As the Alien franchise once again crashes into theaters, it’s worth stepping away from the silver screen and looking at the best implementation of Alien’s creeping dread and sudden death put into board game form. Awaken Realms’ Nemesis series (Adam Kwapiński) takes impeccable production values, a dense array of possibilities, and the constant tension of a hidden traitor to put you in the shoes of everyone who ever found themselves on the wrong side of sci-fi horror.
A Sci-Fi Horror Board game . . . in space!
The Nemesis vibe is apparent from the box art, no matter which version you’re looking at. Sci-fi horror either leaps at you in the original’s monstrous box, the eerie red laser in Nemesis: Lockdown, or the gritty marching soldiers in the forthcoming Nemesis: Retaliation. In other words, from the get go you’ll have a strong idea of the experience you’re in for, which is exactly what you’ll get.
Whether you’re creeping through a faltering spaceship, crawling the surface of Mars, or attacking an alien next, Nemesis and its sister titles play in similar ways. You’ll have a unique character, stats and all, to steer through this infested horrorscape in service of your secret objectives. Those objectives form the crux of the game, as they’ll range from survival to murder and all the options in between, including saving the killer aliens from your supposed friends.
Yes, Nemesis is a semi-coop, where subtle bluffing and sneaking about pays dividends. However, as you’ll have multiple objectives that winnow down to one over the game’s duration, you’re not locked into a course you don’t like. Prefer not to seal away your partner in a burning room? Choose the course that asks you to get everyone out alive.
Whether you go full villain or not, you’ll be scooting around dark corridors and dealing with disaster through action points provided every turn. Moving, dealing with computers, or extracting an alien egg from your body before it eats you for breakfast all cost precious points and drive your decisions. Sure, your friend across the hall might need your shotgun to avoid getting eaten, but the decontamination shower is right there, and you just can’t swing both.
Hygiene’s important, y’all.
Nemesis delivers on its horror aesthetic with a tiled board, where most places are hidden until flipped up. Exploring is both crucial and nerve-wracking, as you might discover a monstrous alien (rendered in gorgeous, terrifying miniatures) or a supply cache with the flamethrower of your dreams. Events spice up the board between rounds too, simulating the dangerous world around you. That peaceful trek to the ship’s bridge might get sidetracked by an exploding fuel tank, or a sudden ambush, though Nemesis isn’t so mean to give you an instant, unsatisfying death. Usually, if and when you bite the big one, it’s because you broke classic rules: wandered off alone, left weapons behind for speed, or thought you could punch out the alien queen.
As disaster grows and players get close to achieving their goals, or dying in the attempt, Nemesis pulls a neat trick in avoiding player elimination. One that’s both cruel and thrilling, as those players who die then get to control the aliens. Relatively simple AI motions become dire, intelligent threats under their new ghostly possession, and tweak the game to frenetic heights. Your buddy, left to be devoured, may devour you in turn, screaming for vengeance the entire way.
Those stories form the core of Nemesis, a game that’s less concerned with being a tight puzzle and more a narrative adventure. Like the movies it’s nominally based on, the Nemesis series will stick in your dreams, haunt your footsteps, and dominate your gaming nights with frothy terror.
Are the Nemesis Expansions Worth It?
Originally a crowdfunded project by Awaken Realms, the same publishers behind similarly mammoth titles like Tainted Grail and Lords of Hellas, digging into Nemesis can seem like a daunting task. So many aliens, so little time and all that.
However, it’s easy to recommend the core game (conveniently titled just Nemesis). There’s so much stuffed into the base box that you’ll get plenty of
terrifying scares, brutal betrayals, and great gaming memories from that alone. The quality here is top notch, with gorgeous minis and cardboard, all suffused with eerie sci-fi horror artwork and graphic design. It’s going to look great on your table, and with the Alien soundtrack humming along in the background, you’re all set.
