Nemesis

Nemesis is a science-fiction survival board game designed by Adam Kwapiński and published by Awaken Realms in 2018. Its original Kickstarter campaign drew attention to a premise inspired by cinematic spaceship horror: crew members awaken from hibernation aboard a damaged vessel and discover that hostile organisms, called Intruders, are aboard. The crew must make the ship capable of reaching Earth, survive long enough to escape or return to hibernation, and satisfy personal objectives. Unlike a straightforward team game, Nemesis is described as semi-cooperative: one character's route to victory can conflict with another's, even though everyone benefits from repairing shared systems.

Players choose from six distinct crew roles: Captain, Pilot, Scientist, Soldier, Mechanic, and Scout. Each role has its own deck of action cards and starting equipment, so a mechanic's options differ from a soldier's. Actions include moving through rooms, searching for items, using room facilities, and attacking enemies. Movement can produce noise in nearby corridors; accumulating noise risks an encounter with an Intruder. Rather than simply revealing a fixed monster at every turn, the game uses an Intruder bag to determine certain encounters. Cards also govern events and attacks, making exploration unpredictable even when players know the ship's layout well.

Winning is not just a matter of killing monsters. The vessel has three engines whose condition matters, and players may need to check its destination at the cockpit. Personal objective cards introduce further complications, including goals that cannot all be fulfilled harmoniously. A player can instead try to leave in an escape pod, provided circumstances allow it. Infection adds another threat: contamination cards can enter a player's action deck, and scanning may reveal that a character carries a larva. Removing it can require access to the ship's Surgery room. Injury, fire, malfunction, and dwindling ammunition make delays increasingly dangerous.

Nemesis supports one to five players and includes rules for solo and fully cooperative play alongside its standard semi-cooperative mode. Its miniatures represent the crew and several stages or types of Intruder, from larvae to the Queen. Player elimination is possible, and survival alone does not guarantee victory: the chosen objective still has to be completed. The 2018 release established a setting that Awaken Realms later revisited in Nemesis: Lockdown, a separate game set in a Martian facility, rather than replacing the original spaceship. That distinction matters: the cockpit, engines, and escape pods belong to the original game's particular setting.