Nemesis: Retaliation

For a while, the enormous Kickstarter box for the third Nemesis had been sitting in annex C of the Vault, forcing me to wonder where exactly it was supposed to fit. It eventually became a perfectly respectable base for stacks of other games, which, honestly, does not particularly wrong the experience. This is the third Nemesis: yet another group of socially unstable “specialists” walks into the jaws of death, ready to betray colleagues, feed aliens, and escape before everything blows up like a certain inspector’s self-destructing message.

The basic recipe remains familiar: I choose a character, take my gear and little deck, then enter the base and try to survive with two actions at a time. Once again we have a base rather than a spaceship, as in Lockdown, but there is also a form of exploration. Rooms and corridors are revealed dynamically, a nice system that keeps discovery alive, even though the game as a whole felt more cumbersome to me than the previous Nemesis titles.

In practice, my interaction with the system and the aliens did not deliver the tension I wanted. Perhaps we were simply unlucky, but the base kept producing aliens, while the AI pathing felt somewhat suspect — with the caveat that we may have handled it incorrectly. We did, at least, have plenty of moments where someone was reliving Dutch facing the “Painful” one from Predator. Even so, the move safely actions and secure tokens made the session feel more static and, ultimately, more boring, without the anxiety of the first game or the madness of the second.

If this is your first encounter with the series, I completely understand why you would be impressed by its theme and mechanisms. I want to give it another one or two plays and search the forums about a few strange rules before writing it off for good. Still, my first impression was not enthusiastic: in my humble opinion, the original Nemesis together with Aftermath remains the most entertaining combo the series has produced.