There’s a delightful irony in stealing the schtick of one of sci-fi’s most infamous parasitic organisms. Nemesis is a cooperative-ish sci-fi board game developed by Awaken Realm Studio. But more accurately, Nemesis is Alien. Its creators have latched onto Alien’s face, incubated the game inside its chest and burst forth onto the board gaming scene. Fortunately, Nemesis is more of an Alien and less of an Alien Covenant, because it’s one of the best space board games ever made.
Essential Info
Price: $149.99 / £119.99
Type: Survival horror
Players: 1-5
Recommended age: 12+
Time per game: 2-3 hours
Complexity: 7/10
Oh, and you’ll need to keep an eye on your crewmates because one or more of them might have their own nefarious agenda. Of course, you’ve usually got bigger problems to deal with, what with the xenomorph menaces running around the ship trying to chop your head off or lay eggs in your chest. So, teamwork makes the dream work, but you’ll need to watch your back.
Nemesis: What’s in the box & setup
Nemesis is a big board game — it comes in a huge box and it’s packed full of highly-detailed miniatures for the player characters and aliens (called Intruders). There’s also a double-sided board, loads of room tiles, multiple decks of cards and a mountain of tokens and widgets.
The plastic miniatures are gorgeous and there are loads of them too. Each of the six playable characters gets a mini, complete with a color-coded base rim so you can easily identify where you are on the board. However, the real stars of the show are the Intruders, who come in five different forms of ascending size: Larvae, Creepers, Adults, Breeders and the Queen. The adults are by far the most common, so they have multiple sculpts. All the included minis are stunning and if you want to paint them up yourself, you can make them look even better.
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Alongside all that, you get a comprehensive rulebook and a pair of quick reference cards that let you know what you can do in all the various rooms on the ship. Reading that rulebook should be your first port of call before setting up your first game. There’s quite a lot going on with Nemesis and the rulebook includes a handy set-up guide explaining everything you need to do before your sci-fi horror adventure gets underway. Everyone chooses a character, gets their starting equipment and a pair of objectives that will appear later in the game.
Each character has unique equipment and abilities. The Soldier is best at fighting, the Captain can order other players about, the Engineer is good at fixing things etc. As a result, your character choice can have a huge impact on how you choose to play the game.
The ship is set up with a randomized room layout (in the game’s lore, you all have cryosleep-induced amnesia, which explains why none of you know the layout of your spaceship). The easy “side A” layout is recommended for your first few games, whereas the reverse of the board has an alternative layout for experienced players. You’ll also need to shuffle the various decks of cards and keep containers of tokens nearby for things like wounds, fires, broken systems and doors.
From there, you simply place everyone in the hibernatorium and the game begins.
Playing a game of Nemesis
At first glance, Nemesis is quite a complicated-looking game, and while it’s true that there are a lot of moving parts and mechanics, it’s surprisingly intuitive once you get into the swing of things. Before long, everyone will know when to roll for noise, when to place a token down on the board and what they need to do in their turn.
Nemesis is a mostly cooperative game…Mostly. You see, each player broadly needs to stay alive, and you’ll have a better chance of fixing the ship if you work together, but every member of the crew is also given two private objective cards at the outset. One of these is a personal objective, and it’s usually fairly benign — send a signal, make sure everyone survives — that sort of thing. The other is your corporate objective, and, in fitting with Alien’s core messaging of “giant corporations are bad“, these objectives tend to be a bit more devious. You might be tasked with smuggling an alien egg off the ship, getting a specific player killed or even blowing up the ship (jettisoning yourself in an escape pod).
Players don’t have to choose an objective until the first alien shows up, but you’ll never know which objective your crewmates have chosen. There are more friendly and neutral objectives than truly despicable ones, so odds are that you’re all on the same page, but you’ll never know for sure.
The game will typically last for 15 turns (around 2-3 hours), assuming the ship and/or players survive that long. If you’re not careful, fires, malfunctions and the dreaded self-destruct system can all bring about the demise of the Nemesis long before it reaches its destination.
The ship is made up of a series of rooms connected by corridors, but you won’t know which rooms are where until you move into them. Each room has a special action that you can perform there, so it pays to explore the ship early on to find all the key locations — you don’t want to be blindly stumbling through the hallways, clutching a bite mark, desperately trying to find the med-bay. Some rooms are in fixed locations, such as the engines and bridge — both rather vital systems that you’ll want to make sure are in working order.
At the start of each round, players draw up to five cards. From there, each player takes two actions — things like moving, shooting, etc. — before handing over to the next player. When the action swings back around to you and you can still do more, you get another two actions. Once every player has expended their available moves (or passed), the round ends.
