Nemesis
In space, no one can hear you scream “Why is this rulebook overly complex?!”
My home game group played Nemesis last night. Though we’re currently on an Ark Nova (and possibly Concordia) binge, I’d had the game set up at my house after a friend had wanted to see it, and rather than tear it down, I encouraged the other players to give it a shot again.
We really like the game, but, as one of us put it, it’s more of a cinematic adventure (feels slightly RPG, though that’s a stretch) rather than a strategy game.
And it’s punishing.
For one, the manual, for whatever reason, in its completeness, is organized in such a way that you can end up in a circular loop or two branching options and not be sure which to take. For example, from page 19:
CHARACTER ESCAPE
A Character may also try to Escape from Combat by performing a Basic Movement Action to go to a neighboring Room (explored or unexplored). Before you move your miniature, resolve an Intruder Attack.
More on Intruder Attack - see Event Phase pages 10 and 20.
Then you go to page 10:
6. INTRUDER ATTACK
Each Intruder in the same room as a Character performs an Attack.
More on Intruder Attack - see Combat, page 18.
Wait, what? Now page 18? So there have been 4 different pages I’ve had to look at to understand how Character Escape works? If it seems like I’m stretching this too far, just imagine trying to look this up during combat. The most egregious thing we need to look up is a table for “Intruder Bag Development” which has six different types of tiles you can pull out of a bag that you then need to correlate to a table — on page 10 in the manual. Which isn’t even where the center seam / staples are to make the manual open up easily. For a big manual. Where am I supposed to put this 8x20” manual on the table? So we took a picture of it and refer to it on our phones. But why don’t they have a cheat sheet or print it on the bag?
Similarly, there are some room effects you can do that are printed on the board, and others that you only learn about if you refer to the large (very helpful, though) reference cards for room effects, but that the board doesn’t even tell you to look at.
Anyway, enough griping, sorry. We enjoy the game but don’t understand how something that is so fun and well-designed in terms of look and feel of the board can be so brittle when you look closer. I imagine it comes down to the last touches or budget, because the game has a real appeal, and feels like it’s going to work great, until you look at that one mini with an alien who’s… resting their hand on a post? And until your character has a larvae on their board (a.k.a., in their belly, waiting to burst out, like in the movie Alien), and you’re desperately searching for the Surgery Room to get it removed, and you draw the Eclosion card, which then just says you’re dead because you have a larvae?! Wait, that’s just not fair. So now the player needs to sit out, possibly not even a quarter of a way through the game?
At this point, it may sound like I didn’t have fun. I did have fun… just, now that I think about it, was more frustrated than I realized. The tension of trying to avoid aliens helps dampen that frustration in the moment and makes me forget how annoying it was I had to shower to get slime off, only to get slimed again, and not find any of the items I need, so — in the moment, it was a lot of fun. I think.
