Published by Awakened Realms in 2018, Nemesis is a love letter to all things sci-fi horror, with the most clear inspiration Ridley Scott’s iconic 1979 Alien. To be clear: I love this game. It is what I would call an infinite story generator. In one game, you will find yourself racing to destroy all the eggs in the aliens nest, only to escape just on time. The next game, you’ll find yourself sprinting through constantly expanding fire trying to reach your escape pod, just for it to eject at the very last second. Every game I have played has played out fully different. I’ve seen games end within the first 20 minutes, while others have gone for close to 2 hours. Even when you are fully out of the game, your heart still pounds as you watch your fellow crewmates roll for a pivotal moment: or join you in death.

Each player takes the role of a crewmember on board of the spaceship Nemesis. These roles include: Captain, Pilot, Scout, Scientist, Soldier, and Mechanic. Each role playing different enough to be distinct, their flavor expressed through a slightly different set of cards and starting equipment. For instance, the Soldier has more combat centric cards, while the Mechanic is much better at keeping the ship intact.

Next, let’s take a look at how a character functions, and how turns are taken.

This is the Soldiers character board. On the left we can see the action cards deck. Each deck is comprised of 10 cards and at the start of each round, the players draw back up to their maximum hand size of 5. Each player gets 2 actions a turn. Next to the action cards deck, is the basic actions; above the first few is a white box with the number 1. This means that to perform this action, lets say in this case it’s the move action, you must discard 1 card. If we look below, we can see that the careful movement action costs 2 cards. You can do the same action twice in your turn. We’ll get more into why these costs are important later, but keep them in the back of your mind for now.

If we take a look at what one of the action cards looks like, we an see that similar white box symbol. Take this Search card for instance.

It has a 0 in its box. So its only cost is playing itself. In addition, if you look at the top right of Search, you can see a gun icon that is crossed out. This means that this card cannot be used while in combat, where as if it has that same gun not crossed out, it may be used in combat. Whatever cards the player uses are placed in their discard pile until they run out of cards to draw from in their action cards deck, then they reshuffle their discard pile back into their action cards deck.

To recap, a turn is taken by doing 2 actions, where your main resource is the cards you discard. Once you ditch a card, it could take some time to see it again which gives these choices a lot of value. I might not need to destroy a door now, but that doesn’t mean next turn will be the same. Now that we know how a turn is taken, lets look at what a players goals are, exploration and how these all tie together.

The characters wake up from hibernation to find one of their crew members already dead. Something is wrong and it’s time to act. What is their objective though? This is where it gets interesting. Each player starts with 2 secret objectives. One labeled Personal and the other Corporate. These classifications really only matter for flavor, but it’s a nice touch to feel more invested.

As long as you complete your given objective, you win the game. Unless you die, then you lose anyways. You’ll probably die. Then, once the first alien appears, all players discard one of these objectives. One objective might ask the player to escape with an egg, while another will ask you to ensure a specific player doesn’t survive. This is the point of no return for how you’ll play the rest of the game. It could happen on the first turn or seven turns in the unlikely event that things are going really well.

The board itself is comprised of 16 randomly placed, face down room tiles. In addition the cockpit, the 3 engine rooms, and the hibernatorium where you start are static rooms in every game and clearly visible. The only way to discover which room is which, is usually by moving from room to room. So if your objective requires you to find the nest and steal an egg? Better start exploring. Have the egg already and need to use an escape pod? Better find an evacuation station. If only it was that simple however. Every room has an Exploration Token, a one time event which reveals itself the first time a room is entered. It could be as simple as a door closing behind you; but usually it’s something you don’t want like the room being on fire. These tokens also tell you how many items are in the room.

If we look at this example, we can see that this tile is the Comms Room. It has a 2 card action that allows you to “Send the Signal,” which is one of the objectives you can get. We can also see that it has a little blue computer symbol, which interacts with other cards and events. Then it has the numbers 0-4, which represent the amount of items, which is shown on exploration token along with a gear symbol. This gear symbol means that the room is malfunctioning and the room action can not be used until repaired. Lastly, the room is yellow at the top, which represents what kind of items the player can search for. The other two types being red and green.

