“Do you know what ‘nemesis’ means?”

“A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.”

Who is Nemesis for?

I’m cynical, but I should get points for being aware of it. That cynicism is what makes me wary of blockbuster Kickstarter productions, having read about many games that look the business, but are functionally a total mess. If a baby could use the game box like a bassinet, I get suspicious of the design. That may not be totally fair, but there are many cases in which an over-emphasis on extravagance or eye candy comes at the detriment of the gameplay.

With that out of the way, a few years ago, I picked up Awaken Realms’ Nemesis with a tax refund. It’s big, it’s expensive, it has huge minis. It’s not the most gratuitous offender of Kickstarter bloat, but playing it feels gratuitous, nonetheless. I played it twice before consigning it to the attic.

I had done my due diligence prior to buying it, reading chunks of the rules, and watching some gameplay. And then we played it. Sometimes games just aren’t a great fit, and you don’t know it until you’ve had a chance to actually play. Oh well.

Now, despite owning a lot of games, I am susceptible to our culture of acquisition. My games are great, but what’s new?? It is not a good quality, and it’s a big problem within the hobby, in general. From time to time, I make a concerted effort to play old games. Sometimes these are old games that I remember fondly, sometimes not so much.

So this week, I played Nemesis again.

I have no idea what put this bug back in my ear, but something must have suggested it to me once again. So I climbed into the sweltering attic and found the huge Nemesis box.

Nemesis was a good fit for this week; it’s a solo gaming week as Kathleen is traveling. I cleared off the Big Table, reread the rules, and was good to go.

Thus far, I’ve played Nemesis at least four times this week, and I have really enjoyed all of my plays.

So what’s changed, exactly?

Well, nothing really, just the player count. Playing Nemesis solo vs two-player (or more) is different for a few reasons, all of which are tied tightly to the Nemesis design.

At it’s heart, Nemesis is a dungeon crawler about disoriented astronauts waking from hypersleep to find their ship disabled and occupied by aggressive alien “intruders.” Now that these unfortunate travelers are awake, it’s their job to figure out which rooms are where on their ship (they forgot, I guess; sleep is hard), make sure the ship is going where it needs to go, and accomplish their own personal objectives along the way.

During gameplay, the ship is randomly setup with facedown rooms, and each player gets two secret objectives, one of which they need to accomplish to win. The game is essentially made up of exploring the ship and trying to accomplish your personal goal, all while trying to not be killed by intruders or by the ship falling into such disrepair that it explodes (!!).

Nemesis is billed as a semi-cooperative game that accommodates 1-5 players. That “semi” part of semi-cooperative makes me very suspicious, as in my experience semi-cooperative games work better in theory than in practice. In order to get the true semi-cooperative nature of Nemesis, you’d need to play with 3+ players—optimally 4 or 5.

But the theory of Nemesis as a semi-cooperative game is fascinating, especially considering Nemesis is intentionally channeling some major Alien (1979)/Aliens (1986) movie vibes—thinking specifically about Burke, Ash, and Weyland Yutani. During the game, player objectives will often be at odds. For example, one player’s objective may say “Ship must go to Venus,” while a different player’s objective may say “Ship must go to Earth.” The cockpit allows, as an action, a player to secretly change the destination coordinates of the ship. And remember, your personal objective is a secret, too.

In a more aggressive take on objectives being at odds, one player’s objective may be that another player not survive the game. That ratcheted up quickly, huh?

Okay enough burying the lead, what’s the beef with Nemesis? Why did it fail the first time through? And how about the headline: Who is Nemesis for?

Threaded throughout Nemesis’ design is randomness; Nemesis is a very random game. Like very, very random.

During setup, the board is seeded randomly, and player objectives are dealt randomly, two pieces of gameplay that drastically alter outcomes. Many objectives will require players to interact with specific rooms on the ship. Sometimes that room is discovered almost immediately; sometimes the room you are searching for is the last tile to be flipped. And to be clear, the ship is big, and moving through it is the most common way to bring intruders down on you. If you’re hoping to rely on simply fighting them off, the game has other plans for you.

Image from BGG user Vojtas.
That intruder is probably just passing through, though soon you’ll be passing through it :-|

Wait, it can’t all be random, can it?

Let’s see:

·         Let’s start small. Many actions are card-driven. You have a small deck tailored for your character, giving certain characters better abilities than others. For example, the mechanic is good at fixin’ stuff, the soldier is good at shootin’ stuff, etc. All strong actions are card based, and you are top-decking your hand each round. So did you finally get to the engine room to fix the engine? Whelp, you didn’t draw your repair card, so I guess you have to wait.

