Spoiler alert: Nemesis is the legally-distinct board game of the movie “Alien”.
You awaken with your fellow crewmembers to find yourself on a ship that is just limping through space, perhaps just hours from exploding. A dead crewmember, chest split open, lies bloody in their hibernation pod. The aftereffects of FTL travel and coldsleep have left you struggling with temporary amnesia. You’re not sure what happened. Something… happened. Something you slept through. Now the ship is on course to nobody-knows-where, the engines are offline, and you are being hunted.
Players choose among archetypes — Pilot, Scientist, Engineer, Scout, Captain, Soldier (and Medic in an expansion pack). Each have their area of expertise. Every player is dealt two Objective cards, from which they choose one, and keep hidden. This is their unique win condition. Their win conditions may or may not be compatible with other people’s win conditions, and their profession’s abilities may favor some objectives over others.
The game is semi-cooperative, but if your win condition demands that Player 2 dies, well, Player 2 better not be surprised when the doors in the room they are in suddenly lock as an Intruder larva squirms across the deck.
I chose the Pilot as my character. My unlockable special abilities were to unlock an escape pod early, and to be able to change ship course more easily. My first choice for objectives were to either be the sole survivor or make sure player 2 died — I was player 2. My other choice was for me and at least one other player survive.
Kasul chose Scientist. His chosen objective was to survive and to bring the corpse of the crew member we found dead with him for proper burial. Drew was Captain. His objective was to bring the ship safely home to Mars. I don’t recall what Ally’s objective was; I missed the end of the game, as Drew’s pet snake had escaped and we needed to extract it from the radiators where it was hiding.
I guess that could easily have been a scene from the game.
Since everyone has different objectives, you’re never really sure if your fellow crew are on your side. Since everyone has temporary amnesia, everyone has forgotten the layout of the ship. Rooms have to be explored; they usually contain items that can be used as-is or combined with other items to make improvised weapons or condition cures. Most rooms have a specific function, like putting out ship fires, setting the ship self-destruct, healing the sick and so on. Usually, these rooms start off disabled and must be repaired before they can function.
It can seem weird to have to repair the generator room before you can set the generator to self-destruct, but that is how it goes.
Characters have different combat abilities, so while the soldier and the captain might want to meet the Intruders head-on, other crew might prefer to sneak around and try not to alert the monsters while they do what they must to survive.
To finish my objective, I had to go to the Fire Control Room to grab the device that unlocks the escape pods, head to an escape pod, and get in it. The room outside the escape pod was on fire and had an adult Intruder in it, but I managed to give it the slip and get into the escape pod, just a little singed.
At that point, I was out of the game, and all I could do was encourage someone else to claim the spot in the seat next to me. Drew eventually did; he’d seen the ship was on course to Mars, so he felt safe. Unfortunately for him, two of the engines were damaged, and so the ship exploded and never made it to Mars.
Ally and Kasul were slimed and under constant attack. Ally died, so her objective wasn’t completed, but her death unlocked all the escape pods, allowing Kasul to get free of the ship with his heavy load. He was severely contaminated, but luckily was not himself infected with an alien larvae, and so he lived.
It’s possible for everyone to meet their objectives and win the game; Kasul and I both won.
The crawl through the ship, opening up rooms, closing others, always pursued by aliens is just a fertile ground for storytelling. The movie Alien opened slowly, and bad decisions and betrayals led to the crew largely dying to the aliens. In Nemesis, you awaken onto a ship that has already been infected. As the game progresses, the alien eggs turn into larva and into adults, creepers, breeders, and if you let the game go on too long, the alien queen.
There is a limit on the number of moves in the game. Setting the self-destruct sequence limits them even more. You can spend action cards on actions, or for movement or activating a room’s abilities. Spending more action cards lets you move quietly, important to avoiding alien encounters, but sometimes you can’t afford to be quiet. You start with weapons, but most can only be used a limited number of times. Mine, for instance, could only be used twice before I had to go hunting for charges. I elected to avoid combat as much as possible.
It’s a fun game, and we’ll be playing it a few more times. My one issue is that players can meet their objectives early, and then they have nothing to do. I could have run around and helped deal with the intruders, or fix the engines or whatever, but since I didn’t know anyone else’s objectives, I couldn’t know that what I did was helping. And, one of their objectives could be making sure I never saw Earth again. Best to complete my objective and peace out, and that is what I did.