That’s a great thing, because Nemesis is a boutique purchase. The price tag, particularly if you’re looking to snap up the various crowdfunded add-ons, matches the effort put into the production. Nevertheless, because Nemesis is a single-session multiplayer experience, rather than a monstrous campaign or a long RPG, it’s something you can bring to the table with almost any gaming group. The rules here aren’t simple—the number of elements you can interact with, the traitor piece, and controlling the aliens all bulk out an otherwise easy-to-grasp turn structure—but this isn’t a wargame or a dense euro.
In other words, you can get Nemesis to the table.
Should you do so, and if you crave additional alien-blasting action, Nemesis: Lockdown offers a standalone expansion experience and brings the alien adventure to a Mars outpost. Because it’s technically a standalone, you could choose to start with Lockdown instead of its older sibling, and you’d get some more refined gameplay elements with that choice, but I’d argue setting here trumps the somewhat small adjustments.
Do you want to escape a dying starship, or deal with an incursion on your martian base?
Beyond the two big core titles, Nemesis comes with a bevy of smaller expansions adding new characters, alien species, and other bits and bobs. Like most expansions, the value you’ll get from these comes with how often you’re playing the game. If Nemesis gets into your core rotation, you’ll find a lot of fun swapping in hideous creatures like the Carnomorphs or even adding on an epilogue game, Aftermath, that uses the remnants of your Nemesis adventure to play a shorter, separate adventure. A dessert on the night’s main course, if you will.
Board Games With Unique Story and Style
Nemesis offers a group affair, best played with four or five (though, for a first play, give yourself a good chunk of time), but Awaken Realms has a unique set of campaign games especially good at one to two. These are titles that can take you and a partner all through Winter, or even the entire year, with great writing, production values, and gameplay.
Take Etherfields (Michał Oracz), a sprawling cooperative adventure where you, quite literally, wander through dream worlds. Built around a narrative campaign, Etherfields eschews convention to give you something unlike anything else. While I wouldn’t recommend this to someone who wants extremely tight gameplay and a small box size, Etherfields is an example of what can be made, for good and (on occasion) ill when you’re not too concerned with squeezing on a mass market shelf.
Tainted Grail (Krzysztof Piskorski, Marcin Świerkot) brings you to a dystopian Arthurian fantasy world, with either its original game The Fall of Avalon or its sequel, The Kings of Ruin. You’ll be playing a specific character, engaging in mysteries, fighting combo-crafting combat, and diving into compelling stories that weave in and around each other throughout the games and their expansions. Like Etherfields, this is a fully cooperative adventure, one recently refined with 2nd edition rules to streamline your quest.
Or maybe you’d prefer to take your game night to space. ISS Vanguard (Andrzej Betkiewicz, Krzysztof Piskorski, Paweł Samborski, Marcin Świerkot) puts
you in command of a starship tasked with exploring planets, building up a crew, and following a fantastic branching story. The game plays in two phases, one spent on your spaceship assembling your crew, customizing your lander, choosing skill decks and dice to bring along. All those choices will come into play on the planet, where you’ll succeed, fail, or fall somewhere in between in your quest to solve some of humanity’s greatest interstellar mysteries.
All three of these games come with optional companion apps offering narration, choice logging, and record-keeping options, which might sound superfluous, but having voice actors bring these stories to life while you get to lean back and sip a beverage of choice is quite the perk. Then you can chuck some dice, curse the fates, and scramble to survive.
The Alien Was You All Along
All told, the Nemesis series is both as close as you’ll get to Alien: The Game and as premium an experience as tabletop gaming has to offer. You’ll creep down dark corridors, unsure of whether death might come at the claws of a hidden monster or at the hands of your ‘friend’ beside you. That tension creates stories above and beyond the roll of the dice or the tallying of victory points. Nemesis, like much of what Awaken Realms publishes, is a unique experience. One worth trying, at least till you get eaten alive.
Yum.
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