How to Play Nemesis in 23 Minutes

prior to the overwhelming success of star wars and close encounters of the third kind in 1977 the theatrical release of big budget sci-fi film was not a common occurrence but the way having been paved there was a new market for science fiction which led to the 1979 release of another big sci-fi picture beginning a film franchise that continues to this day here we'll find the crew of a starship encountering an unknown and dangerous entity and not all of them will survive in fact some of them are altered by the experience and their bodies are used to give birth to a new alien life form but enough about star trek motion picture my name is jay parker and this is rtfm the show where i teach you how to play a game a game that is inspired by but legally distinct from the movie alien that's right today we are learning nemesis a semi-cooperative game about the crew of a ship that's been boarded by a intruders and while you'll ostensibly be working together each of you will have individual and potentially conflicting secret objectives this game is intense and it is not easy well it's entirely possible for some or everyone to win it's also possible for everyone to lose you'll need to move carefully know when to attack and when to retreat and learn quickly whether or not you can trust your fellow crewmates but in order to do any of that you're going to need to know how to play so let's dive in [Music] just a couple things before we get started first off i want to thank everyone who backs the rdfm patreon they're the ones who voted for me to teach nemesis in the first place and without them i wouldn't be able to make these videos at all if you're interested in supporting the channel as well as voting on what i teach and a bunch of other good stuff please check out the patreon link in the corner and in the description i'm also going to put any potential rules corrections on the klingon subtitles thank you rado for that idea so please click the little gear button i think it's over here and turn those on just in case you'll only see anything if there's something to correct and lastly this video is going to teach the base game of nemesis but there are alternate game modes and expansions that i'll be covering in a second video a month from now all right now that's out of the way let's talk about the game nemesis casts you as a crew member of the nemesis trying to fulfill a personal or corporate objective and generally survive the encounter if you want to help your crewmates with their objectives feel free but just know that they might not share your team spirit the game will take place over a series of turns separated into the player and event phases during the player phase each player in turn order will take two actions spending cards to do so if they can't or don't want to they'll pass and as soon as each player is passed you'll move on to the event phase which is mostly about the intruders moving around and attacking but also involves some admin like advancing round trackers and stuff now nemesis has a ton of setup instructions but they're pretty self-explanatory if a little involved so i'm going to go over just a couple key points after you get through it all your board should look like this so let's take a quick tour of the ship as your character wakes up from hibernation they're suffering from a mild case of stasis-induced amnesia so you unfortunately don't remember the general layout of things that's why all these room tiles are flipped over and randomized all of the one tiles will be in the game each time but there are more twos than two spaces so these will be slightly different each game the intruders are already here and have done a bit of damage as well so each tile has a face down exploration token that you'll have to deal with when you enter the room you've got engines that might be broken and your autopilot is sending you somewhere hopefully earth but if not you can change course or maybe just jump in an escape pod there's an intruder bag filled with tokens and you'll be drawing them at various points throughout the game the intruders also have weaknesses but we'll learn about those a little later now once the board is set up deal a help card to each player this is a reference card but it also gives you a number which determines the order of choosing characters as well as being important for certain objectives you'll get a card holder matching your number as well as two secret objectives one personal and one corporate after looking at your objectives draw two cards from the character draft and pick one of them to be your player character characters have different strengths and weaknesses so your objectives may help you decide which one you should choose after picking your character grab their mini board cards quest cards and starting item which will go into one of your hand slots fully loaded with ammo cubes once everyone has picked an identity give player one the first player token and place each mini in the hibernatorium along with the blue character corpse token representing a crew member who was taken out before the rest of you all even woke up you're just about ready to get started but there are a few key moments that will happen in the game that you'll need to be aware of first off as soon as the first intruder miniature is added to the board gets real at this point the threat is too big to ignore and everyone will have to decide where their allegiances lie look at the two objective cards you have and choose one of them to discard face down next you might not all survive this trip and if any characters die that's going to trigger the ship's emergency procedures which just means that the escape pods unlock there are also two timer related triggers to watch out for when the time track reaches eight the hibernation chambers open up and you can use the hibernatorium and lastly you might not activate the self-destruct but if you do once it makes it to the three space all of the escape pods unlock if they weren't already