Nemesis: In space, no-one can hear you scheme (SU&SD Review)

have you ever wanted to enjoy the alien film franchise in boardgame form well don't you worry none son because awakened realms have got you covered with the wonderful alien licensed board game in this delightfully evil box players can take on the role of crew members on a ship infested with aliens each of them trying to work together to quell the impending alien threat aliens the board game packs all the fun of the alien film franchise into one the BC box [Applause] from Disney they own the film rights to aliens and I know this is just a silly goof but they still say goofy round - right Jesus I mean I thought that does he don't even own the rights to alien because they do Tom it's a boom hang on it's not the alien game it's never says yeah Tom we picture the alien from aliens off the bot no that's the alien from nemesis yes that's right it's what the alien looks like in this totally non-copyright-infringing game in nemesis one two five humans are on a probably doomed ship and you're all collectively trying to avoid aliens and get home alive you'll wake up from cryo sleep and then stumble around the ship uncovering new rooms searching them for items and fixing all the broken parts of the ship so you don't all die a horrible death the problem is each time you move around this tin can like a sardine trying to get back into bed without waking up any of its tin mates you're gonna make a lot of noise whenever a player moves their piece from one room to another they'll roll this horrible little dice placing a noise token in the connecting corridor matching the number that you just rolled if one corridor ever contains two noise tokens at once well your clattering around has peaked the intro of a slimy friend it's gonna come and eat your arms and legs and heads until almost all of your arms and legs and heads are gone when you've made too much noise you will reach into this bag and pull a token from it which will determine which kind of alien will be dispensed into your lap like an unwanted scoop from the ice-cream van of chaos and boy are there some unpleasant flavors to try everything from the diminutive la vie to the monstrous towering Queen actually sure all of these gunky folks have different ways of chowing down on your fragile human body so before they get a chance to slurp on your meaty crew let's you're gonna have to defend yourself searching the various rooms on the ship is gonna yield all kinds items that will better help you stop that alien threat from eating all of you alive your endgame though is to escape this collected pickle and getting into an escape pod well that's easy they'll knock automatically and immediately as soon as you activate the ship's self-destruct sequence or if somebody on the crew dies both fine entirely normal criteria or don't get into an escape pod just go back into cryo sleep which you can do straight away as soon as this many rounds have passed that's about half the game so just stay alive for about half the game and then it's good to go back to sleep no problem also you'll have to make sure that the ship is actually heading to earth and if isn't change its course that's two separate quite time rich actions which both take place here on the ship's bridge oh and you'll also have to check that the engines are working or it's two out of three of them and they're all the way on the other side of the ship over here so if you get here and do that and get here and do that then go to Chrysler you'll be fine otherwise you still might be fine it just might be that you go to sleep and then you all go to Jupiter and die all the ship explodes mm you you die but don't worry you've got a unique set of action cards and for now a functional weapon each of the game's unique characters has a tight little deck of just 10 cards some of these cards represent specific unique skills to your character where other ones just see you leaning towards certain aptitudes everyone aboard the ship can fix things Kevin it's just that some of us are bad at it you've got a lot of ground to cover here but if you play to your strengths and work as a team well we should just be able to stabilize this ship get back into cryo sleep without anything truly terrible happening but here's the rub well not actually a rub but more of a tiny anxious burning dread that runs across the board you're not necessarily working together all of your individual crew members are gonna have their own personal objectives which they're gonna need to fulfill and those range from the quite a name such as make sure you'll get home safe to the evil and nefarious like make sure player 1 doesn't survive these secret objectives completely recontextualize everything within the game now each individual mechanic is a double-edged sword a locked door that previously kept an alien out can now seal you in and a player moving off into the dark is no longer going forward to scout but maybe leaving you behind most importantly the fact that you can't attack another player directly means that the aliens are a threat sure but they're also a lethal unpredictable tool to leverage this game has an abundance of rules but almost everything makes sense both mechanically and thematically and even when it is a bit over complicated it's fiddly in a charmingly intoxicating manner the way that the captain reloads their revolver one bullet at a time the fact that closed doors don't actually stop aliens they just stop them once and then that door is gone the fact that every weapon in this game has a special ability and a special ability of the scientists pistol is that when you roll a critical hit you don't do any additional damage and we having talked about the infection deck and the infection mechanic an entire deck of cards that you draw from the top of every time you get hit by an alien these cards go into