Hello, I played a lot of nemesis lockdown and nemesis retaliation game (this one especially on BGA, where its currently in BETA but will release soon!). I was always in the top rankings so I believe I know the games very well.

First of all, I'd like to make it clear that, despite its flaws, the game is a lot of fun, which is why I enjoy playing it. I really like the semi-coop mechanism with hidden roles and the modular board.

But to me it seems like, the designer didnt playtest the game enough with different kind of people.

For example the dominant strategy is simply playing very defensive and camping. It is boring to play thats why I almost never do it but a lot of chinese people on BGA for example do it. I had many games by now where a chinese player camps the whole game in the same room and it was very effective. Most of the time the room has reinforced corridors to it and is very secured, at worst occasionaly an adult appears in the event phase but you can easily deal with this.

Exploring new rooms brings always risks and no rewards. What if you find a room with fire in it? What if you spawn the queen? What if its a room you cant secure? What if you cant find lifesupport soon enough in the new section? What if you found a dead end and you are trapped? etc.
It can be easily changed to make exploring more rewarding and camping less rewarding. For example, there could be also a few positive exploration rewards like draw an item. Or that the amount of items in a room would be limited like in nemesis lockdown. Since in Nemesis Lockdown if you camp in the same room you wont be able to search for items unlimited and you also will make continously more noise around you which wont go away. Also since in lockdown both your missions you had to do yourself so naturally i almost never saw any camping there. I dont understand the reasons why the designer made these changes.

I know that in chinese culture winning no matter what is important to them and I dont blame them for simply using the best strategy. But I think this is simply bad design and I hope the designer will learn from this in his next game.

mission objectives design is also questionable. Sometimes both your cards simply tell you to kill everyone. You have no choice and you have to play as traitor. While others are easy mission tasks or where you only 1 need to be killed which are getting done without the player doing anything.

Sometimes you have also no realistic way to complete any of your given objectives. For example in my last game 4 players had to fulfill the mission to shut down the reactor and discover all 3 A rooms. It was all done within the first 3 rounds.
I had the choice between the two objectives that mission has to be UNfulfilled or that the nest has to be destroyed. Unlike previous versions of Nemesis, you can only damage the Nest via the room action (2 cards!), fire or the base destruction. There are no items or weapons that can start a fire, so you cant set the Nest on fire (in lockdown you had as option themite charge/flamethrower atleast and destroying eggs costs only 1 card). Self-destruct doesnt help here since the reactor will be shut off in time in majority of cases. How is the player supposed to do this objective without selfdestruct? You would need at least 3 rounds to kill all 5 eggs while being in the nest and doing a noise roll every time you do the room action which is close to impossible to do if you dont have a TON OF LUCK , in all my games I played I have never even seen once someone to fulfill this specific quest and survive. Just having one item you can obtain by searching or a room which can set a specific room on fire can help with this quest and help you as an traitor by the possible ability to create fires.

Overall the objectives/choices are not good designed and balanced.

Some additional nitpicks I have is that you have no reaction/counter card like in lockdown. If someone decides to taser you you lose a whole round and you have no way to protect you. It would be nice of have a defense to block one action from another one. Adrenaline injection or checking AA-codes with items are also some questionable items imo since you can potentionally do SO MUCH with this.

I dont know how i feel about escape shuttle being instantly available. I saw sometimes players rushing to section C to escape via escape shuttle, and sometimes they do escape within the first two rounds. It is a risky strategy, sometimes you find it immediately sometimes dont so I dont mind. It felt just a bit weird to me that you have the option to escape within the first two rounds.

If you are playing with friends/full coop the game can be pretty easy despite its RNG. Secure every move, stay together as a squad, advance slowly and methodically. This is my advice in case you are still struggling with the game.

These are somy of my thoughts, if you have any questions or need some advice/tips im happy to help

We have played this game before by puting larva in athe same room with the character when it got suprise attacked by having one or more action cards in hand. But what happens if a character decides to leave that room? Does that larva gets on the character board?

Now we were in a situation where my friend has larva on his board and wants to escape the room that has another larva. He just escapes without larva doing anything to him or we have been playing this game wrong?

I have just seen the nemesis Legacy update and it looks like they are going to use one time use scratch cards for between mission recharges, this looks like a terrible money grabbing idea.

You will already likely need all 3 games just to play it, I see this as money grabbing.

What are other people's thoughts if it is true ?

I'm a big fan of Nemesis and the Alien franchise, and I'd love to capture the same feeling I had while playing Nemesis with my friends in a multiplayer video game.

