‘Nemesis’, Now 30% Off, is the Best Co-Op Traitor Experience
Sometimes influences are subtle. Sometimes they hit you like a power loader hits an alien queen. But if that’s your biggest complaint with Nemesis, you still have bigger problems (like aliens).
You wake up from your hibernation sleep aboard the ship. Still groggy and unsure of your footing, you step out of your chamber and notice one of the crew mates lying dead on the floor. Before you have time to assess the situation, you hear a strange scuttling from the corridors around you.
Could these be the hostile alien invaders from the stories you’ve heard? How could they have gotten aboard? There’s no time to figure it out. Teamwork and community are all well and good, but you’ve got to look out for yourself and just try to survive.
Nemesis Overview
Nemesis is a semi-cooperative survival horror game with modular exploration, dice rolling and hand management mechanics. Each player in Nemesis has their own objective. While they are (usually) working together to keep the ship flying, once the game ends, some will win and some will lose.
Nemesis takes a fairly standard gameplay format of “explore the ship, find the traitors, and save the day” and turns it on its head. There could be multiple traitors, each trying to sabotage the ship in their own way. Or maybe no one has gone rogue. You’ll never be quite sure.
But on top of that, there is always one very obvious bad guy: the alien invaders.
While (probably most of) the players are exploring the ship and trying to get it up and running, they are under constant threat of death from aliens which are constantly evolving. Without someone to keep an eye on that, they will overrun the ship and everyone will lose. You can’t win if you’re dead, after all.
Finally, there is no set map. Thanks to the modular map, each of the rooms tiles are shuffled at the start of the game. This, combined with the random personal goal cards, and starting the game with a random dead crew member, makes sure that each game has a lot of variance to ensure replayability.
Despite the plethora of additional mechanics in Nemesis, the gameplay is pretty straightforward. Players use action cards from their hands to do the things they wanna do. Sometimes the cards in a players hand are also discarded as part of the cost of the action, as noted in the card description. At the end of each round, players will draw additional cards to use in the next round.
In addition to the items and actions available, the rooms of the ship provide players all the tools they will need to complete their objectives. After a set number of rounds, the ship has reached its destination, providing none of the players have activated the self-destruct operation.
Maybe some players win, and other lose. It’s all down to their own personal goals.
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