The twist here is that every action has a cost, paid using the cards in your hand. As a result, you’re eternally being forced to make sacrifices as you choose which cards to play and which to burn to pay for your actions. Do you want to move into the next room normally and save some resources, or move quietly and throw away that repair card that might come in handy later?
Every time a player moves, they make a noise roll that usually results in leaving a noise token in a corridor. Careful movement costs you an extra card, but it lets you pick where the noise token goes, instead of leaving it to fate. This is often essential, as if you ever have to place a noise token where one already exists, you’ll attract the attention of the Intruders.
When someone does make enough racket to draw the attention of the Aliens and the proverbial space poop hits the fan, your best-laid plans will quickly melt away. Aliens range from tiny Larvae that infect you à la Facehuggers, all the way up to the mighty Alien Queen herself, who is more likely to bite your head off. The majority of your time will be spent facing off against Adults — these most closely resemble Gieger’s iconic movie monster, and they’re just as much of a handful to deal with.
Combat with the Intruders is unreliable and quickly depletes your resources. They can deal serious damage to you in a heartbeat if you’re unlucky, so you’ll need to make smart choices about whether to burn through your ammo, work together to bring down a beast, or run away and leave someone else to deal with the problem.
Nemesis is a game that forces an unrelenting tide of difficult choices on you. Run-ins with the Intruders can lead to you getting infected, which creates numerous issues for you. Your deck gets gummed up with useless infection cards, reducing your effectiveness. If you don’t get those infection cards scanned (using the nifty scanner device included in the game) and removed from your deck, they can end up killing you, even after the game has finished.
So do you risk running the gauntlet to the med-bay to treat yourself — and potentially get mauled by Aliens along the way — or do you climb back into your cryo pod and take your chances?
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Event cards throw more spanners into the works too, unleashing some form of calamity onto the ship at the end of each round. These can break systems, start fires, lock doors or even trigger the self-destruct system, while also potentially causing Intruders on the board to move to adjacent rooms.
The first player to be eliminated can even take control of the Intruders if they want, turning on their former allies.
And then there are the other players — can you trust them? Someone checked the engines and said they were working fine, but they’ve been acting suspiciously and heading toward the escape pods for the past few turns. Maybe they’re just heading to the nearby armory to reload their guns, but maybe they’re a no-good, double-crossing son-of-a-gun.
Even when you are all working together, there’s no guarantee of success (or to put it another way, “I can’t lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies”). I’ve died more often than not playing Nemesis. Escaping the nightmare requires you to complete your objective, set the ship’s destination correctly, have two of the three engines functioning, avoid too many fires or malfunctions and then either enter the hibernatorium or an escape pod.
That’s a lot of things to juggle while biomechanical nightmares are trying to give you a fashionable new torso piercing. Mess any of these things up and it’s game over.
Almost everyone I’ve ever played Nemesis with has instantly been clamoring for another go — it’s a real story-generating machine. There was the game where our soldier went out in a blaze of glory fighting the Alien Queen, while the cowardly scientist was munched in his own lab, trying to smuggle out an egg. Another time, the escape pod I was running to malfunctioned and jettisoned as I reached the door, leaving me to watch in horror as my chances of survival faded. No go is ever the same.
Should you buy Nemesis?
If you like big board games, Nemesis is an easy recommendation for me as it’s probably my favorite board game of all time. There’s a lot going on and that can be intimidating for new players, but it’s shockingly intuitive, and after a few turns, it all falls into place.
There are always choices for the players to make, and there’s a ton of variety and replayability thanks to the varied objectives, randomized ship layouts and chaotic nature of the game.
Yet it’s the co-op-ish nature of Nemesis that elevates it to gaming greatness for me. There are plenty of traitor games out there but Nemesis does something more with it. Everyone could be working together but you don’t know if there is someone out to screw you over, and this creates a delightful undercurrent of paranoia throughout the whole game.
It might be lifting a lot of its inspiration from Alien, but it nails the tone and messaging of the universe. Alien was the perfect organism, but Nemesis is the perfect Alien board game.
Other board games to consider
If you like the sound of Nemesis, but don’t want to invest in such a heavy-duty, expensive board game, then you should absolutely check out Alien: Fate of the Nostromo. Ironically, it’s just a simplified version of Nemesis. It’s the same core experience with a lot of the crunchy details streamlined away, and it’s an actually licensed Alien game, so you get to play as Ripley and the Nostromo crew!
The Captain is Dead is also a stellar option. It’s a 2 to 7-player game where you must all work together (no sneakiness here) to defend your spaceship from attacking aliens whilst trying to get the Jump Core back online. The fun, colorful artwork alongside the easier gameplay, making for a shorter playing time (60-90 mins), means this space board game would suit those newer to strategy board games as well as a younger audience.
Finally, you could also go digital and enjoy some of the best Alien games of all time.