all right now that we've gotten our feet wet let's dive deeper and learn about all the different actions you can take okay so most of the player phase is taking actions but before you do that there are two quick steps first everyone draws action cards up to their hand limit which is five next you pass the first player token to the next player in clockwise order though you'll skip this step on the first turn of the game once that's done it's time to act starting with the first player you go around the table with each player taking two actions you can do the same action twice but you have to do two if you only take one or choose to perform no actions then you pass once you pass flip over your help card to show this and you can choose to discard any remaining cards in your hand but you don't have to you'll also be skipped until everyone else has passed and you all move on to the event phase so what can you do well there are four types of actions basic actions which are listed on your player board card actions which are shown on your action cards room actions because almost every room you go into has a unique action associated with it and item actions which are detailed on item cards you'll find throughout the game each action has a cost which is shown in this symbol the cost is how many cards you must discard in order to take the action but not all cards can be spent during the game you might become contaminated these cards go into your action deck and represent both exhaustion and the potential for an alien infection they don't provide actions and they can't be used to pay for actions but you can discard them when you pass now the most commonly used action in the game is movement and it's got a bit of nuance to it so let's take a look discard one card to move then choose a room that's connected to the room you're currently in by one of these corridors if the room hasn't been explored flip over the room tile and exploration token the room will be important but the exploration token will affect things immediately first each token has a number that will determine how many items are in the room so rotate the room tile to align the right number with the arrow on the board next the symbol on the token will take effect if it shows fire or malfunction add a matching piece to the room if it shows a door place a door token standing up in the corridor you just came through if it shows slime place a status marker on the slime section of your player board now i'll get into what all of those mean as we go but for the next two silence and danger i'll also need to talk about the noise roll see after you move you're generally going to make noise this means you roll the noise die and place a noise token in the corresponding corridor some of these numbers are simply next to a red light which refers to the technical corridor a place where you can't go but where intruders love to hang out if you're ever asked to put a noise token in a corridor where there already is one you have an encounter which i'll get into later but it basically means an intruder is going to try to attack you now if you reveal a silence token nothing happens and you don't have to roll for noise that is unless you're slimed if so act as if you've revealed danger danger means that if there are any intruders in adjacent rooms that aren't already in combat with another character move them to your room if there aren't any adjacent intruders place noise tokens on every adjacent corridor that doesn't already have a noise token the noise die also has faces that show silence and danger and if you roll these act as if you had revealed the silence or danger token if you're worried about making too much noise there are two ways around it first if you're moving into a room with another character or an intruder you don't make a noise roll at all second you can pay two cards to move carefully you'll still make noise but instead of rolling the die you'll choose one corridor in which to place the noise token however you can't do a careful move if the room you're moving to is already full of noise or if you have an intruder in your current space moving all in combat with an intruder is a whole thing i'll get into it in the next section other basic actions include shooting or melee attacking which i'll also cover when we talk about combat but just know that you can't directly attack other characters you can pick up a heavy object such as the corpse in the hibernatorium heavy objects require a free hand so place it in one of your hand slots if both are filled you can drop an item or object beforehand dropped objects are placed in the room but dropped items disappear into the ether and are discarded you can take an action to trade with all the other characters in the room freely exchanging item cards and objects provided each player consents to the trade and lastly you can craft an item certain item cards will have craft symbols and the different objects you can make are all listed on your player board along with their recipes discard an action card and the required items and then find the appropriate item in the crafted items deck let's get back to those tokens we placed during movement at the beginning of the game all doors are considered to be open but the door exploration token as well as other actions and events during the game may close doors these will block you and intruders from moving through the corridor unless you open or destroy them if you open a door remove the token if you destroy it lay the token on its side it can never be closed again fire hurts and if you're in a room that's on fire you'll get a light wound every time you end around and by round i'm talking about your two actions so if you move into a room on your second action and it's on fire you'll take a light wound then when it comes back to you if you stick around or pass you'll gain another light wound after you pass your rounds are skipped so you won't get hurt again until the next turn but these wounds can add up so maybe don't be the kc green