Finding Nemos

I (Sam) have been besotted the passing week or so by my solo adventuring in Nemo's War - a game in which you play out the adventures of Captain Nemo, aboard the Nautilus, inspired by 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. But which Nemo are you? You can play an explory Nemo, a warlike one, an anti-imperialist or an enquiring scientisty one. Whomever you choose will affect how you play the game, as there are different avenues (both watery and otherwise) to take. Play the war guy and you basically prowl the seas obliterating warships. The anti-imperialist wants to incite uprisings amongst the oppressed. The adventurer wants to have adventures, etc.

You begin the game with your chosen captain, some eminently expendable specialist crew members, and three aspects of the Nautilus in near tip-top condition - the hull, the crew, and the mental fragility of Nemo himself are tracked on the board. Also tracked is your notoriety, which can trigger a defeat if you sink too many ships.

too notorious!

Each turn is pretty simple. An adventure card is flipped with a test or event on it. Sometimes you can squirrel them away for later, but often the challenge is immediate. As with almost everything you do in Nemo's War, the challenge is met with a dice roll. But you can skew the odds marginally towards you by 'exerting' some aspect of the Nautilus - the aforementioned hull, crew, or Nemo himself. Succeed, and the Nautilus returns to its previous (hopefully healthy) state. Fail, and whatever you leveraged on the dice is lost - and these exertions slowly take their toll on the boat as the game continues.

the world filling up with boats

Having negotiated the card, you now roll for two things - foreign ship placement on the board, and how many actions you get this turn. Actions can be spent in a number of ways - the adventures are expensive to do (two actions!) particularly as you may decide not to bother once the card is revealed, but you can also search for treasure, incite uprisings, refit the Nautilus, replenish the hull/crew/Nemo, or ram boats and use them for tonnage or salvage. Ramming is tempting because you want lots of salvage to pimp the Nautilus out with stuff like fog machines and armoured hulls. But of course, if you keep sinking ships, your notoriety is only going to increase...

torpedoes are cool

All of these actions use dice. Despite Nemo's War's fairly dry-looking board, this is a crazy dice-chucker supreme, where as you continue flipping cards and chucking dice, things get increasingly desperate. You can lose by having your notoriety top out (warlike Nemo is less concerned by this than scientist Nemo) but you can also lose by letting the hull, the crew, or Nemo himself reach the point of disintegration/mutiny/madness. Or by not sinking enough ships - if there is nowhere left to put them at the start of a round, this is a militaristic defeat, as the view is taken that the oceans are so crowded now, the Nautilus can longer exist as this free-roaming, violent anarchist-hippy of the seas.

Dangerous waters

So how do you win?

Well, the Adventure deck is seeded with cards that ramp up the adding of hostile (or potentially hostile) ships, and in the bottom five cards - if you reach them - there is a finale: a final test to pass. When your resources are stretched, this is tricky, and can just as easily see Nemo and company disintegrate to Davy Jones' Locker as sail to X in glory.

I've played Nemo's War four times and perished in three of them. In my third game I managed to see off a mutinous crew at the end of things and win - only to find that according to the Epilogues book, my victory score was 'inconsequential'. Considering I sank 33 ships and started 14 uprisings across the globe, not to mention the building of the Suez canal, I felt Nemo was setting his standards a little bit high.

Nemo reflects on his life

Primarily a solo game, Nemo's War can also be played either as a straightforward co-op or a semi-competitive one where players can wrestle the captaincy from each other. I don't know if that brings a worthy extra dimension to it, but it's been a lot of fun so far. Most of the rules are on the board...

And the sense of adventure is palpable, with a little snippet of the novel (often involving the raging of Ned Land) on each of the cards. On my first play the scoring felt rather salady for such a chance-based endeavour, but subsequently I realised that the system is what gives Nemo a lot of depth - depending on which Nemo you are, you want to get up to different kinds of mischief. I've been the explorer, the anti-imperialist and the scientist. Next up is warlike...