Nemesis review: "A magical sense of tension"

Can we get Alien? No, we've got Alien at home.

Fortunately, the Alien we've got at home is Nemesis, a spectacular semi-cooperative sci-fi horror board game from Awaken Realms. We're playing as a ragtag crew of space truckers who awaken from hypersleep to find their ship infested with biomechanical monsters straight out of H. R. Giger's sketchbook. Of course, all the names have been changed and the designs have been tweaked just enough to avoid the ire of 20th Century Fox's lawyers.

While there are official Alien board games out there, including the rather excellent Alien: Fate of the Nostromo, it's no hyperbole to say that Nemesis is the ultimate Alien experience and one of the best board games in the cosmos.

Features & design

• A survival horror story
• Sessions last up to 3 hours on average
• Expensive, but jam-packed with content

Nemesis is a sci-fi horror semi-cooperative board game in which one to five players team up to survive the Nostromo experience. You'll battle the alien menace while trying to complete your own secret objectives, not all of which are beneficial to the rest of the crew. You'll be exploring the ship, repairing broken rooms, battling own-brand xenomorphs and trying to prevent your internal organs from becoming external organs.

Let's kick off with the obvious — Nemesis is a big board game for adults and probably not for the casual gamer, with an average game taking two to three hours in my experience. It comes in a hefty box packed with gorgeous plastic miniatures for both the player characters and the aliens, called the Intruders.

Alongside the models, there are a whole host of cards, tokens, and player aids packed into the box. The whole package feels extremely premium. The miniatures and artwork are stunning, the two-sided game board is thick and durable, and even the cards and tokens feel like they were built to last. This is good, because Nemesis isn't cheap, but at least you feel like you're getting your money's worth.

There is also a detailed rulebook to help walk you through your first "getting murdered in space" experience. It's a well-written guide that teaches you how to set up the board and play through a game without ever force-feeding you huge chunks of dry text.

Now, there is quite a bit going on in Nemesis, and you'll likely progress through your first few turns at a snail's pace as you constantly flick back to the rulebook. However, to Nemesis's credit, while it has a ton of rules, the actual flow of the game is surprisingly intuitive once you get going. There are also some player aids to remind everyone of their turn order, the basic actions they can always perform, and reference cards for what every room in the spaceship does.

Gameplay

• Hurls choices at you at every turn
• Secret objectives add tension
• Brutally difficult

At the start of the game, you and the rest of the crew wake up groggy from the long cryosleep and can't remember the layout of the ship (a lovely excuse for the randomized ship layout). A foggy memory isn't your biggest issue though — that would be the nearby corpse of a crew member with a gaping hole in their torso… almost as if something burst out of his chest. The first unfortunate victim of the alien Intruders, but probably not the last. The ship has seen better days, with malfunctioning systems and raging fires compounding the extraterrestrial threat.

Things are reasonably chill at the outset of the game as you're let loose to explore the ship. Each player has their own pair of secret objectives — one personal, one corporate — that they can work towards. When the first Intruder arrives on the board, everyone will be required to choose one, throwing the other away.

Your personal objective will likely be neutral, or even altruistic towards your fellow players. Make sure everyone survives, destroy the alien nest – stuff like that. Corporate objectives tend to include more shady enterprises like smuggling an egg out with you, or even getting other players killed. This is where the semi-cooperative element of Nemesis comes in, as you don't know what objectives your crewmates are working towards. You won't survive on your own, so you'll need to work with the other players while also keeping an eye out for betrayals (or planning your own). It creates such a magical sense of tension. Of course, you'll need to balance watching your comrades with fending off the murderous nightmare creatures that have overrun the ship...

In other words? It's like a far more dangerous Unfathomable, with shades of Betrayal at House on the Hill.

Moving around the ship makes noise, and if you make too much noise, you'll draw the attention of one of the Intruders. While these Giger-esque monsters range in size (and threat) from tiny Larvae up to the gargantuan Queen, you'll spend most of your time battling Adults. Did I say battling? I mean running away from.

Combat is tough in Nemesis, as it should be. You're a ragtag spaceship crew fighting for their lives, not a crack team of space marines. You'll need to expend time and resources to battle, and even then your success or failure is down to the whim of the dice gods. Fights can result in you getting infected, seriously injured, and even killed, so choosing your battles is key.

In fact, choice is the overriding theme of Nemesis. The game hurls decisions at you at every turn. Outside of the basic actions, most of your moves come from Action cards in your hand, but each of these cards also comes with a cost, which must be paid in… you guessed it, Action cards. To use a card, you'll have to throw another card or two away and that choice may come back to haunt you next turn when you really need a repair card, but it's sitting at the top of your discard pile.

You'll need to choose between objective cards, choose your route through the ship, and choose who to trust. I adore this sense of paranoia that Nemesis instills in you. It's not just the distrust of other players, it's the agonizing over your own decisions and whether you've made the right choices. Oh, and of course you’ll be juggling all this whilst racing against the clock as you only have 15 turns.

If there is a weakness to Nemesis, it's that it is brutally difficult, and it doesn't always reward good decision-making, or even skillful play. Nemesis is trying to tell a story, creating an emergent narrative through the players' actions, randomized alien movements, combat, and event cards. Sometimes the story will be about how you made the right choices and escaped, but others it will be about how you entered a room, the door locked behind you, and the Alien Queen dropped out of the vents and cut your legs off (true story, happened to a friend in one of our games — he still comes back for more).

Nemesis is trying to be Alien, and nobody would remember Alien if everyone had survived. It's not the winning that counts, sometimes dying in a suitably cinematic or ironic way is its own reward. Like how your teammate is waiting for you in an escape pod and you’re one turn away from joining them… and then the event phase jettisons said escape pod due to a malfunction and you’re left watching your friend wave goodbye as you’re left behind on an exploding spaceship. I’m not bitter about that at all. Nope.

Should you buy Nemesis?

If you're a fan of chunky, in-depth board games, emergent storytelling, and/or sci-fi horror then I can easily recommend Nemesis. My friends and I have played about a dozen games of Nemesis and we’re still always hankering to come back for more, despite the fact that we’ve got a 20% survival rate.

Every game of Nemesis is packed with tension, drama, and betrayal. It oozes atmosphere and there really is nothing else out there quite like it. It's simply my favorite board game of all time.

Yes, it does have a high price tag, but it offers so much replayability through a single-player mode, a ‘harder’ side of the board, and numerous characters to play with various objectives. However, if you want to save a hunk of cash, then The Captain is Dead: Dangerous Planet and Alien: Fate of the Nostromo offer a similar-ish tabletop gaming experience for less money.

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

How we tested Nemesis

I have hosted many a board game night with Nemesis as the main course, and I played a couple of extra games in preparation for this review (any excuse to play more Nemesis to be honest).

For a more thorough look at our process, see this guide to how we test board games, or the wider GamesRadar+ reviews policy.

For more recommendations, why not check out these 2-player board games? As for more sci-fi goodness, don't miss the best Star Wars board games.