your already tiny deck and immediately start gumming up the works get three or four and on some rounds you'll start to feel like you're just a big bumbling bag of alien gunk but it's worse than that and even more exciting because these infection cards might not actually be infected and the only way you can find out is by going to a location on the board or getting an item that lets you use this lovely red acetate scanner putting your cards in and finding out for real if you're doomed scanning these cards is the only way that you can remove them from your deck but if it turns out that any of them aren't affected you'll have to add a la vie figure to your player board if you ever have to two of these on your player board at any job oh I think I know where this is going Houston was just saying at any point if you have two larvae on your boards you immediately explode an alien bursts out of you maybe I'm your chest so another you know bless legally distinct anyway I best scuttle off to front cap or something good luck with the rest of the review human thanks friendly alien yeah I'll sort you out later when I pack away the game to be honest we saw these components is probably a baggie big enough for for a mini right but jokes and horrifying deaths aside there is something marvelous about the exact manner of how this mechanic with these larvae's works you see if you have one larva on your board not a problem too big problem but the only way you can get a second larvae is when you yourself check your own infection cards and maybe you could always just take a pun on never scanning these individual cards and then find out when you actually get into an escape pod at the end of the game whether or not you're taking home a fun bonus passenger if finales get any spicier than this then I'm not sure I have the heat tolerance required for them and these rules being deliciously horrid helps a ton when teaching people how to play the game especially if the people you're playing with are willing to take the first game as introductory that way you can just jump in and explain rules to people as they become relevant presenting them to people as if you're a proud parent well then spa I see you've just discovered the instantaneous alien death mechanic if people just accept that the first game might be a little frustrating or wonky you can just dive in and season the meal as you go even if the seasoning you're adding every time will always be salts Matt did you just make a salt bay choke in 2020 is that bad is he dead or cancelled owned by Disney awesome are you dead no I'm Android robot yeah but my convalesce is you don't read it I know I don't read come on can you help me get rid of this does he why not so what have we actually told you so far this is an ambitious big box plastic thing that's on paper sounds really very cool and exciting but I could have told you all of that in just two words as kick-starts a game and so you can't really have science fiction horror without at least a little in Visser a shin so with that in mind let's get the business these alien minis are fun and fearsome Burt would have been equally atmospheric and scary if they've been half the size the scale of these doesn't make it a better game and arguably for me does make it a less appealing product and then you've got all of this love added onto these fantastic 3d miniatures and yet some of the other design and heart is just feeling a little bit like it could have not with more love this board for example thematically wonderfully dark and grimy but in reality could have now we just learn a little more pop to make it clear what where everything is especially if you're working in a room with downward lighting as all houses do we'd actually got a filter on the camera right now Tom can you twist it around so people can see what it would actually look like and not just just a little filter at the end no not that one that's fine no no this one this one no Tom the one at the front yeah if this gives you a vague idea like you know it's just as soon as you get a bit of light reflecting off this board it's just completely indiscernible is that does that make sense Tom yeah cool and meanwhile we've got so many interlocking systems and mechanics many of which are interesting and fun but a lot of which honestly just seem like they want grab you by your cheap lapels and scream look wait look at all the things we put in from that firm you lie we've got alien eggs you can destroy or carry away as souvenirs a flamethrower an item that lets you take two guns together a whole series of mechanics to do with getting covered in slime then having to have a shower and then in the shower discovering that your body is host to an alien and you are now very likely to horribly die not to nuke anyone's picnic but I'd say that about 1 in 6 people have played this game with her actively hated it and never wanted to play it again and that's a wicked little die to roll with the exception of exciting melee game drama getting killed just completely sucks in a way which is fairly unavoidable and even when you're still alive it's very likely you'll spend long stretches of the game feeling completely powerless [Music] we should move into here this town I think don't gotta get this the still an item in here so I can get the item in here yeah yeah we've got a move we got to keep moving we got to move on this turn short Shirley no no I leave the I'm in here I'm gonna give you a we can move in there next time but this time I think I'm gonna yeah sure cool cool cool cool cool use flash time mum this game isn't fair any point some characters will simply be more useful than others you want to go left but I want to go right but you've got ammo and you're gone and I don't some are going left the violence isn't the only language that matters here and during any game of Nemesis any player could find