Nemesis

I mounted a barn owl the week I finally got Nemesis to the table, wings half spread on the armature, and there’s something about working with your hands on a dead thing while you think through a game that makes the connections stick weird. Nemesis is doing the Alien thing, everyone knows that going in, corridors and noise tokens and a queen somewhere in the dark, and it earns the comparison more than most games that try it. You’re not fighting the monster so much as fighting the not knowing, whether the room ahead has something in it, whether the crewmate helping you carry a corpse to the lab is actually helping.

The semi-coop structure is the real spine here, everybody’s got a hidden objective, some overlap and some don’t, and the tension of “am I actually supposed to trust this person” holds up for a long time before it gets old. Where I’ll push back is on how brutal the dice can be about who gets to keep playing. I’ve watched an alien clip someone for a serious wound the round it spawned in their room, and that’s it, they’re dead twenty minutes into what’s supposed to be a three hour game with nowhere to go and nothing to do but watch. That’s not tension anymore, that’s just bad luck wearing a horror costume.

Box weight tells you a lot before you even open a game, and Nemesis is heavy in a way that promises production value, which it mostly delivers, but the minis themselves are a mixed bag once you actually look close. Mould lines everywhere, muddy detail on the character sculpts specifically, and more than one review out there wishing they’d gone hero scale so the faces would actually read. I don’t paint minis for a living but I’ve spent enough hours under a loupe cleaning up specimens to notice when a manufacturer cut a corner on finishing work, and this is one of those.

Where the game genuinely earns its reputation is the story generator side of it. Every table I’ve run this with walks away with an anecdote, someone banging on pipes to lure the queen off, someone getting cooked alive fleeing a fire they started themselves. That’s worth a lot. Just go in knowing full coop is the friendlier mode, and that the semi-coop version can turn a three hour investment into a very expensive way to watch your friend feed you to something in the dark.