Nemesis by Adam Kwapiński is a game locked in a large, dark box, promising epic gameplay. Incredibly atmospheric graphics can give us some idea of what we will face. As the ship’s crew, who have memory problems after a long hibernation, we will try to achieve two goals: survive and complete an unknown mission.
The almost 30-page manual may put off less advanced players. You have to go through a large number of more difficult and simpler rules, actions and their consequences, as well as markings and symbols. Fortunately, the rules are described quite clearly, and the biggest problem is remembering them, not the level of difficulty.
To visualize what a sample game might look like, it is worth reading page five of the manual. It is a record of a message from the captain, one of the available characters, who warns against attempts to open his life capsule and study alien creatures. It tells the story of the events from waking up and finding the dead body of a crew member, traversing corridors and rooms, remembering about the commissioned mission, to fighting space creatures and escaping ending with taking a stowaway in his own body. This is exactly the scenario that could happen to you. But that’s just one of many possibilities.
Prepare well
Preparing the board takes a long time. We have to lay out a lot of components, e.g. room tiles and exploration tokens, a coordinate card, engine tokens and escape pods. Also within reach should be the intruder board with egg markers and weakness cards, the bag with alien tokens, markers (fires, malfunctions, noises, ammo, status, doors, crew bodies), decks of cards (items, events, intruder attack, contamination, deep wounds), combat and noise dice, and the most impressive in the game – figures of cosmic creatures.
There are still player boards to be prepared. Each player receives a backpack (card stand), a reference card, a figure and a deck of the selected character, three items, and a personal and corporate goal, from which one must be selected at the appropriate moment.
Although it takes time to assemble all the elements, everything is logically arranged on the ship and makes sense. The cockpit is at the front, engine rooms with engines at the rear. We wake up in a hibernation cabin, and among the rooms that we will have to explore, there are, for example, a canteen, a laboratory, a propulsion control center, a communication room or a decontamination chamber. Their arrangement is unknown until we step on the tile for the first time, turning it face up.
Kill, repair or run away?
The actions that we can perform are also logically related to what real passengers of a spaceship possessed by alien creatures could do, i.e. they consist of: moving to the adjacent room, picking up a heavy object, trading, assembling a homemade, shooting and hand-to-hand combat. In addition to these basic actions, we also have at our disposal actions assigned to the rooms in which we are located, as well as from action cards held in our hand and item cards on the base.
Most activities have a cost, although some are free. You pay by discarding cards from your hand, which is useful when you have unneeded cards at a given moment, but very tedious if you have to decide whether the valuable ones will be currency or a good move in the game for you.
space survival
Nemesisis a co-op title, but a more accurate term would be: a survival game. This means that if we risk our own death by helping another player, we can say that we don’t have the right cards in hand to go to him and win a fight with some monster. In fact, it all depends on what mission we finally chose. The common goal for everyone is to survive and reach Earth, but someone’s objective card may dictate a change of destination, e.g. to Mars. If we manage to survive, we have a second condition to fulfill. It could be getting rid of a specific character or being the sole survivor. Of course, we can’t pounce on a crewmate outright, but leaving him with the intruder queen, a white lie about the state of the engines, or a promise to wait in an escape pod
In Nemesis, we have a lot of freedom in choosing activities. We know what the goal is, but the path to it can be very different. It’s worth collecting items, but for that we need to discover rooms. Entering a new room can summon aliens, and you will need these finds to fight them or heal yourself. So what to bet on?
We also need to make sure that we are heading towards Earth. No point in going to the cockpit with the whole pack, so let’s just send one person to check where we’re going. But will he tell us the truth? Maybe this one crew member is going to go to Mars? It’s the same with engines. At least two out of three must be functional. But maybe the player who went to check them out doesn’t care about the survival of the rest of the group, because his goal is to be the sole survivor? Pods are a selfish but effective way to escape intruders, but seeing us heading towards them, someone might go to the control room and shut them down for the good of the group.
And these are just attempts to achieve goals. Let’s add to this beautiful figurines of cosmic beings. They have different stages of development, so we would prefer to meet the larva, not the queen. Unfortunately, aliens move through technical corridors, so we don’t know what will jump out at us until it does. Translating it into understandable language – if a second noise marker would be placed in the same corridor, it is taken instead, and we draw a token from the bag. Depending on the drawn symbol, a larva, a crawler, an adult, a sire or a queen will appear. Fighting the monarch is difficult and often the best solution is to run away, but how beautiful it looks on the board! For the pleasure of looking at the figurines, I could walk around and make noise so that as many intruders as possible would appear on the table.
Dying is… boring
Wychwalam Nemesisfor epic gameplay, wonderful miniatures, atmospheric performance and great translation into the board of actions and decisions that could be made by real members of the crew of a spaceship. But does the game have any downsides? In my opinion, the biggest drawback is the possibility of dying early in the game and sitting out the rest of the time watching how other players have fun. Of course, we try to survive and that’s what most of our moves lead to, but the cards and tokens drawn are random, so we can be defeated before we have a chance to defend ourselves against it. There is a variant where the first person to drop out of the game takes control of the intruders and starts playing against the crew members. It’s a good idea, but it only takes one player. Others, unfortunately, have to wait for the end of the game.
I recommend Nemesis to all fans of Alien , because the atmosphere of the cosmic struggle for survival and the dark ship hiding monsters is very strongly felt. I’m an anti-co-op fan, but in this case we have so many different things to do; perhaps we have mutually exclusive goals and, above all, action and item cards that others cannot see, and attempts to control other characters of a potential alpha player will fail. Only we have a full picture of our character’s capabilities. And all actions, even creating a failure in a room or closing a capsule to someone, can be creatively explained.
Unfortunately, in order to enjoy playing Nemesis , we must already have some experience in board games. If you only know simple party or family titles, a large number of components and a long manual will not encourage you, but will spoil the first contact with the game. In this case, it is best to sit at the table with someone who already knows the rules and is able to help you.
I watched the development of the crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter and from the very beginning I was rooting for the Polish author, who managed to encourage players around the world to support him. Nemesis is a great board game. If you are not afraid of becoming a potential carrier of a new intruder, try to survive on a ship full of aliens.
Thank you to the Gandalf store for providing a copy of the game for review .
