Nemesis

Nemesis occupies the table before the game has properly begun. The production is striking, the quality is high, and the miniatures have just enough detail to make an Invader beside your character feel like very bad news indeed. It is not a small purchase, but as a physical object it earns its weight and its space.

The crew wakes aboard the ship and tries to work out what is happening, searching rooms and gathering items in order to stay alive. It uses a fixed card deck rather than deck-building, so its choices are fairly direct and easy to enter: explore, search, move, and try not to make matters worse. Taken on their own, the mechanisms are not something to write home about.

Nemesis comes alive in what the players do to one another. You may find yourself weaving between four adult Invaders as a perforated scientist in a wheelchair with fourteen infections, determined to blow up the ship in revenge on the soldier who betrayed you — only to remember that the pilot had already betrayed both of you. Or someone hoards food items, squeezes out four extra actions, and turns the vessel into a funeral pyre; at that point, the airlock begins to feel like a group decision.

Nemesis does not promise fair treatment. A dreadful first tile involving a nest and queen can ruin someone's evening at once, and the event randomness can end a session with very little room for appeal. It needs a group that knows the game, keeps it moving, and accepts that the story matters as much as survival.

I would not bring it out to admire its gameplay. I would bring it out to watch a crew lose its collective mind, commit to their roles for a while, then laugh about the wreckage afterwards. On a Tuesday after work, that can be exactly the kind of space disaster one needs.

Nemesis is quietly excellent when you treat it as an experience rather than a machine for fairness.