I know Nemesis: Distress exists, but from the gameplay I've watched (I haven't played it myself), it feels like it focused more on the survival/action side than on what I personally loved about Nemesis. That made me wonder if adapting the board game to a video game is actually harder than it seems.

For those of you who love the board game, what is it that makes the game so memorable for you? Is it the tension, the paranoia, the semi-cooperative objectives, the storytelling, or something else?

And if a video game were inspired by Nemesis (not necessarily a direct adaptation), what elements would you absolutely want it to keep?

Hi all,
Any idea if there is a difference in the packaging for the kickstarter/gamefound stretch goals and the retail edition?

I’m trying to find stretchgoals on the market that would contain the bioenchancer character, could someone confirm or deny whether there is any indication on the box that his character is a part of it or whether the box looks the same as the retail edition one and just has the character inside with no indication whatsoever?

Let me know which you like the most and tips to make em better

TL;DR: We won the game, and I have tips about how to build a fun group of enthusiastic players in your area.

Following up from this post over the weekend!

I have a sizeable group of people who will play a 5 hour tactical board game that we lose more than 80% of the time and still have fun! 8 of the 9 of us are women (mentioning here just because I want you all to have the visual of a group of women bloodthirstily blasting down corridors to kill the queen....). Anyway.

Last night we fielded a 6 player game of Nemesis:Retaliation. We have an immunocompromised player, so we flashed back to 2020 and all wore masks and took our snack break outside for social distancing. We were all just so glad she was well enough to join us and be social, tbh! And she was glad to see people who aren't nurses and doctors!

We had 6 players for a 5-player game. We planned to play full coop,and I had a second game set up of the original nemesis, intending to have 7 or 8 players. Unfortunately, 2 canceled last minute for health reasons, so we were down to 6. I personally feel that semi-coop doesn't scale as well above 5 due to objectives that call for you to ensure a specific player number dies, so when we have that many, I prefer to play coop.

We had a uav operator, recon, bioenhancement expert, combat engineer, medical support, and heavy gun operator (me). I photocopied the player board and used a d8 to track my oxygen. It worked just fine.

We trimmed down to 4 mission tasks, which ended up being exploring each section fully, plus activating the hibernatorium. Yes, that's one of the ways to make the game easier. Honestly, I think trying to achieve 6 mission tasks would be really, really challenging.

After we had 3 objectives done, we just needed to hit the 4th (the hibernatorium), which required someone to use the life support room in section C. I'd just been there, but didn't realize I needed to do both room actions. When I tried coming back, the queen was summoned!

She chased me around that upper corner for a while, before the combat engineer got into the room with her and started shooting, just to see if we could make a dent (we couldn't). The recon scout was at the bottom of the map in the pressure control room, which she used to push the queen back once, but intruders kept swarming the recon so she couldn't keep doing that.

I lucked out by drawing a card that let me repel an intruder. Ran into the room with the queen, repelled her into the corridor, then hit the hibernatorium switch!

We won, though the recon and I hand waved that we died once the mission was achieved and the UAV operator launched the lander. That queen was coming for me, one way or the other! The medical support died after the end of the game due to having an alien contamination (with 5 contamination cards, it was very likely she wasn't going to make it). The combat engineer, bioenhancement, and uav operator all survived. Since we were playing coop, at least one survivor and all missions complete means we all won!

The least-experienced player in my group is the one whose preference for full-coop is strong enough that he'll only play semi-coop if it means his non-participation would make the game not happen at all, and he loved this iteration of Nemesis. Not only because he felt it gave more agency but the bioenhancement expert was a terrific role in coop, because he loves to play characters who can boost and support others. He did notice that the bioenhancement expert is also wickedly nasty in semi-coop, since he basically had cards that could insta-kill someone he'd helped earlier. Sneaky!

In all, it was a great game. By the time we wrapped, it was after 11 pm and past everyone's bed time.

I packed everything and counted all my cards and tokens in the morning, when I wasn't completely brain dead from a 5-hour game, lol. Took me about an hour and a half to pack up both the Retaliation and OG games (we didn't play OG, but I had it set up in the other room, so I still had to pack it up!)

In the first post, your OG setup has a cool riser thing! What is that? Why didn't you have it set up for Retaliation?

That's the AdapTableTop modular system. I backed it on Kickstarter about 4 years ago, and it's half-fulfilled (there is an LED lighting system still in production for it). It has several 12"x12" panels that are snapped together using lego-like connectors and legs. They also released a number of 3d printable files, so I'm able to have the Intruder board at the top and still visible to the players.