Now that we understand actions and exploration a bit better, we can talk about the part of the game which really stresses me out. Walking. If you notice on the board, each room is connected by a series of corridors labeled 1-4. When you take a move action and enter a room without another character or alien in it, you roll this evil object:

This D10 is not like normal d10s. Oh no. Don’t let it fool you, this was made by dark forces. It’s called the noise die! This tells you in which corridor you made noise. If I were to roll 1, I would place one of these little yellow tokens on that corridor.

There are two special rolls you can make on this dice however. The first one is the blessed X. You make no noise. Unless you’re slimed (you’re probably slimed) then it acts as the second special icon: the scratches. What do these do, you ask? End Runs. They place a noise marker in every corridor connected to your room; unless there’s an alien in an adjacent room, then it enters your room! What fun!

Once two of these are placed in the same corridor, you remove every noise marker that is connected to the room you are in and an alien spawns. How do you determine what kind of alien? Well we need to explore what a round is fully comprised of first to answer that question.

A round of Nemesis is made up of 2 phases. The player phase; the portion of the game where each player takes 2 actions. Then there’s the event phase, which takes place after each player has taken their turn. In this phase you follow these steps:

1. Move Time Track: There are 15 rounds total, this just progresses the game. After the 15th turn, the game ends. If someone (Probably Daniel) has started the self destruct sequence too, move that time track up as well. I think you can figure out what happens when you reach the end of this track.
2. Next, all of the aliens attack. They draw a card from their deck, and if that card has a matching symbol to the alien, the attack lands, and you follow its instructions.
3. All aliens take fire damage if they are in a room that is on fire. Simple enough.
4. You resolve an event card, which tell you which aliens move where when out of combat, and then something random happens. My personal favorite is when the fires spread, that usually ends games pretty fast.
5. Lastly is, and this is in all caps like the game presents it, because I want it to be just as menacing. INTRUDER BAG DEVELOPMENT.

You see, during set up you place a specified amount of alien tokens into a neat little bag from the depths of the abyss. The types of tokens are linked to the different alien types. The alien types in order of “I’m going to die” are: Larva, Creeper, Adult, Breeder, Queen.

During INTRUDER BAG DEVELOPMENT you draw one of these tokens out of the bag at random and do what this fun little chart says:

Some of these aren’t too bad, at least at first. While others, like the adult and breeder, can cause a full meltdown. One moment, the ship is clear of alien’s; were all happy, doing our objectives without a worry. There’s a few noise markers around you, but hey, chances are you’ll pull a larva token from the bag. Then you all make your noise rolls because Daniel pulled an adult from the bag, and just like that: 3 adults. You see, in addition, this is same bag that you draw the aliens out of normally when you make too much noise to find out what type finds you.

Great, now we know what the purpose of the bag is and how it makes pulling tokens out of it a nightmare for everyone at the table. But it’s not over! When we do determine what alien finds us to attack, we look on the back side of the token!

See that number? If you have less cards in your hand than that number, it gets to surprise attack you! Note that this is on your turn, so the attack step of the event phase still happens! Did I mention that if you leave a room with an alien it gets a chance to attack you? Because that’s also a thing. It’s pretty brutal. How do attacks work anyways?

Well, it’s actually pretty simple. For the alien whose making you upset, they draw a card from their deck, you check what alien symbols are on it, and if it corresponds with the alien attacking then it hits and resolve the bottom effect. Otherwise, it misses. For the player, it’s only slightly more complicated. When you choose to attack it’s either with a weapon or with your bare hands. A weapon requires ammo, which is limited for everyone but the captain unless you find the correct weapon recharge item but that still takes an action to use, so that just eats up your action economy. To continue, you roll a neat red d6. After that you just follow a chart and depending on the class of alien you either hit or don’t based on the roll. Did you hit? Awesome, draw an alien attack card and check the top left value, if the alien has taken that much total damage it dies.

