Nemesis board game

Would anyone be interested in buying a brand new, unopened all in pledge for the Nemisis board game?

That is a lot of boxes! My Nemesis (small condo) doesnt let me splurge on too many games anymore due to severe lack of space.

Don’t tempt me

I heard this game plays well solo?

Yep. You can find quite a few solo playthroughs for it on YouTube. Solo, it’s more survival horror than the constant threat of one of your fellow players backstabbing you. The game is one my wife and I enjoy a lot. You do need a big table through.

Yeah that is the other factor since I only have a Bridge table. Not enough table space and I would not be able to leave the table open for any major length of time.

First-time posters are allowed to start new threads and hawk their wares? I got flagged once for linking a site that was selling something, and I’d been here for years.

Yeah, it’s going to be a consideration. This is Nemesis when we last played it on a table that sits 6 comfortably.

And this is the game on our table which is closer to sitting 8:

Nemesis will, if you let it and spread out the components a bit, happily gobble up all the space, whatever the space is.

You’re missing these awesome character trays in each player’s color.

We’re going to need a bigger table…

I already purchased the mat to use instead of the board as it eliminates reflections and creases. Makes the ship that much more pleasant to navigate.

I’ve considered the scenery pack. However, unless it gets painted, it’s worse than the standees. That one is an indulgence I can live without.

Those player boards are neat though. I’m tempted. I’m just not sure how having that set space per player would fit.

Given the length and storytelling aspects of the game, it’s tempting to bling it to add immersion though.

I own those them and I will tell you they are great!
Needed, no, but they work great to keep things organized and add some flair. The wheels for tracking ammo are magnetic and it holds your board and your cards really well and yes the thing is a beast on the table. Was very impressed with the AR game mats. Nemesis and Lockdown were so good I got it for Great Wall.

This is my most played game so I have definitely gone down the rabbit hole. I painted my figures (with some cool uv paint hidden on them). I have 3d printed computers for the rooms that need them and other fun bits. I really want to get a 3d printed map with leds.

I highly recommend printing, or buying on etsy, the life tracker rings for the invaders. So much better than trying to stack cubes on things. They make a couple of versions now. One uses the cubes the other which I’m tempted to buy is a dial base the alien sits in and you just rotate the arrow to the number of hits it has.

Day before yesterday, I was pressed into service for a game of Nemesis with a friend in from out of town. He brought his copy with him and instead of playing the game I thought we were going to play*, he decided he wanted to teach me Nemesis.

But I forget that for some people, teaching a game means sitting with you while they read through the rules book and find the parts to read out loud. Which is fine. We’re all trying to get to the same place even if we take different routes. : )

But by the time we had lost, I’m not sure I had gotten a solid feel for how Nemesis is supposed to play. It was my second time in one of these “let’s all figure out the rules as we go” free-for-alls with Nemesis. But I’d seen my favorite streamer play it (albeit with a single character, so I’m not sure that counts…), so I knew enough to know we were doing some things wrong, even if I didn’t know what was wrong about them. Overall, it was one of those deeply unsatisfying experiences where you know you’ve had a design laid out in front of you, and you’ve had people there with you to play it, but none of you knew the game well enough to actually play it.

So I spent a lot of yesterday watching more playthroughs, reading about the differences among the various Nemesis iterations, reading over the rules, pondering buying a copy, and even discovering the videogame version. This was all in the pursuit of my suspicion that Nemesis might be a single-player game I would enjoy. My conclusion after the day was out was this: Nemesis is a noisier version of Mage Knight.

This is obviously a bit reductionist, but bear with me because it’s simultaneously a criticism, an observation, and a compliment. Both Mage Knight and Nemesis are about operating a character to explore a procedurally built map and fight a set of enemies organized into an “ecology”, five actions at a time. Your cards are each an “action point” to move and fight. Once you’ve used them, increment the time track and go again. If you don’t meet your (arbitrarily determined before the game) victory threshold before the time is out, you have failed to optimize your actions and you lose. Meanwhile, the cards themselves, and the board, and the things you’re fighting are systems you interact with in the context of those five actions/turn.

That’s a high-level description of Mage Knight and Nemesis (from the Czech Republic and Poland, respectively!), and I’m fascinated by their similarities. But as you get in closer, the differences are myriad. What most intrigues me about Nemesis is the alien ecology being modeled by a bag builder. To my mind, this is what separates Nemesis from less imaginative dungeon crawlers or survival games: that the monsters are leveling up and skulking around offboard. That they’re so often unseen, but not inactive. (Oh, the irony of Awaken Realms cashing in so crassly on the plastic miniatures fad!)

I’m not as impressed by the survival stuff or the map layouts or the character asymmetry, or the traitor mechanic stuff, or the awkward noise system (for instance, it bugs me beyond all reason that a Careful Movement combined with a Silence chit still results in placing a noise icon). There are so many elements of Nemesis that feel rough hewn and poorly considered, as if they were working under a strict mandate that nothing could ever be cut or streamlined, that this creaking and wheezing machine has to be massive and festooned with buttons and levers that do things that might happen in Alien.

