I like the idea of the Nemesis games but they’re just too big, and sadly, don’t appeal to the rest of my regular game group. I’m also not overly keen having to deal with lots of bulky minis. My eyes lit up when Chip Theory Games announced 20 Strong: Nemesis in their recent crowdfunding campaign (along with a couple of other Awaken Realms properties, Tainted Grail and Etherfields), so I just had to find out more.
If you’re not familiar with 20 Strong games, they’re dice-based push-your-luck solo games (well, mainly solo; 20 Strong: Nemesis breaks the mould, supporting up to 3 people, though the BoardGameGeek consensus is it’s still best solo). The 20 in 20 Strong refers to the number of dice used in the game: 17 of them are ‘unit dice,’ mainly used for movement and combat; the remaining 3 are ‘stats dice’ used to measure health and indicate location in this game (though they’re used differently in other 20 Strong games). Similar to Final Girl, the game is sold as a core module containing the dice and a tracker, known as the chip, with a separate ‘deck pack’ containing cards for a specific game scenario. The core pack and Nemesis deck are available as a combined pack. Additional ‘universal hero’ promo-packs also exist, offering additional characters to play in just about any 20 Strong game, sort of like how Final Girl characters can be used in any Final Girl feature film, though some do work better than others in specific games.
Be aware that while a new core pack is available, it’s a small upgrade (mainly rebranding) over previous ones, so there’s no need to buy that if you have a 20 Strong game already, just the deck pack.
Designed by Josh J. Carlson and Logan Giannini, 20 Strong: Nemesis is a tiny recreation of the Nemesis universe in a deck of cards (and some dice)—will it be enough to scratch my Nemesis itch?
Gameplay Summary
Before I start, I’ll mention that a pretty good interactive tutorial is available. (One small warning: I find Dized tutorials occasionally get stuck and refuse to respond to the ‘next’ button; most times, clicking on the settings buttons and going back again kicks the system into life again.)
If you’ve played other 20 Strong games, be aware that how you use dice is different for Nemesis in several areas. Additionally, there isn’t a ‘big boss’ to end the game with a final battle as is usual; instead, you keep playing until the clock ticks down to zero, or all players have escaped or perished, whichever comes first. As mentioned earlier, this game can handle multiple players in a semi-cooperative mode (like ‘big’ Nemesis), with a personal objective card putting the ‘semi’ in ‘semi-cooperative.’
With that out of the way, back to the game…
The 17 unit dice have different distributions of hits and misses on their faces, ranging from the weakest with 2 hit sides and the rest misses, to the strongest where all sides hit. As one of the hit sides, all dice have a critical hit (or crit), which generally means applying more damage, though not always in this particular 20 Strong game. What crits mainly mean here is increasing the noise level (a concept straight from full-fat Nemesis), and too much noise can cause an alien—or more than one—to pop up next to you.
These dice exist in several different states, determining what you can and can’t do with them; I won’t dive into the details, but two important states are ready for use and exhausted (once you’ve ‘applied’ them), with ‘recovery’ being the process getting dice from back from their exhausted state to be usable again.
In other 20 Strong games, the 3 stat dice indicate different stats, but here each one represents the health of an individual player as well as indicating their location on the map. The other values normally represented by these dice, strategy and recovery counts, are determined here by your hero card (heroes being the term used in 20 Strong games for player characters).
Health is a pretty obvious concept, but the other stats may need some explanation. When you select and roll dice for actions, you’re allowed to reroll up to your strategy count, which can be beneficial in bumping misses to hits or, more significantly in this game, bumping crits down to hits, avoiding the noise increment when putting the dice to use (termed ‘applying’ in the 20 Strong lingo). The strategy value also indicates how many items you can carry. The recovery count is the number of dice you can move from exhausted back to ready to use at the start of your turn (not the end, as with other 20 Strong games).
Now that cards have been mentioned, I’ll outline the most important card types here:
- Hero cards represent the character you play in the game, showing your stats and initial health value, and have player aids on the back; each hero also has a special ability, e.g., the Medic appearing leftmost in the picture above can restore players’ health;
- Objective cards—your own private goals for the end of the game, e.g., second left above lists a bunch of ways to gain additional points; if all players agree, you’re totally at liberty to ignore objectives and treat the game as a race to escape;
- Alien cards—initially off the board, but when you make too much noise, you’ll find a monster such as the third card above, breathing down the back of your neck;
- Item cards of 3 types (technical, military and crafted) and in single, multi-use or ongoing effect flavours, e.g., the Recon Drone shown above, with its back indicating that it’s a technical item; and
- Room cards—20 cards laid out randomly in a 5×4 grid to create a map of the spaceship you’re trapped in, e.g., the Cryo Chamber and Armo[u]ry, rightmost in the picture.
The chip is used as the countdown clock here—the game ends when it hits zero. It’s positioned on a Noise card (seen in the earlier dice and chip picture) to show the current noise level—a bit fiddly, but at least the chip and holder assembly is reasonably substantial, so not easy to accidentally jog out of place.
Initially, all but one of the Room cards are face down, that room being the Cryo Chamber, where you wake up and start the game. You have to explore the ship, finding and activating generators, engines and ultimately escape pods before it’s too late.
A round consists of 2 stages, activation (a somewhat overloaded term in these games!) and engagement, and the latter has 2 phases, strategy and resolve.
