Somebody in my group put the Alien score on low in the background before our first game and it completely changed the experience, I’d recommend that to anyone before their first play, it’s not a gimmick, it earns it. Nemesis drops you on a doomed ship with a hidden objective, sometimes aligned with the group, sometimes actively working against it, and the tension of not knowing whether the person next to you is going to help you seal a door or leave you behind to die is the entire point. Semi-coop is where this game is best, full stop, we tried it fully cooperative once for a newer player who didn’t want the betrayal angle and it’s fine, but you can feel how much of the design is built around not fully trusting the table.

It is swingy, genuinely, one bad card pull from the contamination or intruder deck and you can be dead within a single turn having barely done anything, and I’ve seen that specific complaint from other groups too, it’s not just us being unlucky. I’ve made peace with it because the atmosphere the swinginess creates, the sense that anything can go wrong at any moment, is doing real narrative work, this isn’t a game built for people who need to win through pure skill. Setup is faster than a comparable game like Arkham Horror, everything nests properly in the box insert, which I appreciated the first time I opened it and didn’t immediately dread the teardown.

Where I’d flag a real weak spot, the human-controlled intruder variant is not good, most groups I’ve talked to agree it should just be ignored in favor of the standard deck-driven aliens. Also worth knowing, one person basically has to learn the full rule set and run the event/intruder decks for the table, it’s not evenly distributed complexity. Neither of those stop this from being the most purely cinematic thing in my collection. Five stars, low lights, real soundtrack, mandatory.