·         Combat is random. When you attack intruders, dice are rolled that have a low probability of hitting anything larger than a larva or creeper (the two lowest ranked intruders of the five types you’ll potentially encounter). You’ll be rolling a lot of misses, especially when fighting an intruder that can really do damage

·         Intruder health is random. If you do hit an intruder, you’ll need to flip a card and see a random health value. If you meet or exceed this value, the intruder is dead. This means that sometimes a Queen can be killed with two measly hits, while an Adult (two steps below a Queen in seniority) can potentially take 5+ hits to take down.

·         Intruder attacks are random. During the intruder attack phase, a card is flipped to reveal which intruder attacks and what they do to you.

·         Wounds are random. If you get attacked and receive a “Serious Wound,” you randomly draw a card that will affect your character in different ways, a few of which are highly punishing. Draw your third serious wound card, and you are dead. Except in some cases when your second serious wound card kills you.

·         Contamination is random. Certain interactions with intruders will introduce Contamination cards into your deck—essentially junk cards that can’t be used and decrease your deck’s efficacy. Each has a block of hidden codes that may contain the word “Infected.” You won’t be able to tell unless you find a specific room and interact with it. If you manage to survive the game but still have a Contamination card in your deck that says “Infected”… surprise! You are dead. You didn’t win, you lost.

·         Noise is random. When moving through the ship, you can either spend one card from your hand to move normally or spend two cards to move “carefully.” Moving always creates noise, and noise never goes away unless you trigger an encounter. When noise is created, you place a noise marker on an adjacent corridor. If you are ever forced to place a second noise marker on a corridor, you resolve an encounter (ie an Intruder appears and potentially attacks you). Normal movement resolves noise with a random die roll, while careful movement means you can place the noise marker in any adjacent corridor you like. Oh, that sounds good? Yes, but…

·         The Intruder Bag is random. There is a chit pull mechanic that both evolves the intruders in the game, making them grow (this is a really cool mechanic, actually), but it can still completely hose you with an intruder encounter. Let’s say you’ve been moving carefully through the ship, you can still draw a chit from this bag that will screw you anyway, forcing you to roll the noise die and bringing an encounter down on you.

·         Events are random. Sometimes, the whole ship just catches on fire or breaks down, either through the event deck or the tokens randomly (!!) seeded on each room during setup. If you’ve got a fire in a handful of rooms, one bad draw from the event deck can blow up the ship. Unsurprisingly, if the ship blows up, you are dead.

·         And the damn ship. I already mentioned this above, but it bears repeating with more detail: the ship is big (it has 16 rooms, I think), and the rooms will be laid out with no rhyme or reason—other than the good rooms are farther away from where you start. Some objectives will require you to find and interact with multiple rooms. Okay, so say you need to send the signal and destroy the ship? In that case, you’ve got to find and interact with:

o   The Comms Room (send the signal)

o   The Generator Room (initiate self-destruct sequence) or the Engine Rooms (at least two different rooms—sabotage two engines to blow up the ship)

o   If you opted to go to the Engine Rooms instead of the Generator Room to guarantee the ship blows up—hey at least the Engine Rooms are face up on the board—then you also need to find the Hatch Control System Room (unlock the escape pods)

o   Finally the Evacuation Section Room (enter the escape pod). There’s also a required noise roll before entering the pod, so hopefully you don’t have noise markers all around you or entering the escape pod will fail. Womp womp.

o   Remember, you have find these rooms, you have limited turns, you’re potentially being chased by aliens, and other crew members might be trying to kill you or (worse?) undo what you just did.

I’m sure there are other things I’m overlooking, but frankly it’s harder to think of a mechanic at play here that is not random. Almost everything in this game is random. I think the room-searching aspect bothers me the most because moving in Nemesis is dangerous. And the way the noise tokens work, you are incentivized to not ever double-back on your own path, because that is even more dangerous, and it will almost guarantee an encounter. But you are looking for specific rooms, so you have to keep moving, and you need to hit as many rooms as you can, but the more rooms you find, the more problems you uncover. Fires will start, malfunctions will spread, intruders will spawn.

have some rooms! yes, it’s sideways. I particularly like “You are Slimed!”

DIDN’T YOU SAY YOU LIKE NEMESIS NOW? aka The Caveat Party

Yes, that’s the thing, I played it four or five times this week. Yes, I do like it. I think it’s really fun and kind of hilarious. During one play, there was fire everywhere. The intruder nest was on fire, the hibernatorium was on fire. I was on fire, you were on fire. Everything was on fire, and I could not find the fire control system room to put any of them out. At a certain point I just kept on running, trying to finish the objective before the ship gave out. It was as hilarious as it was ridiculous. Eventually I went to a new room, found one more fire marker, and laughed as the ship blew up.