During activation, you wind the chip down a notch, getting closer to the end of the game, and recover dice from the exhausted area. If the dial hits a particular value, the ship’s self-destruct is triggered, and all the remaining aliens come out to play—everything starts to get a bit hairy…
The strategy phase is where you select a number of dice up to your maximum health (i.e., the number on your hero card, not the stat die) to roll and apply them (remembering to increment the noise level on each crit, which can potentially add an alien to your room), using the rolled values to perform up to 4 actions from the following:
- Move—move across the map up to the number of hits. If you end your movement on a face down card, you can look at it and decide to activate or not, which may require having particular items in your inventory or other rooms having been activated already, and often you have to roll dice. Once activated (turned face up), some rooms gain Item cards of specific types, which you can later salvage.
- Salvage—acquire the top item card in the room. This necessitates rolling all non-exhausted dice; besides increasing the noise level, each crit also lets you recover an exhausted die.
- Attack—pretty self-explanatory… Apply damage until you reach the threshold of the alien’s health count. Incidentally, the enemies here don’t give rewards when defeated, as is typical in 20 Strong games, but can trigger wider game effects; what’s more, the wretched cards aren’t discarded, but get shuffled back into the enemy deck!
- Trade—swap items between players in the same room.
- Other—specific actions offered by a Room or Item card.
- In the resolve phase, you suffer damage from aliens in the same room as you, as they whack you with the damage count using the dice indicated on their cards (not a fixed amount, as is typical in other 20 Strong games), then you move all applied dice into the exhausted state, enemies not in rooms with players move (towards the heroes, of course), and you roll for noise yet again.
Repeat until you’ve escaped or until all players have run out of health or time.
Production quality
Physically, the game is amazing. I’m in two minds about PVC cards, but they’re certainly shiny and robust, with great artwork (courtesy of Piotr Foksowicz, Patryk Jędraszek, Ewa Labak and Andrzej Półtoranos, artists for the original Nemesis) and clear iconography; the dice are high quality; and the magnetic chip and holder is a chunky, solid bit of work.
The box is wonderfully compact, and very transportable.
My one criticism is that parts of the tiny and dense rulebook can be confusing to people unfamiliar with any 20 Strong games, especially where it more or less says ‘these are the 20 Strong rules’ followed by ‘but it’s different here.’ The brevity of the two rulebooks (there’s a common core rulebook as well as the one for the Nemesis deck) also results in a bunch of ambiguities and unexplained corner cases, as evidenced by the number of rules queries on BoardGameGeek. I do think the game could benefit from a comprehensive FAQ, and it’s worth checking out the Dized tutorial mentioned earlier and perhaps a few instructional videos before your first game.
Comparisons
The obvious game to compare this to is Nemesis, along with and its variants. I confess that my knowledge of the big game is based only on videos and the rulebook, but I reckon the 20 Strong version captures a fair amount of its spirit. However, the tension is reduced, as is replayability, thanks to the more limited map and aliens. Dice rolling seems more randomising than in full Nemesis, but I’m also aware that there can be a lot of swinginess and luck in that game too. I suspect fans of Nemesis might be disappointed with 20 Strong: Nemesis, unless all they want is an extremely portable version to get a quick hit of alien mayhem when they’re on the go.
The game that strikes me as most similar to this is Final Girl: Into the Void. The ship’s layout is more predictable in Final Girl (pretty much fixed, bar the maintenance shafts), and there’s only one enemy alien. Oh, and you have a crowd of people to protect (I like to think one of them is a cat). It’s also single-player only. But, for all that, I think it’s a bit of a toss-up which game is better for solo play, and they’re sufficiently different that there’s no reason not to have both in your collection.
If you’re a fan of the 20 Strong system, would you like this one? A definite… maybe! It breaks enough of the 20 Strong conventions that it’s verging on being a different game, so could be frustrating if you’re looking for the same overall feel as the other games. Perhaps the most jarring difference is the lack of a final boss—escaping vs not just doesn’t have the same impact or sense of accomplishment.
In one of the Gamefound campaign updates, a quite interesting developer diary for the game, this comment appears: ‘Nemesis is the most non-standard 20 Strong deck we’ve made so far. It may be the most non-standard 20 Strong deck we'll ever make’—Chip Theory Games themselves are admitting it’s a bit of a stretch!?
Squinting just a little, there are similarities with cooperative games such as Pandemic or The Sheep (and there are plenty more), in which bad things just keep a-coming, and your main task of dealing with the primary objective of the game is hampered by having to fend them off. Like most of those games, too, if you let the crises get out of hand even just a little bit, they’ll stampede and totally swamp you.
Verdict
As someone as yet unable to play full-size Nemesis, I found this a decent game to play, though it does make me even more eager to somehow play its larger sibling.
Were I a Nemesis veteran, would I like this game? While it is a mini-Nemesis, I feel the experience is rather weak compared to the larger game, so it might be disappointing. There’s perhaps too much randomness, in terms of ship layout, dice rolls and card draws (woe betide you if the queen alien appears early in the game). On the other hand, like Wingspan Pocket compared to Wingspan, it might provide enough to scratch an itch.
Switching audience, if you’re a seasoned 20 Strong player, you might find the rule tweaks and differences frustrating. I appreciate there’s a lot of uncertainty there, but this game is to some degree neither one thing (Nemesis) nor the other (20 Strong).
There’s better news if you’re not particularly experienced with either the big game or the 20 Strong system. It’s a nice solo game set in an Alien sort of universe, and kind of works for a couple more players if you push it. I’d also say that if you are a fan of Final Girl games or other cooperative disaster-fighting games, you are likely to enjoy this one.