meme dog in this situation fire will also hurt intruders but i'll talk more about that when i get to the event phase there are eight fire tokens and if you put all of them out the ship gets too dang hot and explodes ending the game the good news is each room can only have one fire token so anytime you're instructed to add fire to an already flaming room you can just ignore that like fire malfunctions are bad and if you have all eight on the board the ship loses horror integrity and is destroyed ending the game malfunctions don't hurt you but so long as they're in a room you can't use that room's ability some rooms have computers which will be important for certain characters and items but a malfunction in the room makes the computer unavailable too now let's take a look at these cards we've been discarding because they've got some actions on them too every character has their own deck of action cards some of which are common to each character while others are unique you'll see the cost of each action on the card but that doesn't include the card itself so to play this basic repairs card you'll discard it and to others the cards will tell you what they do the only big thing to keep an eye out for is this gun symbol on the top right some cards will show a gun or a gun crossed out while others won't have the symbol at all these tell you when you can play the card if there's no gun you can play at any time the others can only be played while in or out of combat and you're in combat when you're sharing a room with an intruder one of those action cards allows you to search when you search look at the color of the room you're in and draw two cards from the corresponding item deck choose one to keep and discard the other one face down then rotate the room tile to show that there are fewer items left if the arrow is pointing to zero you can no longer search there also if the room is white you can choose to search from the military medical or technical decks item cards are kept secret from the other players by placing them in your card holder you can talk about what you have but you'll only ever show your items during the trade action the exception to this is if they show the heavy symbol heavy items are revealed and placed in one of your two hand slots and if you find a gun it comes loaded with one ammo guns let you take the shoot action but most item cards provide an item action these often require you to discard the item along with a card or two based on its action cost but they'll give you some pretty handy benefits and lastly we have room actions there are a lot of different rooms and most of them have their own actions all of which are detailed on the room actions reference sheet i won't go into all of them because you'll be referring to the sheet for the first few games you play anyway but the special rooms are pretty key so let's talk about those at the beginning of the game your ship has set a course for location b which is somewhere while you're in the helm you can spend two cards to take an action and either find out where you're going or change course to any of the other locations if you look at the coordinates you can tell people whatever you want but don't reveal the card itself at the back of the ship are the three engines and you don't know whether they're working or not when you're in an engine room you can spend two cards to check the status secretly looking at the top engine tile if you have tools or a repair action card you can play one of those to look at both tiles and choose one of them to secretly place on top either fixing or sabotaging the engines you'll need two out of the three engines working and your course set for earth in order to succeed on most of the objectives that is unless you take the escape pods the escape pods start off locked but can be unlocked through item cards certain room actions or if a character dies once unlocked a character can enter an escape pod by following the evacuation section instructions and once inside a few things happen place your miniature in one of the two spaces as you can see each pod can only hold two characters after you get in choose to either launch immediately or wait if you launch you'll be out of the game but your character will definitely make it to earth if you wait you're considered to have passed and at the beginning of your next round you can launch leave the escape pod or wait again passing your turn without taking any actions the other way to make it through the end is to go into hibernation at the center of the ship is the hibernatorium where once it's been unlocked you can go into stasis and just wait out this whole intruder problem or you can try anyway discard two cards to start the hibernation procedure and then make a noise roll if this causes an intruder to show up you can't hibernate but if there are no intruders after your roll remove your mini and go to sleep you won't take part in the game anymore so hopefully the engines are working and you're headed to earth once any characters are hibernating the self-destruct can't be initiated and the destination can't be changed the engines can still be broken though so make sure you trust your friends before going to bed now the basic rooms are important but rather than detailing how they all work which again you'll probably need to double check during the game anyway i'm going to provide a quick overview of their significance starting with the simplest ones the armory lets you reload energy weapons the comms room lets you send the signal which is important for some objectives the emergency room helps you heal wounds the evacuation sections get you to the escape pods like we talked about the fire control system helps you put out fires the generator starts and stops the self-destruct sequence the storage room lets you search for item cards without a search card and the surgery helps you remove contamination cards and intruder larva which i'll talk more about in a bit there are two other rooms that need a bit of explanation first is a