Last night I wended my way to Chris' for a four player crack at Nemesis, with Paul and Stuart joining us. Essentially Alien writ large as board game, everyone has distinct, hidden objectives (although we discarded the eliminate player X type ones) but work at least semi-co-operatively to achieve them.
You also have a distinct deck of cards: I was the pilot, Chris the captain, Paul the mechanic and Stuart the scientist. On your turn, you take two actions, either discarding a card for a basic action (move, shoot, etc) or playing the action on the card itself (close a door, search for kit, scan for infections, etc) You might be scanning for infections if your deck contains unwanted contamination cards, which both clog it up and possibly kill you, but don't worry: it's just as likely you'll be dead already.
We initially agreed to pair up as we explored the ship: the deadly intruders hear noise as you move around, so keeping together at least mitigated how much to some degree. If you make too much noise, they attack, springing out of the woodwork and towering over you terrifyingly. This happened to Chris very quickly. Paul was covered in slime, but had managed to shoot a larval intruder and wanted to analyse it, for science. Chris agreed to meet him halfway to the lab, but his unfortunate luck with noisy doors meant his way became barred:
Paul and Stuart both came to his aid - I was at the far end of the ship, checking the engines - but in their panic, they shot holes in every wall but managed to miss the intruder itself, who dealt a serious wound to Chris at the end of the round. In the following round he took another, then as Stuart scarpered the intruder lashed out wildly, and Chris bought it. We were only four rounds into the game!
Our early luck in not triggering attacks now very much evaporating, we found the buggers coming out all over the place, and rooms we needed to use were malfunctioning. I managed to Send a Signal, which I needed for my mission, but I also needed that alien carcass analysed. The three of us reeled between rooms, getting hit by attacks as we ducked under flailing tentacles, and then we accidentally started the self-destruct sequence. Shortly after Stuart halted it - a one bright shaft of hope in the gloom, Paul bit the dust too. The ship was awash with noise.
Stuart plotted a course for Earth as I dragged a carcass to the lab. He needed to get to the hibernatorium; I needed a petri dish. Neither came to pass, as fire burst out in all the malfunctioning rooms and instantly spread, compromising the hull of the ship: the thing fell to pieces, and we were sucked into the vacuum of space. As it turned out, if I'd survived I may well have been infected anyway... it's an absolutely brutal game, this, with everything that can possibly go wrong almost certainly happening. I didn't help by getting the slime rule wrong either, but that was the least of our worries...
We followed the madness of Nemesis with something a little gentler in Rosenberg's fishing paean, Nusfjord. It's a very Rosenbergian thing of developing your fishing industry, using Elders for wisdom, Buildings for varied uses and a triplet of economies in gold, fish and wood. To be honest I don't remember a huge amount about it now, as my head was whirling from both Nemesis and Paul's Giant Chocolate Buttons, but I do recall the level of humour sank to schoolboy altitude, largely thanks to me. Apologies for that; there's just something about the way Chris says Trigger your bonus though.
Lesson learnt. Run away from the big stuff!
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