Nemesis has just had a very successful Kickstarter campaign. This new board game, designed by Adam Kwapiński, is the result of a collaboration between Awaken Realms (creators of This War of Mine: TBG, The Edge: Dawnfall and Lords of Hellas) and Rebel (creators of Drako, Dream Home and K2) . It's a 1-5 players semi-cooperative Sci-Fi horror where you and your friends try to survive while attempting to fulfill your secret objectives that may sometimes collide. It will also enable full co-op as well as solo play experience.
It probably won't be available for retail until September 2019 or later. It's not too late to do a Late Pledge on its Kickstarter campaign. I haven't pledged on Kickstarter as I am still new to Kickstarter and would probably wait until my vendors gets copies to sell.
But if you have Tabletop Simulator on the Steam game platform, you can download the digital version of the prototype of the game to try out. I played this with my brothers online through Tabletop Simulator.
So I played the game by myself and with my gaming group online. There are 5 characters (Captain, Soldier, Scout, Scientist, and Pilot). However, one of the characters is randomly selected to be found dead and thus unplayable. This game uses an action economy mechanic where each character has a unique deck of 10 cards. They then take 6 cards to their hand to use during their turn.
Each player also have a player card and each character has different starting items which are placed on the player card. You are dealt 2 personal objective cards and you can only choose one. You don't reveal this objective to anybody because some are rather not very nice or goes against the main objective. Fortunately, most are just benign like discovering 2 weaknesses or killing an adult Intruder.
Each room has a hexagon tile and a square tile which tells you how many items that can be found in the room and the status of the room like a malfunctioning room , room with a broken door which shuts closed behind you or a presence of an intruder. Once reveal the room, you have to make a noise check and the dice will tell you where to the noise token in the corridor. If the same corridor gets two noise tokens, an intruder is revealed and will immediately attack you.
The main goal of the game is the have at least two functioning engines out of three engines and to have the flight coordinates set in the bridge to Earth. Then once those are attained, you need to go back to the hibernation chamber and enter the pod or escape through the escape pods before times runs out. But each person has a personal objective they need to resolve as well.
This is really a challenging game which really gives the atmosphere of the movie franchise Aliens which obviously inspired this game even though they make sure not mention it. So they are not called Aliens but Intruders. I call them the Not Aliens.
Each character has unique abilities coming from their deck of cards. The personal goals are a nice touch to affect the level of trust in this game. You have to take your fellow players's word if they say the engine is functioning when they check it or repair it or if the coordinates set are actually to Earth.
So hopefully this game becomes available in September and the expansions next year. It is not too late to do a late pledge on their Kickstarter campaign if you're interested.