themselves suddenly holding all of the cards in a negotiation you might find yourself untouched and powerful the one that everyone else follows around is they hope to momentarily get your attention like toddlers following an older child but equally you might find yourself limping behind trying to guilt trip or straight-up bribe other players to take an interest in the charity of keeping you alive and I'm sorry but this isn't one of those games where suddenly on the next turn your fortunes are reversed and then everyone needs your help and you get to be the hero know if your character starts having a bad time story of that game is likely to be one in which your character just has a really bad time and when you realize that you're probably toast it's just not all that fun of course you've got the optional rule that lets you play as the alien in the event that you do die but to me it makes it so difficult to win as the crew that I never really want to play with it it just feels kind of tacked on I don't know if I agree with it being tacked on but I definitely do feel like the rule allows you to be the alien you want to see in the world feels like a dangerous tool without proper instructions my personal reading is that the function of this rule is to provide a healthy exhaust for early knockout bitterness and then to accelerate the game so you could maybe just start another one it's a system that just doesn't account for the fact that you might not want everyone else to die sure you get wiped out early and you come back and you exact your revenge on the specific player that you blame for your personal demise but you're not re-enter in the game as a laser-focused angel of vengeance you you basically make the game much harder for everyone which means you should not it's not a job appropriate unless you are going back into the game as the alien with the intention of wanting literally everyone to die maybe really this just feels poorly implemented because the rest of the game is so far from being black and white even nature of being a traitor in this game isn't as simple as cut-and-dry evil at the start of the game you get given two objective cards a personal one a broadly more human friendly mission and a corporate objective maybe hey char just wants a loose end cleaning up but maybe I'm just more interested in research than you maybe yeah I'm really quite keen on popping to the aliens hive nest whilst you would rather avoid it does that mean we can't get along the key thing is that you choose which of your two objectives you'll pursue only after you first encounter an alien up until that point you can keep both of your objectives in mind but as soon as you see an alien well you have to just fix all of your hopes on wall it's a bit like fog of love except in fog of love you're accepting the sad reality of a divorce and in nemesis you're accepting the sad reality of locking Stephen in a room so he'll get eaten by an alien it's similar but it's the fact that you make that choice then it's important because in other similar games of the traitor mechanics that question is asked out of the blue do you want to pointlessly stab your friend in the back and that's something that can be fun absolutely but it's not what leads to treachery so maybe I chose the objective that means I only succeed if you don't make it home and who can blame me I mean when I had to pick my objective you were trapped in a room with an absolute unit and I was on the other side of the ship and to be honest this subjective looked quite fiddly so of course I had to pick the one where you'd die and I mean I didn't I didn't want you to die it was just it was just convenient and obviously when you escaped from that encounter completely unscathed and absolutely fine well I just had to improvise crucially in emesis the choices you make aren't only defined by your secret objective card to truly explain how this all works I'm going to tell you the story of what happened the last game we played so we're playing a three-player game of nemesis I'm the scientist tom is the scout and friend of the show drew is the engineer and Drew's like I'm gonna go off and fix the engines fine good idea I guess we'll go up towards the bridge anyway we split up because Tom wants to go and try and find some items fair enough but meanwhile things aren't quite so hunky-dory for me anyway just about making our life get myself patched up and I think I'm gonna be ok as always going to catch up with Tom and the control so um if you could just could you come and help just check of the edges so call do you're not checking the engines you're just rummaging around in cupboards so I eventually managed to catch up with Tom's character betting some genuinely very large aliens and then he just immediately leaves and then the alien follows me into the room and I Tom it's the only thing you can help right now I can really do with it ok so I'll play a car that lets me do all of my actions in one turn just quick alright so first of all I'm closing the door blocking the door oh well and now I've left I've gone somewhere else oh hang on and now I'm in the escape pod room of I've left again again you want to kill me the whole time after being so evasive it made perfect sense no wonder he kept running away and didn't want to help me for the whole game Tom's objective was to see me dead and now I was I was dead with a crewmember now dead the escape pods unlocked and Tom prepared to get inside of one until I'll come with you look I made all this noise and I kind of want to get this get leave now because of the noise never there's two slots on a skateboard I could I could say what with you oh sorry I'm getting in the pot now drew by s'alright I got this card that lets me go anywhere on the ship using the venture and it was at that point that drew realized that Tom's objective wasn't to make sure that