Nemesis

Nemesis is thematic and dark in a way that mostly earns it, everyone’s on a doomed ship with something loose in the vents, and the hidden agendas mean the other players sitting across from you might be genuinely trying to get you killed, quietly, through inaction more than sabotage. That last part is where my one real complaint lives. A player whose secret goal is to make sure you don’t survive has almost no direct tools for it, they can lock a door on you, redirect you, but they can’t attack you with a weapon even when that’s explicitly the win condition they’re chasing. I’ve watched that frustration happen at my own table, someone locked into a kill-agenda with basically no lever to pull, which is its own quiet kind of kingmaking, since it hands the actual outcome to dice and doors instead of the player who’s supposed to be causing it.

Player count matters more here than most games I own. Four or five feels like the game working as designed, tense and full of competing agendas. Solo is fine on its own terms. Two, based on what I’ve seen and felt myself, just doesn’t generate the same paranoia, too few people to genuinely suspect.

The box and its expansions add up fast if you go the Kickstarter route, I’ve seen full pledges land north of $350 once you count the acrylic packs and playmats, and I did some real price-per-play accounting before deciding the base game plus Lockdown was enough for my group without chasing every add-on. It paid off, we’ve gotten real mileage out of just those two boxes.

Still a five for me, mostly because the tension it builds when it’s working is unlike almost anything else on my shelf, but go in knowing the hidden-kill mechanic has a real gap in it, and that four or five players is where this actually sings.