in this game don’t play around. They’ll do a lot of damage and add Contamination Cards to your deck, and they’re not easy to kill. Add to that the fact that ammunition for weapons is in very short supply, and what you end up with is spending more time trying to get away from these things than actually fighting them. That, however, is its own problem, as the ship can get overrun very quickly. To balance this, the game does provide players with ways to push the Intruders into escaping without actually doing damage, such as activating the fire suppression system in a room with one or more enemies or using a decoy to lure them into another room.
The ship can also become quite the enemy, too, as you’ll find rooms covered in Intruder slime (or an Intruder can cover you in it). This will add a “Slimed” status effect to your character. Slimed characters find it more difficult to move around and tend to make more noise. Rooms can also be on fire when discovered, and these fires can spread to explored and unexplored adjacent rooms if not dealt with. Some rooms will be malfunctioning and will need repaired in order to operate. Too much fire, or too many malfunctions, will result in the ship being destroyed, effectively ending your game.
There are also two trackers in the game. The typical Time Tracker (like a round tracker) and the Self-Destruct Timer. Once the Time Tracker gets to a certain point in the game, the stasis pods become unlocked, and players only have a few rounds to make it back into stasis before the ship auto jumps to whatever destination has been set, killing everything on board that is not in stasis. If Self-Destruct has been initiated, players will only have a few rounds to make it to an escape pod before the ship explodes.
Your final enemy in Nemesis is you. You may make it out alive. You may complete your quest. You may even successfully initiate self-destruct and secure a spot on an escape pod and be ready for that little celebratory dance. But don’t get too excited. Do you remember all those Contamination Cards in your Action Deck? Well, they may or may not have been hiding something. Each card is encrypted with a sort of “code” and must be deciphered by inserting it into the supplied Scanner. Okay, the cards may or may not have the word “INFECTED” on them, and the Scanner is just a red screen that filters the red color off the card so it can be read. But if you insert your Contamination Cards into the Scanner, and at least one does say “INFECTED” somewhere, your character will need to undergo a closer examination, and if they are truly infected, they die, and you lose the game.
Production
Anyone who has ever owned an Awaken Realms game already knows what I’m about to say here, but for those who are unfamiliar with their work, Nemesis is almost perfect as far as production goes. The miniatures are highly detailed and exciting to look at. The use of heavy blacks gives the board and card art the feel of moving around a dark, greasy, and deadly ship. The subtle pops of vibrant, almost neon, colors are a real treat on the eyes. The cardboard tokens are all durable and well-printed, and the tray insert is very functional.
The corridors and vents on the game board can be a little bit tricky to see, especially in low-lighting, due to the aforementioned use of heavy blacks. The game also has you using the same small, red cubes (think of the Red Viruses from Pandemic) for both ammo and damage. The ammo works out fine, as it’s just cubes on a card, but the damage has you, sometimes precariously, stacking these cubes onto the base of the Intruder mini. There are a couple of 5 Red Cube tokens thrown in, but these won’t get used much (mostly out of inconvenience), and if you need a third 5 Cube token, you’re out of luck. Bottom line, if you get more than, say, two cubes on any mini, it’s best you don’t sneeze.
The real beast, and what will likely turn a lot of people away, is the up front cost. Keep in mind, I’ve only set this game up maybe four times, and I haven’t had the chance to experiment with better approaches. The instructions to set up Nemesis covers two pages of the rulebook. The writing isn’t large, and there aren’t many pictures, either. It’s just the typical game board image with numbered sections so you can follow along. This is one of the best games I’ve played, and definitely a show-off game, but be prepared to spend about 45 minutes to an hour for the game, and another 20+ minutes per player just in setup alone. I, personally, don’t mind a large setup, but I’m also not blind to that being a deciding factor for a lot of people.
There is a lot to shuffle and sort through. Before you can even play, you’ll be shuffling and dealing a combination of 18 decks of cards, stacks of tokens, and Room Tiles. In addition to this, there is a draw bag for Intruder Tokens, which will be used to both add random danger to the ship and also for spawning random Intruders. Different amounts of different token types will be added based on player count. Then there’s the character draft, which is how players will choose their characters.
In the midst of the grand total of 20 setup steps (officially, but some of the steps have multiple steps within them), you’ll also be wrestling tabletop real estate. Nemesis, much like Mega Civilization and Empires of the Void II, takes up a lot of space, and at no time is this more evident than during setup. Unless you come equipped with an extra end table or two, expect to have no choice but to stack components you’re not using or not using anymore on top of components you haven’t set up yet. It’s going to look very, very messy before it looks like a fully functional board game, and looking for components you set aside will definitely add to the setup time.
Final Thoughts
Nemesis is fantastic! Awaken Realms knocked it out of the park with this one, and it definitely secured my place as one of their fanboys until further notice. If it weren’t for time constraints (remember the setup), I’d be bringing this game to the table as often as possible. Few games feel like a movie could be made about each playthrough, but this is certainly one of them.
If you’re a fan of the Alien IP, Nemesis is for you. If you like sci-fi, Nemesis is for you. If you like anything with a dominating, stunning table-presence, Nemesis is for you. If you can look at Nemesis, and a part of you thinks you may enjoy it, I strongly encourage you to find a local gaming group or download one of the many fantastic mods on Tabletop Simulator and give it a shot. Just don’t worry about screaming. I heard somewhere no one can hear you when you do that in space, anyway.
Nemesis details
- Designer: Adam Kwapiński
- Artists: Andrzej Półtoranos, Ewa Labak, Michał Oracz, Patryk Jędraszek, Paweł Samborski, Piotr Foksowicz, Piotr Gacek
- Publishers: Arclight Games, Asmodee, Awaken Realms, Cranio Creations, Delta Vision Publishing, Funforge, Galápagos Jogos, Geekach Games, Hobby World, Korea Boardgames, Korea Boardgames co., Ltd., MINDOK, Rebel Sp. z o.o., Rebel Studio
- Release Date: 2018
- Player count : 1 - 5
- Age range : 12+
- Time range : 90 - 180 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Campaign / Battle Card Driven, Cooperative Game, Dice Rolling, Hand Management, Hidden Roles, Interrupts, Modular Board, Player Elimination, Semi-Cooperative Game, Solo / Solitaire Game, Team-Based Game, Traitor Game, Variable Player Powers
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