Matt died but to make sure that he never made it off the ship alive and you know after that loads of aliens turned up and just sort of ate his face and legs and he died so listen this game is not a clean piece of design about 15% of your friends might actively hate it and that story we just told you after all of our stuff panned out drew was quite understandably a little bit sour at least until the next day as the passive time as it so often does fermented that mild trauma into a delightfully palatable delicious story but hopefully now you'll start to see what this game is this box is an engine for creating stories but in beautiful keeping with the series it aims to emulate most of these stories feature rather sticky endings and how much fun you're likely to have with it is completely dependent on how willing you are to die in the service of creating a great story personally I love doing now whenever I play role-playing games always create characters that are having an incredible Deathwish just because as soon as you stop caring about whether or not you live or die everything just becomes much more fun Bath's even though everyone knows that these stories are full of death and murder and misery and backstabbing in reality sitting there for 45 minutes what everyone else plays and you're dead just isn't much fun eighty five point seven percent of the people aboard the Nostromo in Alien died that is the cost of telling that story and as soon as you realized that that is the objective of this game well all of the mess of this game it is still messy takes on a new kind of clarity I'm just gonna come out here now and drop the mic from orbit I love this game I love it it has got seven out of ten video game written all the way through it what do I mean by that what I mean is this is a game that is rough and strange and if you smoothed off all of those harsh edges you would make a game which was more consistently fun and more consistently palatable but in doing so you would completely erase all of the ability to have searingly hot highs and terribly low lows that make this game wonderful some salt on this blood still Pfister some salt and so now in the same way that you might rewatch a film that has an integral twist I feel like we need to go back and look at the slightly messy design if nemesis not through the lens of it being a fun game but it being a simulation a sandbox designed to amplify a very specific kind of experience and I think a lot of the really clever stuff behind the curtains of this game come down to the way they've used a mechanic that I honestly thought I was maybe kind of done with the hidden potential traits of mechanic something that's been thrown into a lot of games but the sort of reckless abandon you might add paprika to do lash and much like paprika it's something that often looks really exciting but personally I don't think it's actually very interesting because the traitor mechanic in Nemesis isn't an afterthought this isn't just oh there's a birdie in the game got to deal with it this central conceit sharpens nemesis's focus to a fine point a point that sits just below the ribs nemesis has so many little tricks up its sleeve to make those traitorous systems engaging like the way that you choose a character only after seeing your objectives letting you take the person that's right for the job but always in a way that's gently wary of what other people have already picked the scientists for example is the number one character to pick if you want to activate the self-destruct sequence or what about the captain it's not unusual for games like this to have a leader character that can move other players around the board with their consent but the orders being barked here aren't open to debate which could be an issue if they aren't on your side but maybe you're just being paranoid you see the thing I think that makes this game different is that too often games with potential hidden baddies in rely a bit too heavily on theme now I really like that of winter but it's a game that relies on you accepting that people might be acting strangely simply because the zombie apocalypse tends to broadly have that effect meanwhile other games rely too much on pure social deduction they're the baddie I can tell because of their doing that weird thing with their face and their eyebrows it's their nemesis has me realizing that the weakness of many games where you might have a body is that everyone else has a very clear unified singular task and anyone who is deviating from the critical path that you've all decided is the correct thing to do now is immediately worthy of distrust and it means that you haven't really got much room to operate as a body without immediately being faced by a sea of raised eyebrows and at that point your ability to play is wholly linked to your ability to directly deceive and that's where a nemesis all of the obfuscation of these systems really comes into play so here's the thing this isn't a case of a team of Care Bears being infiltrated by a bad bad bear at best you're just a dysfunctional family arguably kind of on the same side but a bit of selfishness is constantly expected it's all very well to say let's all stick together but as a counterpoint I personally don't want to die and they're the worst slice of this deliciously bad pie is that even if you do find out that somebody definitely wants you dead there's nothing you can do about it it's not like they flip over their board to the bad side cackling brilliantly at footway know the game just carries on they want you to die and then just get on with a game that social deduction has limited value if there's nothing you can meaningfully do in response in emesis there's no point in fixating on whether or not somebody wishes you might die because just like in real life there's nothing you can really do about it which is in itself quite