Most horror board games are Scooby Doo-level scary, Nemesis can bring pure terror to your Halloween

Boys and girls of every age, wouldn't you like to see something strange? Come with me, and you will see why Nemesis is the best horror board game to be playing this Halloween…

That rhyme kinda got away from me there at the end, but the point stands; Nemesis rules, and Halloween is the perfect time for you to grab some friends and dive into its claustrophobic, alien-infested corridors.

Horror is a difficult thing to nail for even the best board games. As a setting, it's perfect, and there are loads of spooky-themed games out there. Betrayal at House on the Hill, Arkham Horror, Horrified… the list goes on, but none of these games are particularly scary. It's tough to inject fear into a board game when it's essentially a group of friends sitting around a table, chatting and having a good time. As a result, most horror board games are more akin to interactive Scooby-Doo episodes than a starring role in a slasher flick.

The exception, though, is Nemesis.

For the uninitiated, Nemesis is Alien. Oh sure, all the names have been changed, and the copyright logos have been sanded off, but it's Alien. You and your buddies are trapped on a rickety spaceship with extraterrestrial monstrosities that want to bite your face off or implant an embryo in your chest, and you have to work together to survive the nightmare.

So what makes Nemesis scarier than other games? The brutal difficulty, for one thing. I've died an order of magnitude more times than I've survived playing Nemesis, and it's the fear of getting your ticket punched that drives the terror.

There is also a masterful tension curve in Nemesis that builds slowly as the game goes on. At the start, players all wake up from their hibernation pods with no idea what's going on. There's a corpse on the floor, and — thanks to a convenient bit of hypersleep-induced amnesia — no memory of the ship's layout, resulting in some clumsy exploration to figure out the ship's randomized configuration. As you explore, you'll make noise, which will eventually draw out the Xenomorphs Intruders.

The Intruders are savage, and fighting should really be a last resort. Your odds improve dramatically if you have help from the other players, but you can't always rely on that. See, I said you all have to "work together" earlier, but that cooperation comes with an asterisk.

You see, every player has hidden objectives when the game starts, and while most of them are pretty chill, some of the corporate objectives require a tiny amount of betraying your teammates and leaving them for dead. This creates a wonderful sense of paranoia amongst the group; will Sarah really come to my aid? Did Steve really fix the engines like he said he did? Why is Dave smuggling an intruder egg around under his jacket?

Your death in Nemesis will usually come at the hands of salivating monsters popping out of the vents or the ramshackle spaceship exploding, but never forget that people are the real monsters. I've been abandoned, blown up, locked in a burning room, and sent into deep space, and I will forget none of these betrayals. Payback is coming, my friends, in this round of the next.

There are actually three different versions of Nemesis at this point: Nemesis, Nemesis: Lockdown, and Nemesis: Retaliation. There is also a Legacy version on the way, and I cannot wait for that.

Nemesis: Lockdown is set on a secret research base, and Nemesis: Retaliation is the Aliens to the original's Alien, with players taking on the role of a crack squad of marines.

They're all different flavors of the same experience, and while I'd recommend the OG Nemesis, it can be tough to find, so the best Nemesis to play is the one that you can get your hands on.

Whichever version you do end up playing, though, you'll have an amazing time. Nemesis is a real story-generating machine and the perfect way to spend a spooky Halloween evening with your friends.

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