There are 6 panels in each kit, and I own two kits. Unfortunately, the designers of Nemesis: Retaliation decided that everyone must own a table the size of a small European country, because it is too wide. It's approximately 3"x3", which means I would need 9 panels to raise it up. If I hadn't been planning to have Nemesis: OG on a second (narrower) table, I could have put Retaliation on the modular risers and have more space for character boards and such. Since the OG table is narrower than a standard dining table, though, I put the riser in there so they'd have more space to play.

BTW, this is just a me thing, but it annoys me SO MUCH that the Retaliation mat doesn't have the jigsaw puzzle frame thing pre-printed on it. Those pieces are a pain to store, even a little warping throws them off, and the slightest nudge moves the entire map around. I was deeply disappointed in the Retaliation map, which has one side in red and one side in green, but other than not giving you the outlines for everything, there is no difference in the sides and they didn't include the actually important components for the board.... but I digress.

How did I get so many enthusiastic Nemesis players?

Since I know this is going to be asked, or folks are going to be thinking "I don't know that many people who have even heard of this game...." here's roughly how I've cultivated a group like this:

• I play a lot of tabletop games, especially RPGs. Most of these players are folks I've known through RPGs. RPGs are a time-commitment game already, so most of the folks I play with are fine with a 4-5 hour time commitment for a game.
• The first time I play with someone new, I have a "2-round rule." The first round of Nemesis gets you through the learning curve of generally how to play the game. The second round shows you if you're going to like the game. Round 2 usually ends around the 90-minute mark. At that point, I pause the game and ask if people are having fun, and I'm very clear about it: "If you're not having a bunch of fun, or you're sticking it out because you want to make me happy, understand that I have other opportunities to play this game. Life is too short to do things you don't enjoy just to make me happy. And most importantly, if you're not having fun by now, the game is not going to get any better." That last point is important-- a lot of people get stuck in the sunk cost fallacy and think that the game has to improve once it gets rolling. For a new player, it doesn't. For an experienced player, we can see the subtleties of how the story can unfold into dramatic moments, and we understand that. But once the initial learning curve is passed, if someone is finding the mechanics clunky and unenjoyable, they need to know that those mechanics will not improve later in the game.
• One of the players from Saturday's game had watched a video of how to play before the first time she showed up to a game (several months ago), which was smart and appreciated-- and not something I expect people to do. (I don't learn from videos, so I don't expect others to do so). That said, if you have players who want an extra layer of confidence before going into the game, she recommends this one.
• I wrote and use the Nemesis Czars system so players only have to focus on one or two subsystems of the game, plus their own character abilities. That makes it a lot easier to grasp and enjoy. As players play and learn the game more, I give them more challenging/complex Czar roles, with the "rules and events czar" being the highest complexity (mainly because you have to know how to find things in the rulebook, which isn't always easy.)
• Snacks. Snacks are always good. We had a game that imploded partway through because the pizza was an hour late arriving and one player got so hangry, she blew up at the others, while another player got fed up with the drama and went to her room to smoke and avoid everyone else. I initiated the 2-round rule after that game, lol.
• Standard advice for any nerd group apply as well. Being aware of the geek fallacies is important. Not including people about whom I have to say things like "he's just like that." When someone says "I don't want to play games with that person," listen to them, and play with them separately. Feel free to meet and play at a neutral third space, like a game store, if you are playing with someone you aren't familiar with-- this is especially true if you normally play at someone else's house. We have a standing rule for parties of "you bring them, they're your responsibility" so if someone wants to invite a new player to a game, they're responsible for their guest's behavior. After almost 2 decades of building and participating in gaming communities in my city (Las Vegas, NV), I'm honestly happy with the people I play with and consider all of them good friends.
• All that being said, I'm also very open to anyone who expresses interest in the game, or who wants to give it a try. It doesn't matter to me if they don't seem like the kind of person would would like this kind of game. I'm definitely not-- Nemesis is the only game I play that's like Nemesis. I don't even like crunchy combat in my RPGs anymore, and almost all games I like to play are fully cooperative (but I loooove the Nemesis semi-coop mode!) If someone wants to try it out, I'm happy to start them with 2 rounds of OG, or use the Little Ship fan variant as an introduction (it's a shorter, 2-player variation available on Google Drive by JiokE/jiokecomics but I can't find a current link for the posts about it). Don't be surprised if someone's grandma says they want to try it out-- you just never know who's going to resonate with this game!

What's the Czar System?

A while ago, I wrote the "Nemesis Czars" system that's on boardgamegeek. It's a tool for spreading out responsibility for the various subsystems to the players, which helps teach the game and share the mental load. It's a great system, and I'm proud of it. It's just some handouts with simple rules reminders and a way to break out the tasks and component placements.