stressful and yeah I'm sorry I'm sorry maybe Susan is actively trying to kill you but she's not actively trying to kill me so I'm not sure why I should care nemesis is messy web of mechanics and things or serve a beautiful purpose when combined with the chaos all around you so many things that do mean so many reasons you might be zigging when everyone else is insisting that you zag when I reviewed the endless adventure mega beast glue maven I found tremendous soul in the spaces that allowed for players to be disruptively selfish if people have to work together that's not cooperation that's coercion and this cuts both ways if you don't get a choice to betray someone then you don't really betrayed them you were always just a secret antagonist which is cool but it's not the same thing even the most ruthless moves in a game of nemesis will come from a player who chose that path for whatever reason but that also gives true collaborations so much more meaningful power nemesis is a game which is really hard to cooperate with people you know that you need to you know that you should but then the game pokes you slowly along a horrible tightrope in which every form of collaboration is constantly weighed and measured and eyed with a healthy spoonful of distrust but here's the crushing thing about it maybe if someone doesn't actually want you to die but does it functionally make any difference if they simply don't care I can't think of a single action that doesn't appear completely selfish under the wrong lighting and this only works because the game is this mess of crazy mechanisms and bundles and cogs and systems that leaves everything nicely fuzzy and intentions unclear it's the second game that you play with the same group that's the bite point because once you've become acquainted with the game systems everything becomes a lot crunchy ER and meaner and more strategic and distrust spills across the table that being said after that second fantastic game it's not perhaps a reliable evergreen choice to cozy up to on a Sunday night but more of an experience game that flamboyantly spreads itself across a table on special occasions let's stay in tonight light some candles murder Stephen and personally my favorite part of the game is just showing it to people taking these mechanics out of the box and laying them on the table in a way that's almost theatrical and there's nothing quite as satisfying as Wapping it down the alien queen it's a sensation the only Cthulhu Wars can really rival speaking of Cthulhu wars this game has a similar pricing problem namely that it's really expensive in a way that it can only kind of justify with its miniatures yes this is the part of the review where we're going to talk about these bulky boys these are cool but for me it's way too expensive to buy on my own and will be something that I would consider for a group purchase but then does Nemesis really have the staying power to entice my friends multiple times I'm not sure if it's better than something like Twilight Imperium which hovers around the same price point I love this game and I'd love to have this game but for what it is it's very big and very expensive this is a game that I would absolutely love to see in a really trim down squeeze down box measure something like the brass Birmingham box all that beautiful wonderful game but don't get me wrong some of these plastic guns can absolutely definitely stay these little yellow translucent noise tokens lovely staff lovely staff but listen I can't help but imagine a version of this game with cardboard standee that does not make me any even I don't know listen I can and I will recommend nemesis I just wish it was easier for me to justify not just to you but to myself as well this strange incendiary little game should be a little game it doesn't quite fit in this large over-the-top polished wrapper it's a game that I think is cool enough that it should be on everyone's shelf but as it stands something this big I'm not sure for how many years I'll be able to convince myself to keep it on mine I would never suggest a version of this game that was mechanically less ostentatious but physically I just feel like something trimmed back would actually be a better fit for the games that they've actually made if you've got enough money and space for a game like this then fill your boots but for a lot of people maybe it's a good idea to get a few stories out of it and then find it a new home yeah I'm keeping it mainly because I've got about three or four friends who will watch this video review and say let me check my diary I think I'm free in 2023 but on the app something I will say about nemesis is unlike Lords of helis a game that was built on a foundation that required exponential plastic that is scoped here for doing some really cool expansion stuff that doesn't add tons of new minis I mean is that likely to happen almost definitely not no that project cannot make loads more aliens but you know if you've given up on hope you've given up on life and that's our review of Nemesis can't really recommend it literally won't stop recommending it love it it's a mess hopefully that's all entirely clear and now yeah this is the point where usually we would just do a bit where we Tom can we get like something to come in and like do the end of the review maybe a call back from a comedy character where we can come back and say like and subscribe but it's not as it's like one of those sort of goofy grunt Tom just recording this message in advance before I don't or my nice skydiving holiday John sit down for those who could walk into the videos but you should give them allow you to subscribe for the only pass and an evil the ones based grace you'll know they're a little bit too you can also watch the video next to the shiny big map ahead that's all for me to do and I'm sure I'll see you again soon [Music] you