laboratory where if you bring a character corpse an intruder corpse or an intruder egg you can analyze the object and learn one of the intruder's weaknesses each game you randomly set up three cards and once you analyze the matching object you flip the card over revealing the weakness these aren't huge advantages but they will help you out and lastly we have the nest which is where the intruders have laid their eggs the nest can never have a malfunction on it because it's not really one of your rooms you can search the nest for eggs but there are plenty of events that are more dangerous if you have an egg so be careful there you can also attack the nest to destroy eggs but every attempt to do so will cause you to make a noise roll if you do destroy or remove all of the eggs the nest is considered destroyed place an injury token to show this the additional rooms are interesting but they won't all show up each game so i'll let you discover how they work on your own with all that said and done let's move on to what happens when the intruder show up so we've talked about how intruders show up whenever you add a noise token where there already is one that triggers an encounter but what does that mean well whenever an encounter is triggered we're going to bring out our intruder back which is set up at the beginning of the game and pull out a token almost every token has a symbol on it that corresponds to a different type of intruder so find the matching figure place it in the room with you and then remove all noise markers from adjacent corridors including the technical corridor if applicable there are only eight adult figures so if you need to add a ninth remove all adults from the board placing matching tokens into the intruder bag and then place one in the room where the encounter is happening if you flip the token over you'll also see a number and this will tell you whether or not the intruder gets to make a surprise attack against you check to see how many action cards you have in your hand if you have as many or more than the number shown then you're safe but if you have fewer cards the intruder attacks you either way place the token to the side as you might put it back in the bag later the only exception to all this is the blank token if you draw this place the token back in the bag and don't place any intruders but do put a noise marker in every adjacent corridor also if this was the last token in the bag add an adult token if the intruder attacking you is a creeper adult breeder or queen draw an attack card if the card shows a symbol matching the attacking intruder read the rest of the card to determine the effects of the attack looking at your player board we've got this section for wounds if you take a light wound put a red cube on the first space if you take another move it down one if you take a third light wound remove the cube and take a serious wound card this will have an ongoing negative effect that lasts until the wound is dressed which can be done by various game effects once the wound is dressed flip the card over to show this and from now on you can basically ignore it however unless you can actually heal the wound it'll stick around which is important because if you ever have three serious wounds dressed or not any further light or serious wounds will automatically kill you if the intruder attacking you is a larva simply place it on your player board and add a contamination card to your discard pile we mentioned contamination cards before but they're more than just an annoying addition to your deck about a quarter of these cards when scanned will show the word infection and you don't want that you can choose to ignore your contamination cards but that might cause some problems for you at the end of the game so it's probably better to get rid of them but some of the methods for doing so can be a bit of a gamble let's say you use this rest action card which allows us to scan all of the contamination cards in our hand slide them into the scanner to see if they're infected or not you will remove from the game all the cards that aren't infected but if any of them are you have to follow the infection procedure which basically means that you keep the infected cards and gain a larva problem is if we already have a larva the infection kills us and we replace our character with a creeper but just to be clear if you have a larva on you and another one attacks you that doesn't kill you simply remove the second larva and add another contamination card you only die if you get a second larva through infection so getting attacked and contaminated is bad and in order to avoid that you'll want to either escape from the intruders or fight them off escaping sounds good but it's pretty dangerous if you're in a room with intruders and you take a move action to leave each intruder gets to make an attack against you before you go starting with the biggest ones better to fight them off then right well maybe it kind of depends on what sort of weaponry you're packing there are two kinds of attack actions available to you shoot and melee attack shooting requires a weapon with at least one ammo cube spend the ammo and roll the attack die the blink side will do nothing the targeting symbols will do one or two damage to any intruder the creeper symbol will deal one damage if the intruder is a larva or creeper and the adult symbol will do one damage to a larva creeper or adult you can form a melee attack without any weapons but there's risk involved roll the die as with a shoot action but if you end up missing take a serious wound also even if you roll the double hit side you'll still only give the intruder one injury let's say you get in a solid punch larva only have one hit point so if they get hit by any attack remove them from the board for other intruders place cubes on their stand to show how many injuries they've sustained and then you'll check to see if your attack was enough to kill them for creepers and adults draw one attack card they're not fighting back