HAVE YOU PLAYED?

There’s few ruder wake-up calls than coming out of hypersleep to find that your spaceship is overrun with aliens – and they’re not the only ones you have to watch your back for in, Nemesis

Words by Christopher John Eggett

Before the Alien franchise was dished out fairly liberally around the board gaming world (see Alien: The Roleplaying Game from Free League, and the recent Ravensburger outing in Alien: Fate of the Nostromo) there was only one way to get the full Alien style thrills on the tabletop – and that’s in the form of Awaken Realms’ Nemesis. Join us as we hop out of hypersleep to work out what exactly keeps leaving claw marks around the vents – and whether we should trust whatever that is compared to the other people around the table.

WHAT IS IT?

Nemesis is the apex predator of ‘survive until stabbed in the back’ games. Players draft a play order, and then get to pick a character of two chosen randomly, along with personal and corporate objectives. You’ll recognise all the characters –a trigger-happy solider, a sneaky scout, an over-curious scientist, a hard-bitten mechanic, a pilot who knows the ship like the back of their hand, and the captain – who somehow is meant to keep it all together. Maybe anyway. As you’ll soon realise, the secret objectives that each player draws at the start of the game give you your motivation. Maybe you want to escape with an intruder egg, maybe you want to kill the queen, maybe you want to set the ship on a course for Earth. Maybe, if you’re playing with enough players, you have the job of killing player one. Or blowing the ship up and being the only survivor, snugly jettisoned into space in an escape pod.