We’ve been playing Nemesis on game night for awhile now; we’ve dealt with chest-bursting aliens, aliens that force mutations on you until you die, and tonight, aliens that drive you insane.
“Every spaceship has a voice; a melody of machinery and subsystems its crew learns intimately during long travels. The problem is, ever since the last mission our ship sounds WRONG. There’s something foul in the way it’s speaking to us. Barely audible murmurs. Strange whispers no machine could make. The dark corridors and vast halls almost seem to SING.
Some of us have tried to locate sources of this interferences, but they always seemed two steps ahead. Stalked by their never-ending presence, we soon started cracking. Our engineer has cut some words on his flesh. When we asked why, he replied:‘Incandescent secrets need to be written in blood’. Then, our navigator took a spacewalk without her suit. When we pulled her in, her entire face frozen and cracked, she grinned in a way I will never forget.
Now, it got even worse. Noises turned into voices, sharing tales of slaughter and terror. They do not run from us anymore. They encircle us and herd us through the ship to some dark purpose. I need to UNDERSTAND them before it’s too late. I put my hand on the pistol grip, looking at the backs of my last two crewmembers. I see dark mysteries swirling under their skulls. It would only take two bullet holes to release them…”
Nemesis: Void Seekers is one of the very many Nemesis expansions we own. There’s as many or more that we don’t own, like the one set on a Mars base (“Nemesis: Lockdown”). In the space ones, the setup is usually the same. We waken from hypersleep; a crew member is dead at our feet; the ship is struggling to make a last jump to somewhere, perhaps where we want to go, or perhaps it will simply explode. And something is on the ship with us.
In tonight’s game, it was Void Seekers — incorporeal creatures that can pass through closed doors and solid bulkheads, always at the edge of your vision.
Void Seekers introduces an insanity track for each player, and a deck of panic cards that can drive you past your breaking point, whether or not you glimpse an alien. When the aliens do manifest, they are are strange, twisted creatures. At least the xenomorphs and the carnomorphs looked like they could exist in our universe.
In the base game and the previous expansions, aliens tend to hatch and begin to infest the ship. We, the players, are trying to complete our objectives — which can be cooperative or antagonistic, though we most often choose the ones that don’t end with killing everyone else in the ship. The confrontations end with us face to face with the alien queen. We don’t have any hope of killing all the aliens, but we don’t have to. We just have to survive.
The Void Seeders, though, don’t need our blood, just our sanity. Panic feeds them. (Although we did discover one of their weaknesses tonight, which gave us an edge in the final couple encounters).
The pilot had to find an alien egg and analyze it. The soldier … not sure what her objective was. The medic’s objective was to send a signal and jump to our solar system. Mine was to send a signal and bring home the dead comrade whose body greeted us as we came out of hypersleep. The medic was driven to self-harm through insanity and died just minutes away from the jump to light speed. (I thought this game should have a content warning for that). The soldier and pilot left the ship in an escape pod and survived.
When I entered hypersleep, the engines were on fire from a fuel explosion; the starboard aft quarter of the ship was already on fire from a mishap in the comms room. As the last survivor on the ship, I knew there was a good chance the ship would disintegrate in the light speed jump… but it didn’t. It and I survived,
Next week, we wrap up Nemesis with Aftermath. A lost starship has just jumped into the Sol system, on fire, with distress beacons blaring a warning to all local traffic. Earth is recruiting a crew to explore the derelict and find out what happened… Is that our starship?