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 465,514

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Matt Lees, Nemesis, Tom Brewster, Alien, Aliens, Traitor, Hidden Traitor, Betrayal, Secret Identity, Gloomhaven, Big Box, Ridley Scott, Geiger, Ripley, Nostromo, Best Board Games, Biggest Games

Id: SKbEBrWjWzY

Length: 34min 23sec (2063 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/snakebyte36]

Great, now this is going to be out of stock everywhere! /s

[u/j3ddy_l33]

I played this a couple months ago. I remember feeling like it was supremely OK. Not terrible by any means, but nothing really grabbed me.

Very thematic and great visual presentation, though!

[u/Tigertemprr]

Nemesis is getting a lot of positive buzz, looks fun, and would definitely work for our group, but it's also expensive, out of stock, and possibly won't reprint any content outside of the core game. I hope Awaken Realms recognizes what they have and makes popular games like this more readily available. I think they announced two reprints for this year.

[u/F-b]

I'm a happy owner of the game and I think this review is pretty fair! The only very minor thing I disagree with, is the idea that dying feels bad. In my experience deaths occur near the end, so it's not like you do nothing for one hour.

Otherwise, yes...

- the retail version is too expensive to be worth (especially without the expansions).

- A standee version would be great.

- The rules are messy, but honestly, this is the only fiddly game I wouldn't change. Because the payoff is really there. It wouldn't be as immersive and as good if you removed one thing in this ruleset. My advices for teaching: don't even explain combats, wounds and contaminations before it happens. My advice for new players: winning is an exception and aliens are there to hunt you, not the other way. ;)

[u/summ190]

Seriously, nobody else I’ve seen comes close to SUSD’s level of insightfulness. A real deep dive into what makes these games tick, for me they’re light years ahead of the competition.

[u/sabek]

Sold my copy at a recent con and that is the happiest the game made me. I got money and the buyer got a game he has been dying to get his hands on.

Win win really

[u/pandajedi]

I sort of disliked the review of Bunny Kingdom where I felt like Matt didn't provide a lot of substance in his view of the game, and I feel exactly the opposite for this review- it's great! I feel like I've gotten a very well rounded review of the game from the perspective of why I would like it and why I would not like it, getting a deep view of the kinds of feelings both positive and negative I will feel. And outside of just gameplay, lots of time spent discussing the price, unnecessary box size/giant minis, glossiness of the board, art design, etc.

This is one of the best reviews SU&SD have done, IMO, assuming you think the goal of a review is to inform the consumer of whether or not to buy a game. It was entertaining like SU&SD should be, but from an informative stand point this is the gold standard.

[u/[deleted]]

$150 Canadian seems a tad pricey to me.

[u/EccentricOwl]

I’ve played Nemesis three times. I had fun all three times.

Every time I thought about how fiddly it was; how many extra little bits the game used. The terrible hex tiles for items.

I thought about the huge miniatures and wished they were smaller in scale - the human crew aren’t very good minis for instance. Why not make them 15mm and then the ship feels way bigger and the alien feels bigger?

The game is good, and I’m going to watch the review now. But it’s not $300 good - not even close.

Play it? Sure play it... just make sure you don’t ACTUALLY want to play an RPG instead.