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unlicensed aliens — Beware both the chestburster and your fellow players. Dan Thurot – Jan 18, 2020 2: 30 pm UTC Enlarge / The intruders are… unpleasant.Awaken Realms Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com. You’re roused early from cold sleep. The ship’s hibernatorium—and likely the remainder of the ship—is running on half power. There’s a body nearby. More accurately, there’s a body all over. For a moment, your sleep-fogged brain assumes somebody has splashed BBQ pork all over the floor and walls. Nope; that’s the crew member who was supposed to be on watch while everyone else slumbered. Welcome to Nemesis, a board game with strong (but decidedly unofficial!) echoes of Ridley Scott’s Alien. It raised millions on Kickstarter—but is it any good? At the table, everybody can hear you scream Generally, board games don’t do horror very well. Oh, they’re plenty good at tension. Setting up a climactic play over multiple turns, waiting to see if somebody undoes all your hard work by taking that card you’ve been eyeing, wondering whether your spouse is secretly Hitler… these are the moments board games create almost effortlessly. One time, I realized I’d been holding my breath during Exploding Kittens. Here was a game I wouldn’t ordinarily confess to playing, and yet my entire body was rigid was apprehension. (Granted, this was because I hoped the game would end as soon as possible, but still.) Nemesis takes that tension and weaponizes it. From its very first moments, this is a game about the terror of the known, the half-known, and the unknown. Such is its dedication to that prickle you get when somebody threatens to jab you in the kidney that the game even features player elimination. Note that I’m saying Nemesis “features” player elimination, not that it suffers from it. Getting knocked out of a three-hour game within the first 40 minutes is a design decision, not an oversight. Sure, it’s a bummer. But don’t you think Executive Officer Kane was bummed when that chestburster did precisely what its name implies? I’ll bet he was totally bummed. I’ll bet he wishes he could have stuck around until the ending and helped Warrant Officer Ripley jettison that bastard alien out the airlock. I’ll bet he thinks it’s unfair that a single lapse of judgement resulted in having his sternum ruptured by an unknown lifeform. Too bad. The same thing can happen in Nemesis, leaving a puddle of raspberry jelly and a freshly hatched creeper where once stood a human being. So it goes when you don’t head to the surgery room as soon as a space monster roots around your esophagus with its multi-jawed proboscis. Of course, even this doesn’t come across as truly horrific. When your character makes too much noise and summons a queen from the depths of the ship’s utility level, you won’t kick your chair to the floor and leap from the table. Maybe you’ll swear.
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