you're just looking at the top left corner to see how they react it shows a number that is equal to or lower than the amount of injuries they have the intruder dies and you replace their figure with an intruder corpse token if the number is higher than their injuries the intruder survives and nothing else happens if the card shows an arrow that means that the intruder retreats draw an event card and move the intruder through the corridor matching the number if this takes them into a technical corridor remove all of their injuries put a corresponding token into the intruder bag and remove the intruder from the board lastly if you're attacking a breeder or queen you'll draw two attack cards instead of one adding both numbers together to find their current health however if either of the cards shows an arrow they retreat so we've learned how to fight and be fought by intruders but they're not done yet a lot of their activity takes place during the event phase so let's get to it and wrap things up [Music] all right everyone around the table has passed now it's the intruder's turn first off move the time marker forward one space and if it's been activated the self-destruct marker too remember that if you pass the midpoint threshold on the time track the hibernatorium is now open for business and halfway through the self-destruct the escape pods will open up too next is the intruder attack if there are any intruders in combat with characters they get to attack either infesting you in the gaze of larva or drawing attack cards for the other intruders if there are multiple characters in the room the intruders attack whoever has the fewest action cards in their hand or whoever's earlier in turn order if tied if there are no intruders in combat skip the step after attacks comes fire damage each intruder in a room with a fire token will gain one injury which resolves just like if you had attacked them also if there is a fire in the nest destroy one egg from the intruder board once you finish the fire damage step you will draw an event card this will make a few things happen first off some of the intruders on the board are going to move the symbols show which intruders and the number on the card shows the corridor they move through as we learned earlier intruders that are in combat will not move and if an intruder goes into the technical corridor remove them from the board heal their injuries and add their token back to the intruder back if there's a closed door in the corridor they would move through the intruder stays where they are but the door is broken all intruder movement is simultaneous so if two intruders would move into the same door it breaks and both of them stay where they are after movement read the rest of the text on the event card and follow its instructions they're usually pretty bad but the effects don't always trigger so fingers crossed lastly we have intruder bag development this just means that you draw a tile from the bag which will trigger a specific action if you draw a larva token discard it and add an adult token to the bag if you draw a creeper discard it and add a breeder if you draw an adult or breeder each player who is not in combat makes a noise roll in turn order then add the token back to the back if you draw the queen check to see if any characters are in the nest if so place the queen in that room and resolve an encounter if not add an egg to the intruder board and put the token back in the bag and if you draw the blank token put it and one adult token in the bag once you're done with the event phase go back to the player phase and play another round so that's all the gameplay elements but there's one big thing left to talk about winning or potentially losing see the game will end as soon as there are no more characters on the board or if a marker on either the self-destruct or time track reaches the end once the game is over you'll go through a little checklist first check to see if the ship survived if the self-destruct is active even if the time track ends first the ship is destroyed the same result occurs if at least two of the engines are damaged if the ship explodes all intruders and characters on board die which might actually help with some player's objectives if the ship doesn't explode check its coordinates all but one objective require the ship to go to earth so flip the coordinates card and make sure the marker is on the right space if it isn't all characters asleep in the hibernatorium die and remember if you got out on an escape pod you are considered as having made it to earth next up is the contamination check if you have any scan every contamination card in your deck if all of them are clear you can move on but if not shuffle all the contamination cards back into your deck along with your discard pile and draw four cards if any of them are contamination the character dies once all that is complete any characters still alive reveal their objectives and all who have successfully completed them share the victory everybody else and sometimes that's just everyone well better luck next time and that's how you play nemesis again there are variants and expansions that i'll be covering in the next video that rtfm's patreon backers can watch right now as well as a first timer strategy video next week for everyone else they'll go live in 30 days either way thank you so much for watching my patreon backers have voted on what game i'll be teaching next and it is the new expansion for twilight imperium 4th edition prophecy of kings because i mean come on yeah i didn't know this was coming anyway i'll see you next time [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: RTFM

Views: 57,211

Rating: 4.936295 out of 5

Keywords: board, game, rules, explanation, learn, to, play, Shea, Parker, RTFM, gaming, rtfm, rftmshow, show, tabletop, gamer, boardgame, games, tutorial, boardgames, how to play, nemesis, alien, semicoop, intruder

Id: PKCiex9FXo0

Length: 25min 26sec (1526 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020