So with successive add-ons, Awaken Realms just adds more and more “noise” to the formula, remixing things, adding things, changing things, providing a glut of plastic geegaws, obsoleting things, and generally wallowing in that classic Awaken Realms bloat – plastic and otherwise – whereas Chvatil’s Mage Knight only ever got two add-ons.

But I do appreciate how Nemesis is a sort of aimless collection of Mage Knighty systems, designed so that everything is modular and replaceable, so there’s no single economy or ecology, so that everything is moving and nothing can be solved and it all always can feel new and unknown, despite the undercurrent of cloying familiarity. This is less like boardgame design and more like the work of short-order cooks serving hungry and impatient customers. So what if the food is cheap and greasy? They’re not hungry anymore, are they?

I also sampled the videogame version of Nemesis: Lockdown**. Which, like Gloomhaven, is mostly a faithful 1:1 adaptation of the boardgame in a massively inconvenient 3D engine. But unlike digital Gloomhaven, which seemed to me a perfectly viable offline single-player game that I can flex almost as readily as I’d flex my own copy of Gloomhaven, the videogame version of Nemesis: Lockdown has a rigid agenda. Namely, that of convincing me that Nemesis is a multiplayer game that should exist on servers, with players congregating in lobbies, and all of them caring about their rankings and unlockable cosmetics. If I buy Nemesis in a box, I can play it solitaire, cooperatively, or competitively (even Mage Knight is similarly confused about how it’s supposed to be played!). But if I buy digital Nemesis, I can only play it with other people. For some dumb reason, you can’t play cooperatively unless you play with a single character, which is decidedly NOT how Nemesis was designed.

So that was my Nemesis journey, which is more or less at its end with me once again realizing how wrong I once was about Mage Knight…




* the classically barely interactive economic engine builder, Terraforming Mars

** Lockdown is a standalone version of Nemesis in that it comes with its own map and characters. But it’s the same design as Nemesis: non-Lockdown and it’s 100% backwards compatible and twice as expensive. But I believe the videogame adaptation only has the Lockdown content.

Yesterday Stationfall arrived at the house. Im hoping it will do everything I enjoyed about Nemesis, tell a zaney space escapade, but without the problems Nemesis has. Stationfall seems a little less figity, everything (save for the hidden roles) is right out in the middle for everyone to see. My hope is the pacing is better. I like that you can potentially influence all the characters to accomplish your goal but you are still very tied to the role(s) you have in hand. It’s an Eklund Design, but it’s a Matt Eklund design so we dont get the full Phil here, for better or worse.

I havent played, this is based on video and rules research. So, we’ll have to see how it holds up in practice.

*meant to be a reply to @tomchick but i hit the wrong reply button

Pretty sure if you carefully move you don’t roll the noise die, that being the point of that action. You just place a noise. So you can definitely come out better with a regular move if you’re lucky… but you put it all in the hands of the dice gods.

Also Mage Knight had two expansions, as well as an addon character (a goblin that can use disguise magic to ignore alignment penalties when buying things) and I think the bundled Ultimate edition maybe added a few more things? I never got Ultimate. Or the second expansion because apparently there were some printing issues and the colors were different from the rest, and I am not clear if that ever got fixed.

This is stunningly apropos of a conversation I had at lunch yesterday…where three of us decided to play Nemesis sometime in the future over Deep Madness. I am sensing a mistake.

It’s heartening to see a review tucked away here in the forums.

Sorry, I meant to type “chit” (now fixed). When you make a Careful Move and draw a Silence chit, you have to place a noise token.

Not necessarily! I suspect most people who come to Nemesis are perfectly happy to have a sprawlingly sloppy “fun moment generator”, and I bet most of them wouldn’t care one whit about how it compares to the tightly engineered Mage Knight. And I’m sure it’s a ton of fun if you all know how to play. I would totally play Nemesis with other people, so long as we all knew the rules. I just have no interest in owning it or playing it solitaire.

As for the Deep Madness comparison – scenario 3 has been set up on my main table for a few weeks now! – don’t get me started. I’ve only got so many walls of text I can do in one day. : )

Yeah, Nemesis is absolutely about creating Alien-esque boardgame experiences first, tight mechanics…third? But personally I think it’s pretty successful at that so I don’t mind.

I wouldn’t dream of playing it solitaire.

For me the hidden objective stuff adds nothing and the game is already real difficult to survive, so true solo or multihand/coop work great. (There’s a separate set of objectives for that.) But I know many people enjoy traitor stuff more than I do and certainly there are mechanics that do very little in that mode. They’re just not significant enough that I’m fussed about it.

I wouldn’t recommend Nemesis as a solo game at all. The agendas and tabletalk that should be happening screams multi-player to me.

There is an actual Alien branded game, Fate of the Nostromo that is purely cooperative/solitare. I remember thinking the rules were ok. I had only played once and while the art and cards were evocative I don’t remember being really impressed by the design. It seemed ‘safe’ for lack of a better word. It did seem to know enough to keep moving at a snappy pace, so, you know better than anything designed before 2009. ;)