But ammo is limited, so what about punching the old fashion way? Well ain’t that just the funniest thing. First, you draw a contamination card and put it in your discard pile (We’ll get to this, don’t worry my fellow crewmates.) Then, same as before, you compare your roll to a chart, if you hit awesome, do a wound, and if you miss? You take a serious injury.

But how do wounds work, Josh? You scream at the monitor, forgetting that we’re in space and nobody can hear you. Well it’s simple. There are two kinds of wounds. The first is a light wound, get three of these and you get a serious wound. A serious wound is a card you draw from the appropriately named serious wound deck which gives you a semi-permanent effect. One might be bleeding, where every time you end your turn, you take a light wound. So that’s pretty fun. Once you have three serious wounds, the next damage kills you. You can of course dress a serious wound with a items if you’re lucky enough to find one, but it doesn’t get rid of the wound, it just stops the effect.

Now we need to back up, remember that contamination card I mentioned? Well these come from aliens attacking you, or you punching an alien. They go to your discard pile. and eventually after you shuffle it back into action deck: your hand. Guess what can’t be used to make actions. Contamination cards! So if your hand is suddenly made up of 4 contamination cards and 1 normal card, you better enjoy that single action, you’re about to take buckaroo. You can get rid of contamination cards though! That’s good right? Well, the easiest way is to use the Rest card! Take all the contamination cards in your hand and scan them with this red hero.

It will read on the card a bunch of jumbled words. Once they’re scanned, you get rid of them forever! But wait, yours says INFECTED? In all caps? That can’t be good, right?

Spoiler: It’s not.

Now you get a larva on your character board! Unless you get rid of this thing in surgery (Hope you found that room,) the next time you rest and have an infected card? R.I.P. You’re super dead.

What I’m trying to say here, is that things start to fall apart pretty quickly once combats start happening, and make no mistake, combats will happen. Daniel moves and has a bad noise roll? Alien. Event phase, draw an adult token, Matt and Ryan fail their noise rolls? Aliens, plural. Hey look at that, the 3 aliens we talked about earlier, and now you can’t get to your objective without walking through 3 adults, and next turn, probably 5. Just an extra “Good luck, kid.” Jason, whose goal it is to kill you, left in the last escape pod. You’ll bleed out next turn so, yeah that’s that.

Is this a lot? Yeah. There are so many moving parts in this game it’s actually crazy with so many points for an error in judgement to be made. Never forget that human element too. Your friends objective might not say that you have to die, but I mean, it’d be pretty funny if he used the airlock on you, instantly killing you. At least, that’s what he thinks would be funny. I do too.

That’s the game for the most part. Not everything was covered here, but I want you to experience things like the technical corridor (haha.) for yourself. Or the first time you win only to find out those contamination cards can still kill you at the precipice of victory. Even better is exploring crafting and discovering that flame throwers exist, and yes they work in space.

To top it all off, the sculpts are all super cool. The aliens for example, most of them are really big compared to the characters which just adds to their threatening aura. When that Queen arrives on the table you can’t help but wish you didn’t waste all that assault rifle ammo on the 1 wound larva last turn. While their detail isn’t anything super crazy, I would say you get more than what you’re paying for with these.

If the idea of a game where endless chaos and difficult choices need to be made appeals to you, pick up this game. If you want to experience moments of great triumph, where all odds were beaten, you need to pick up this game. If you want to experience exciting new narratives every time you play a round, please, get this game. This whole review I’ve been trying to find something I genuinely don’t like about the game and I can’t find anything. Maybe I’m just a fan boy, but so be it, this game is sick. I’ve played it a bit over a year now every chance I get and while my friends might be sick of it at this point, I probably play a solo game every other week.

Alas, that’s all I got for you today. I really hope that this review conveyed the exciting downward chaos spiral that is Nemesis. Next time we talk about this game it’ll likely be the expansions, but I need some more time to experience those before I can really dig into them. So while you wait, get out there, play some Nemesis, lose a bunch of time. Or play scout and wonder why your friends are finding the game so hard.

Thanks for reading, see you on Mars!