I saw a review of Nemesis before its release on YouTube, and was instantly hooked, the Kickstarter was of course backed by me.

Once I got the game, it was as good as my impression from the preview was.

You have six characters, one of which starts the game dead, you can play the game with up to 5 players. The character you play is semi-random, you draw two randomly, choose one, and put the other back in the deck. So even the last player chooses from two options.

The story is, that the crew of an interstellar space craft wakes up from cryo-sleep mid-flight, as something is wrong. One of their crew is dead (the sixth character no-one is playing), with… something… having broken out of that character's chest cavity, then is cryo chamber, and vanished into the ship's interior… xenomorph on board!

The characters also get two game missions, dealt randomly, one personal and one corporate goal. During the game they need to decide for one. Goals include the ships destination (Earth, Mars, the sun [to destroy the xenomorphs on board]), the survival (or not…) of a specific character, transmitting a message, … And of course the goals of each player are secret.

The base atmosphere of the game is paranoia from the start – you work cooperatively, check the engines' status, check the coordinates the ship is flying to, repair damaged modules. Well, officially. And ideally, everyone's goals match or at least don't interfere. But often, that is not the case – at least some player's goals will clash.

The coordinates (on the bridge) and the engine's status (two engine rooms) are handled via cards and counters, which you can only check, when you are in the relevant room. Once a character checked them (at game start their status is random), he will inform the other players – or not, his decision. But is he telling the truth? Was the engine really damaged, and the player, with his room action (change the order of the two status markers, the one on top counts), really did repair it? Or was it functional, and the player damaged it, because his goal is for the ship to blow up…?

A few rooms are fixed on the board (like the bridge the cryo room, the engine rooms), which consists of hexagonal spaces where rooms are placed, connected by corridors. Most rooms start as are empty spaces. Because of the emergency wake-up from cryo sleep, everyone's brain is still a bit fogged, and no-one remembers the exact ship layout – when someone enters an unexplored room, a random room is drawn and placed – great replayability.

When your goal is to "send the message" for example, you need to find the communications room. When you need to blow up the ship, you need to find the room with the self-destruct button AND the control room for the escape pods, to open them (because you need to survive, of course), etc. When you get hurt you need to find the medical bay to heal.

All the time, with each movement, you need to roll a noise test – creating too much noise, and you will attract the aliens lurking on board, which also breeded in the meanwhile. From small larvae to the queen, different sizes of aliens will appear.

In fights with the aliens, you will accumulate injury cards. They are part of your cards in hand (which determine which character specific actions you can take), and clog a slot that could hold a useful card. And they have a hidden text behind red dots, which you can only read when you put them in the scanner (a cardboard device you can push the card in, which then reveals the hidden text through a red tinted transparent plastic sheet). This hidden text reveals, whether you have been infected by aliens, carrying one inside you that will eventuelly burst out of you. Scanning your cards is also only possibe in a specific room. Now, some of the game targets define that you must be un-infected to win – so in case you are (which you first need to find out), you need to go to the surgery, where you can get rid of the infected cards.

The game is under time preassure. Every turn, a marker is moved one square, after a fixed number of turns the ship will enter hyperspace. Everyone on board and not in a cryo chamber will die. And the ship will only enter hyperspace, if all engines are working – otherwise the ship will explode when the jump is created.

Oh, and there is the self-destruct, you can activate in a specific room (like when your mission is to prevent the ship reaching populated space to not spread the alien infestation). Which another character can turn off again, in the same room, should he have a different mission goal…

Each room that you discover can be un-damaged, damaged, or on fire. Fires can spread through the ship, except you contain them in with closed bulkheads, or extinguish them.

Players may only attack xenomorphs, never other players. Even if their mission is to ensure a specific character does not survive. Well, you may not directly attack another player… if you toss a grenade into a room to attack a xenomorph, and the attack also deals damage to every other model in the room… or if you close the last bulkhead to a burning section, and your target character is still in… or if you play a card that forces a xenomorph to move into a room that happens to include the other character…

The ship also explodes, when the ninth damage marker would be placed on a room. Having up to eight is fine. In a game, where we had five already on the board, and my character repaired one to reduce the total number on the board, I became suddenly suspicious – because I repaired the room with the self-destruct button. Why would I do that, if my goal wouldn't be to destroy the ship, the other players said. Well, I didn't want to destroy the ship, I just happened to be in that room (remember that you discover them at random) and it really was just to reduce the total damage tokens on board… welcome to Nemesis :-)