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Nemesis |
| 2026-03-15 |
Nemesis
We played Nemesis. What a solid game!
I came unprepared to the table, thinking that it was a riff on Aliens, it isn'it, it's a riff on Alien. So far, my favourite game on Alien had been, well, Alien, which is a simple and efficient collaborative game.
We woke up in the middle of the ship, exiting our hibernation pods, we notice a corpse lying on the floor, and none of us can remember the layout of the ship. The engines are at the back, and the bridge is at the front. Why the corpse? It seems it died a violent death. Are the engines on? Where is the ship heading?
I was handed "The Scientist" as a character. I like that genericity, I am in a wheelchair, I look a little bit like Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park, but the name of the character is left for me to choose, or not.
We somehow forgot the layout of the ship. There are three rooms between us and the engines, and four other rooms to the bridge. Being the first player, I went towards the engine and the first room I came into was the nest for something. And my wheelchair got pretty slimey. I rolled the "noise dice" and the corridor I just had used got a noise marker.
Let's stop, I will not reminisce all we did in that ship. My fellow shipmates escaped by getting back into their escape pods after having turned the ship signal on, pointed the ship at Earth, and checked that the three engines were on. Matt got killed by an intruder right before entering his pod. Too bad.
You have to choose one objective, one personal or one corporate. I had chosen the corporate objective which required me to use the laboratory and determine two weaknesses of the intruder species. Since I spent most of the game fooling around and firing parthian shots at the monsters, I was late in caring about realizing my objectives. I understood the search mechanism a bit late and was a mistake. I needed chemicals and lab tools to do my job. I ended up outside of my hibernation pod as the ship engines fired.
We were heading back to Earth. Kaori and Tony were the winners, having performed all the steps before reaching back the safety of their pods. But Kaori was infected by an intruder. And the ship was full of intruders. I guess that the engine kicking back in meant the death of any life form not an hibernation pod (me included).
As I wrote on top, it is a solid game with great replayability. My friends had said they had never succeeded at it. Yesterday was a first for them. I was surprised by the number of fiends that jumped at us after a few turns. It felt like a lost cause, helping each other did the trick.
It lacks the space truck feeling conveyed by the original movie, but it has its own charm. I want to play again.
