With loose talk of a Saturday night GNN in the air to experience the relentless doom that is Nemesis, I thought it worth running through the facets of the game as enticement/warning. Like the film Alien, you're on a spaceship - component parts unknown - and lurking within the bowels of the ship are the baddies - Nemesis calls them Intruders. Everyone begins with two secret objectives, which can be as straightforward as making sure you and one other survive, or as dickish as making sure player 3 is dead. I think for our first play we'll filter out the nastier ones, because Nemesis throws plenty at you without them, and co-operation is extremely helpful. Not everyone will survive.
Whew! The ship is headed for Earth, with an alien race onboard
Players have different roles in the crew - captain, scout, mechanic and so on - and everyone plays with a bespoke deck of ten cards. It's not a deckbuilder, more a deckfucker: the only cards you might add are contagion cards, which may mean you're infected. Or they may just get in your way, if you're lucky. In each round you can expend cards to do basic actions, shown on the Scientist's board here:
Or you can use the action on the room you're in, or you can use the action on the card itself, which is where the bespokeness comes in. The mechanic can repair things easily and move through the vents (technical corridors, to give them their technical name). The Captain can always reload his weapon. The Scout can move without making any noise - possibly the best ability there is, as like a nightmare version of Clank in Space, everyone is stepping, grunting, rattling and loudly whispering their way through the story, which keeps drawing the attention of the intruders.
noise is yellow, obviously
Those yellow things in the corridors are noise markers, which steadily fill up the ship. If any corridor gets a second noise marker, it triggers an encounter. Encounters usually go badly. In the room itself there's a fire, which means if the Soldier ends his turn there, he'll pick up a light wound. Light wounds lead to serious wounds. Serious wounds first encumber you, then they kill you. Oof.
If the noise and the intruders and the fires weren't enough, a number of other things can go wrong: including malfunctions. As we move about the ship we discover what each room does (including the room that used to do something but is now the intruder nest, and the room that was once something else but is now covered in slime) which are varied and helpful things like navigation, surgery, engines and so on. The first person to arrive flips an exploration token which gives you some circumstantial information about the room. Maybe a door closes behind you as you enter. Maybe you've been slimed. Maybe there's a malfunction. Malfunctions stop the room from - you guessed it - functioning, although players are usually able to get it working again if they want to. But their presence also signifies the integrity of the ship is compromised: if you're asked to add a malfunction marker and they're all on the board, the ship has disintegrated and you're all dead (unless you've evacuated!) It's a similar story with fire. You can never make too much noise, though...
You might have noticed earlier you can pick up a heavy object as an action. Fortunately most objects aren't that heavy, but your weapon is, and a dead player or intruder is, and so is an egg. Some of the objectives ask players to discover some science about the Intruders, which means dragging these heavy items to the lab and testing them. But meantime time is running out, Intruders are either attacking or moving, something might trigger the self-destruct and everyone has contagion cards. So much is going wrong!
But there are number of things in the players' favour. You can search for stuff: stuff is always handy to have. You can contain aliens by closing doors. You can 'control' where the noise is made by spending two cards (instead of one) for careful movement. and avoid triggering an encounter. can stick together: moving into an occupied room never adds any noise. You can pass: the danger escalates from constantly moving, so late-game especially (if you've completed your objective) it might make sense to sit pat. But mainly - unless those treacherous objectives are mixed in - you can work together. Co-ordinating efforts, from my four exploratory plays so far, seem to make a big difference.
The game end arrives either with the aforementioned collapse of the ship, or when time is up, or when everyone's dead. Assuming you made it into an Evacuation pod, or hibernation, or you're on the ship but the ship is intact, you may have won (multiple players can win) as long as you're not contagious and the ship doesn't explode now, which it will do if more than one engine is malfunctioning. Also, it must be headed for Earth, otherwise it's assumed you're going to die shortly. If it's not you can only still win by being both alive and evacuated, but you still need to make sure you're not contagious: if you are, there's a finger-crossing shuffle-and-draw of cards to establish whether your immune system saw off the infection, or you got John Hurted. Assuming you - anyone, really, gets past all of that, there's now a grand reveal of objective cards.
For transparency's sake I should say in my first three games nobody survived. In my fourth, two characters won, but this was aided by some spectacular dice-rolling for combat, a last-minute fluke of drawing a larva instead of an adult intruder, and accidentally skipping an event in the very first round. Had I played correctly, and/or had a little less luck, it could have been very different...
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