Nemesis

Chuck (Scout), Doug (Soldier), Scott S. (Mechanic), and Tom (Scientist) struggled to survive the aliens who infected their starship in our game of Nemesis. Thanks to Tom and Ki for the teach session. They did a great job and we moved through the game at a lively pace.

With most of us being new, we all moved fairly quietly in the beginning and our alien count was low to start (see notes below, though). We managed to explore much of the ship before things went sideways. Tom (Scientist) was busy searching rooms and repairing some of the systems on the ship. Scott (Mechanic) made his way forward to check the ship’s destination and announced it was Earth. Chuck (Scout) moved around the ship searching and repairing. He would join Scott (Mechanic) near the escape pods and helped activate them. It did not take long before Scott had amassed his minimum number of items and boarded one of the escape pods. It was a close-run thing though when an alien appeared after he opened the escape pod door, but he survived the encounter and launched himself into space. Doug (Soldier) had gone back to check and repair the engines, then made his way forward to the Cockpit with the goal of changing the ship’s destination from Earth to Mars. After a couple battles with aliens, he managed to change the ship’s direction to Mars – much to the chagrin of Chuck!

Chuck then headed forward to change the destination back to Earth as Doug was trying to get back to the Hibernatorium – which currently had a fire and was not operational. Doug had to stop in the Fire Control System room to extinguish the fire. Though successful in extinguishing the fire, he would not make it out of the room, as he died fighting another alien that appeared. Tom was diverted after he became infected when he had to go the Surgery.

Congratulations to Scott S. for escaping the ship alive and achieving his victory conditions! Unfortunately, the ship jumped before Chuck and Tom reached the Hibernatorium (which still needed to be repaired) and Doug died fighting.

 

Chuck did some research after the game and discovered a few things we were doing incorrectly and some important points to keep in mind when playing the game:

• Careful movement still generates noise.  You just get to pick which corridor the noise happens in that’s adjacent to the room you just entered.  This is why the Scout card is cool.  Burn 2 cards and you generate no noise at all.  If you enter a room and flip the hex token and get a “silent” symbol, but you’re slimed, you still roll for noise.
• If you get a second noise token in any corridor, an intruder shows up and the noise clears from ALL corridors.  This takes care of the situation where there were multiple corridors that were going to get a second noise token.  You just place one monster and then clear all adjacent noise tokens, even in the technical corridor.
• Fire damages you at the end of every 2 actions, not the end of the phase.  So, if you end your second action in a room that’s on fire, you take a wound, so you can take multiple wounds in a single player phase.  The fire damage step we were doing was to apply fire damage to the intruders, not characters.
• There are only 8 adult monsters.  If you need to add a 9th, you remove all the adults that are in rooms that don’t have characters in them, and them place the one new one in the room that needs it.
• We weren’t adding intruder corpse tokens when they died.  You can haul these around and research them to discover weaknesses.

 

As Chuck noted, the short version is that we should have had more noise on the board and likely more intruders, but each intruder clears out all the adjacent corridor noise, so maybe that would have evened things out (we were leaving a lot of noise on the board)?  It doesn’t make much of a difference the first pass the characters make through all the rooms, but it means that any doubling back is pretty much going to always trigger a monster, so the scout becomes infinitely cooler in this case.  You just have to be a bit more organized in the exploration.  Makes things a bit harder, but not impossibly so.

He added that you definitely need the quick reference cards that are available on BGG for this.  If we’d had those handy, we would have done all this correctly because it’s all readily visible on those sheets.