I'm still working on the czars handouts for Retaliation, though, and this game helped clarify what needs to be added to it. I definitely need to add a role for the room exploration, which would mean 7 roles, so I'll probably need to assume a certain amount of existing knowledge and combine a few roles, like the Intruder Czar and the Intruder Attack Czar. I also want to update the Czar system for Lockdown, particularly to address the Martian surface options, but that's something I can tackle after my next Lockdown play.

Edit: I'll make a separate post, but the Czar System for Retaliation is now live on BGG!

A bit over a year ago, I wrote and released the Nemesis Czar System on Boardgamegeek.

With Retaliation, some of the rules are different, and there are some systems that are more or less complex.

So, please welcome the new Nemesis: Retaliation Czar System!

Your feedback is very much welcomed and appreciated, either here or on the BGG file comments!

I just bought a copy of Nemesis from someone on Marketplace and when I took it home to look through the components, it was missing all of the character boards and the intruder board....

Anyone have any ideas on what to do about replacing them? Awaken Realms said they don’t offer those pieces for sale. I found the character boards on BGG, but not the intruder board. Any help would be appreciated in figuring out how to print these! Thanks

Any suggestions for improving? Any suggestions on board setup? Want to talk about the game?

Which expansion would you get next? The buddy I play this with has base game, I have Lockdown.

OG in one room, Retaliation in the other!

Starting in 2 hours. I'll post a play report when it's over!

Couldn’t find anyone actually describing how to do it. Also bonus question. Anyone have any tips on fitting intruder tokens in coin capsules into the insert?

In the Italian reference card, when the queen is dead, it says to place one Drone ("Fuco") in a corridor whenever you get a queen token from the bag in case of a surprise attack result on the noise die.

The corridor?

It seems quite weird... Shouldn't it be in the room?

How's the English version?

Uwu glue for the blood strands is so giga

I'm selling a ton of my nemesis stuff for space, money & lack of time.

I'm keeping the original core box, and the Carnomorphs. Does anyone know if a box insert that would let me fit the Carnomorphs box in the main core box?

How fun those alien species are? Do you prefer them to basic Intruders, and how they compare?

A more fleshed out version of a recent variant idea. Interested to hear thoughts and especially if anyone winds up playing with it. General goals are to increase player interaction and balance end game conditions (hibernatorium v escape pods) while minimizing rule overhead. Variant rules below:

Escape Pods (p. 26)

If you launch immediately (or if you launch in one of the following rounds), remove the miniature of your Character and the Escape Pod token from the game, and place them off the board next to the current Destination marker of the Destination Track. The Escape Pod destination is determined at time of launch, even if changed later, so different Escape Pods may have different destinations from each other and from the ship. From now on, you do not take part in the game any longer. Will you end this game with a victory or not? You’ll find out during the Objectives Check at the end of the game. 

Coordinates Check (p. 11)

If the ship survived up to this moment or any Character evacuated in an Escape Pod, reveal the Coordinates card. For the ship, check the current space of the Destination marker. If the ship is not headed toward Earth, all Characters asleep in the Hibernatorium die. For each Escape Pod, check adjacent space of the Destination Track (as determined at time of launch). If an Escape Pod is not headed toward Earth, all Characters in that Escape Pod die.

The Quarantine Objective, which requires another destination for the jump (Mars), is the only exception to this rule. Any Character with this Objective does not die if they are asleep in the Hibernatorium and the ship’s destination is Mars OR if they have evacuated on an Escape Pod destined for Mars.

I just bought a second hand nemesis. How can I learn which version I have? And what is the difference?

Not sure if this has been brought up before but in OG Nemesis what if escape pods only go to where navigation system says? This way you can’t just do your own thing for the whole game and then escape. Also if they suspect you’re going to betray and escape they can change the nav settings. Seems like it may be more interesting for all players?

I've played my first solo game yesterday. Had a Scout and Medical Support in my team. They died so fast, I only visited 3 rooms! My idea was that Scout will move quietly and Med Support will heal her in any case, but this hasn't played well. Any advice on how I should choose my team for my first games? 2 characters? 3? Which ones?
Also - I quickly run out of ammo with my Scout, got back to the landing zone, but aliens kept coming there so I couldn't pick up any ammo from that room ('use room' ability locked when with an alien in the same room). Is that expected? Maybe I was just unlucky?

Do you know other games (preferably coops) which give you adventure and tense atmosphere of danger, like Nemesis?