This was it, our last night on that doomed starship drifting far from any stars. One last hyperjump to safety.
We’ve been playing Nemesis, the space survival horror board game, for months now, working our way through the many expansions.
The basic idea is simple. It’s the Alien franchise. In the base game, the crew of a starship wakes up from hypersleep to find a crewmate dead on the deck in front of them, body torn apart by… something. The ship has sounded an alarm, and initially the players — who all take on crew roles, such as pilot, captain, scientist and so on — are trying to find out why they were woken, and fixing the incomprehensibly broken and burned equipment.
It’s not too long into a game where someone first discovers the aliens; exactly which alien and how they kill you depends on the expansion. Once an alien is discovered, everyone chooses a personal objective from the two given at the start of the game — a corporate objective, something The Corporation has asked you to do, which is usually something the rest of the crew wouldn’t like. Or a personal objective, which is usually, “survive”, or some variation thereof.
Through our plays, we have been adding and adding more difficulty, culminating with the Aftermath expansion.
In Aftermath, scientists on Earth detected a coldsleep freighter jumping into the solar system. It doesn’t make contact; it just silently drifts. An expedition is sent to investigate — and then standard hijinks ensue, but NOW you have alerts that must be cleared within two turns or the whole game ends.
And then in the mode we played last night, we have all that, except we’re back in space again, but now we have to deal with the alerts along with everything else.
The CEO of the Corporation was along for this ride; his special ability let him review all our corporate objectives. His personal objective was to study the aliens and look for weaknesses. My corporate objective was to find and clear the hive and its queen; my personal objective was to see the ship reached Mars.
I was lucky, there. I (playing the pilot) headed straight for the bridge and found the ship was already programmed to head to Mars; I then went to the engine status room and found that all the ship’s engines were functioning perfectly. Unfortunately, things went pear shaped after that.
Aliens poured out of everywhere. I got seriously wounded, slimed, and contaminated — four times over. Trying to get into an evacuation pod in that state would be fatal, so I had to help repair the ship’s automated surgery and emergency rooms to clear the contamination (I had an alien larva in me, among other issues) and deal with some of my injuries. An alert had us required to check the evacuation hatches. Andy’s soldier died. Ally’s character (can’t remember the class) ducked into an evacuation pod and was out of the game. With aliens everywhere and the CEO about to escape on the shuttle, I managed to make it to an evac pod.
And then an alert happened, requiring Kasul’s CEO to bring two eggs onto the shuttle. He might have made it — but then we got an event that sent malfunctions throughout the ship. And we still might have made it, but then all the malfunctions caught on fire, and the ship exploded.
The ship didn’t make it to Mars, so I didn’t meet my objective. Plus, I was still infected, so I likely still would have died. The CEO went down with the ship. Ally’s character was the only survivor.
And that’s it for Nemesis, for now. Kasul tells us the next board game is “In Too Deep”, apparently about psychic FBI detectives battling corruption both outside and inside their minds.