Now, here’s the thing: that was a solo game. I set it back up and started a new game immediately. In Nemesis, you’re gonna die a lot. Most of your plays will end with your character getting killed in an unfortunate and grisly way. Maybe the ship blows up, or maybe you got killed by an intruder bite, or a larva burst out of you. Ahh, solo is one thing, but if you’re playing multi-player, it’s very possible that you have bad luck, and other players don’t (yet). If so, here’s the thing: when you die in Nemesis, that’s it. There is no respawning. You’re out. And that means PLAYER ELIMINATION. Dun dun dunnnn.

Player elimination. Yikes. If you peruse the BGG forums, you’ll find some heated debate about this. In true internet fashion, some people get disproportionately angry about this considering it has zero real world implications, and we’re talking about something filed under “toys” in online marketplaces. Some people are fine with player elimination, and some aren’t. That’s it. It’s a non-issue for some gaming groups, and it’s a major issue for others. For the record, personal preference is, uh, personal, so you can have whatever opinion you want about player elimination, and I’ll do the same.

For us, player elimination sucks. If Kathleen and I are having a “big game” night, like we would need to for Nemesis, it’s a real nut shot if one of us gets killed on turn 5 out of 15. Do we restart? Do you use the variant rules that allow a respawn? You’ll need to draw a new character and new objective (at your own peril). Or do you soldier on with one player sort of watching/doing something else?

We play games to spend time together, so we’d most likely start over if time allowed, or try and play something else in the time we had left. This is where the rubber meets the road, that wreck when the extreme randomness of Nemesis meets real world player experience at high speed. I don’t mind randomness in games, but when it puts the experience itself in jeopardy of completely coming apart, what’s the point?

THIS PROBABLY SPELLS YOUR DOOM MAYBE

No, really, didn’t you say you like this game? and WHO IS NEMESIS FOR?

I don’t really know who Nemesis is for. Best guess? Large gaming groups who don’t mind player elimination, I guess, which seems like a niche market for a very expensive, very long, kinda fiddly game. Oddly enough, there is no guaranteed player elimination like in a game of Werewolf. If you die, it’s possible (if unlikely) that no one else dies for the duration of the game. So I guess you’re not going to buddy up and start a new game in the meantime.

Who else could this game be designed for? Solo players who don’t mind playing two characters, and this is my preferred mode of playing. If you play solo with one character, the ship size is not scaled (it’s never scaled, for the record). If it seemed big with two or three characters, it’s MASSIVE with just one. You are going to be humping it all over that ship looking for your rooms to complete that lone objective and cursing the layout the whole time. The fewer players you have, the longer it takes to explore, although you will have to jockey a little less with noise tokens and other players trying to screw you.

Ultimately, there are balance issues at play all over Nemesis. For every benefit of one player count over another, there are deep pitfalls. I’d love to play with the semi-cooperative elements at higher player counts, but I know I would be frustrated by the randomness and player elimination. Playing solo is fun. It’s a wacky story that unfolds in front of you. It really works for me. I have played it over and over this week, and I would gladly play again right now. That being said, I know I’m missing out on a lot of the design. Playing solo always feels little like you’re only getting a piece of the game instead of the whole thing. But if you said, let’s play a two-player game, I’d really need to think about it—and probably suggest playing a different two player game that’s more reliably satisfying.

The Bottom Line

When I play, I take two characters, set up the game as normal with only one change: I draw two cooperative objectives and I pick the harder of the two. I discard the other. With my two characters, I try to complete one objective (instead of one per character) and get them both off alive. If the argument against this is that it is now too easy, I have succeeded at this a total of zero times, but I have always had fun. Closest I came was my scout escaped on a pod, unlocked by the soldier on the last turn before he was killed by an intruder. As she flew away and the ship exploded, I revealed an “Infected” card from her deck. She died from a chestburster as she flew away. Tragic. I have other crazy emergent stories like that, too. Each play has told an excellent, memorable story without any frustration—which matters to me most of all.

At the end of the day, I have a very difficult time recommending Nemesis. It has so many delightful and richly thematic elements included, but it also fails on so many levels. If lengthy setup and playtime aren’t spoiled for you by randomness and player elimination, Nemesis may have a lot to offer you. But it’s important to be honest with yourself before plunking down the high cost of entry.

EMPHASIS ON “SOME”…. SOME FOLKS