You are coming out of hibernation. The hibernatorium is dark and the air is tainted by a horrible smell. Scanning the room you see the corpse of one of your own lying on the ground, the ribcage exploded as if something had come out of it.

Game from Kickstarter Requests Permission to Land

Nemesis comes straight from the Kickstarter galaxy and like all members of its species (or almost) it brings us a significant amount of material of impressive quality. In addition, its theme is masterfully highlighted by its gameplay and vice versa.

Cute figurines and beautiful tokens

Nemesis arrives on earth in a beautiful and imposing black box dressed in an illustration that immediately sets the tone. What's inside continues in this dark and oppressive style.

• 20 very well sculpted alien figurines and, like many things in this game, strongly inspired by the movie "Alien". From the small larvae to the imposing queen, these monsters allow us to pinpoint precisely what the game has in store for us. Namely violent clashes and frantic escapes within the ship that may serve as our tomb.

• 6 character miniatures (and their personal board) representing the ship's personnel coming out of stasis, these miniatures that will represent the players in the ship are detailed and offer a real diversity from one character to another. We will also highlight the presence of a character in a wheelchair which allows a nice inclusion (even if the leg injury cards sound a little fake). The boards contain information about basic actions as well as a few boxes to keep track of the damage, your radio signal and the slime that covers you (or not).

• 20 room tiles that will allow you to renew the ship from one game to another. The illustrations are effective and elegant and the cardboard very thick.

• Equipment for "intruders". The "intruders" or aliens in the game have some personal equipment. In particular, a separate board where the weak points cards will be placed as well as the egg tokens present in the nest. A cloth bag will be used to store the tokens representing the aliens in the ship. Finally, next to all this we will place the intruder attack cards that manage... The attacks of the intruders, well done.

• 114 plastic tokens that represent many things. There will be small flames in transparent orange plastic to represent the fire that is likely to ravage the ship. Small red cubes for wounds and ammunition. Transparent flat balls for a whole bunch of things (rev counter, slime token, signal token,...). Gears to represent broken rooms. And the most important are transparent yellow triangles representing noise.

• A whole bunch of cardboard tokens for a whole bunch of things. Doors, engines, evacuation modules, exploration tokens, corpses and a cosmonaut cat among others.

• And of course, several hundred cards (more than 300 if my calculations are correct). I'm not going to go through them all, in fact I'm just going to tell you about the infection cards. These are cards that you will add to your pack of action cards. Their backs are the same but the front of the infection cards has a coded area that you will have to pass through the analyzer to be able to read it. Once this is done, you will know if an alien is inside you. I'll talk about it a little later.

• And finally, the most obvious, the game board. Double-sided, it represents your ship and the location of the different rooms on which you will place the tiles mentioned above. Very pretty, it manages to be dark and readable at the same time.

Haven't you heard something?

In Nemesis, you'll need to explore a ship to accomplish your personal goal. Indeed, contrary to what you might think, Nemesis is not a cooperative game. Each player is dealt 2 objective cards at the start of the game, and when the first intruder enters the game, everyone discards one. The card you have left will be your final goal, it's up to you to do everything possible to get there.

To do this, the players will chain their turns by doing 2 actions each. Each action has a cost varying between 0, 1 and 2 that you pay by discarding the same number of cards from your hand. The actions are varied and range from moving around to crafting new items.

As they explore the ship, players will hear noises coming from the corridors and ventilation ducts. To determine where the sound is coming from, players throw a custom dice 8 (whose faces are: 1,1,2,2,3,3,4,4,X, attack symbol). If you get a number, place a noise marker in the hallway with that number. But if there is already a marker in the corridor in question, then an intruder arrives. Take a token from the cloth bag and you'll know what you're looking at but also if you're being fooled by surprise. This mechanic increases the suspense since, if you avoid attacks long enough, the board ends up covered with small yellow tokens and then each move becomes extremely risky.

As for the fights, players roll 1 die to find out the amount of damage inflicted while the intruders draw a card from their personal deck.

Even if the rules are not complex, the asymmetry of the characters as well as the number of possibilities make the first rounds of the game laborious.

[Jeux de Société/Plateau] Nemesis

Nemesis or, as I like to call it, Alien the board game offers a real feeling of claustrophobia and danger. In addition, the fact that each player has his own goal creates paranoia at all times. Because you should know that some of these objectives involve killing another player. With that in mind, it's hard to see another player who has spent the whole game picking up military equipment next to you.

As for intruders, we most often find ourselves running away from them rather than confronting them. Interestingly, I saw more aliens in my 2-player games than in my 5-player game (in defense of the game, we were very lucky with the dice).

In conclusion I would say that this game meets all my expectations: betrayal, paranoia, suspense and has super quality material.

You can order your copy here: https://shop.magicfranco.be/jeux-de-societe/45750-nemesis.html