Nemesis Board Game | How to Play and Win

Nemesis is a 1 to 5 player semi cooperative survival horror game for ages 12 and up, and you win by finishing the single secret objective you quietly keep and getting off the ship alive. More than one player can cross that line, and on a bad night nobody does.

If Catan is still the heaviest game that regularly hits your table and you have been circling Nemesis because somebody online called it Alien the board game, let me hand you the corrected version first. The old copy of this page told you the combat ran on ten sided dice and reroll hits, that an AI deck drove the aliens, and that solo play handed you two characters. None of that is in the rulebook, and two of those mistakes would cost you a game. Everything below has been checked against the official rules and cross checked against three independent summaries.

Nemesis is a 1 to 5 player semi cooperative science fiction survival horror game. You and the rest of the crew cooperate to keep the ship running and each other breathing, but every player is dealt a hidden objective and the rulebook is blunt about the fact that not all of you can win. It is nothing like a friendly family game, and that is exactly the point. If Gaia Project is the other heavy space game you own, this is the one that is loud, dirty and frightened where Gaia is quiet and polite.

You win by finishing the single secret objective you decide to keep and getting yourself off the ship alive, either by hibernating when the ship makes its jump to Earth or by launching an Escape Pod you are still inside when it goes. More than one player can cross that line, and on a bad night the whole crew dies and nobody wins. So the honest question is not whether Nemesis is fun, because it absolutely is. It is whether your table wants a game that will happily turn on you, because it will.

Affiliate disclosure: this page contains Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through one we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you, and it never changes the verdict above.

How you win, and how the game ends

You win Nemesis by completing the single secret objective you chose at the first Encounter and by surviving, either hibernating when the ship jumps to Earth or launching an Escape Pod you are still inside. More than one player can win the same game, and on a bad night nobody wins at all, which is a design choice the rulebook states plainly rather than hides.

There are exactly two ways off the ship as a winner. You hibernate in a chamber when the Time marker sits on a blue space, passing a Noise roll with no Intruder in the Hibernatorium, and you stay asleep as the ship jumps. Or you climb into an Escape Pod and launch it: at 1 to 2 players there are 2 pods, at 3 to 4 players there are 3, and at 5 players there are 4, and each pod holds 2 Characters. Every pod starts Locked, and they all unlock automatically the first time any Character dies and again when the Self Destruct marker reaches any yellow space. Escaping in a pod is the exit that does not care about the engines or the destination, so it is the safer bet when you are hurt or infected and the clock is nearly done.

A game ends one of exactly three ways, and only one of them is pleasant.

How a game ends	What triggers it
The ship jumps into hyperspace	The Time marker reaches the final red space of the Time Track, and every Character awake on board dies
The ship explodes	The Self Destruct marker reaches its final red skull space, or a ninth Fire or Malfunction marker is placed, and everyone aboard dies, including the Intruders
Nothing is left to do	The last alive, non hibernating Character dies, hibernates or uses an Escape Pod, so the ship is empty

When the game ends the victory check runs in a fixed order, and whether you live is decided before your objective is even looked at.

Check, in order	What has to be true
1. Engines	At least 2 of the 3 hidden engines must be Working, or the ship never reaches its destination
2. Coordinates	The Destination marker must end on Earth. A non Earth destination kills hibernating Characters, except for the Quarantine objective
3. Contamination	Every survivor shuffles their whole deck and draws the top 4, and a single Contamination card of any kind kills them
4. Objectives	Only now is your chosen objective checked and your victory settled

So an Escape Pod character skips the engine, destination and contamination gamble entirely, because they already left. A hibernator bets everything on all three landing their way, and the game refusing to let you know which until the end is the whole anxiety of the design.

The 15 turn clock and the two phases

A game of Nemesis is exactly 15 turns, tracked by moving a marker up the Time Track from its green start space, and every turn is two phases in a fixed order: the Player Phase and then the Event Phase.

Each Character has a personal deck of 10 Action cards and enters the Player Phase by drawing a hand of 5. During the Player Phase each Character takes 2 Actions or passes, going around the table until everyone is done. The Event Phase then runs top to bottom, and it is where the game hurts you.

Phase	What happens
Player Phase	Draw a hand of 5 from your 10 Action cards, then take 2 Actions or pass, going around until every Character has gone
Event Phase	Step the Time marker up the Time Track, Intruders in occupied rooms attack, fire spreads, draw and resolve 1 Event card, then develop the Intruder bag

That last Event Phase step is the ratchet that makes the game scarier the longer it runs, because every Event Phase can add worse monsters to the very bag you are about to draw from. Fifteen turns sounds short until you realise that the ship is actively getting more dangerous while you are trying to fix it.

The Noise roll, encounters, and the Intruders

Noise is the engine of Nemesis, and the rule is simple: every time your Character enters an empty room you roll a Noise die, and a result of 1 to 4 places a Noise marker in the corridor with that number.

Placing a Noise marker is how the ship hears you. If you are ever told to place a Noise marker in a corridor that already has one, you resolve an Encounter instead: all the Noise markers around that room are discarded, an Intruder token is drawn from the bag, and if the number on that token is higher than the Action cards left in your hand you suffer a Surprise Attack before you can act. So the whole game is a balance between exploring for the items you need and staying quiet enough not to pull something into the room with you.

The Intruders are not one enemy, they are an ecosystem that feeds itself.

Intruder	What drawing it does to the bag
Larva	Adds an Adult to the bag
Creeper	Adds a Breeder to the bag
Adult	Every player rolls for Noise
Breeder	Every player rolls for Noise
Queen	Appears in the Nest, or otherwise adds an Egg
Blank	Adds an Adult to the bag

The box holds 27 Intruder tokens in all: 8 Larvae, 12 Adults, 3 Creepers, 2 Breeders, 1 Queen and 1 Blank. A fresh bag is seeded with 1 Blank, 4 Larvae, 1 Creeper, 1 Queen and 3 Adults, plus 1 extra Adult for every player at the table. Look again at what a Larva and a Creeper do, they feed the bag. This is a game that gets worse on purpose, and the Event Phase keeps pulling the lever.

Combat is one die with no rerolls, and there is no AI deck

This is where the old page was most wrong. Nemesis combat uses two Attack dice with symbol faces, a Shot costs 1 Ammo and rolls a single Attack die once, and there are no rerolls anywhere in the rules.

After you place the Injury markers the die gives you, you check the Intruder endurance by comparing it to the blood icons printed on the Intruder Attack cards. A melee attack is different and harsher: you first draw a Contamination card, then roll the same die, and any miss also inflicts a Serious Wound, so the best possible melee result is only 1 Injury. Wounds stack through three light steps before turning Serious, and a Character already carrying 3 Serious Wounds dies to any further wound. A Larva or Egg dies to a single Injury, a Creeper or Adult compares your Injury markers against the blood icon on one Intruder Attack card, and a Breeder or Queen makes it two cards.

The second big correction is that there is no AI deck. Nothing shuffles toward you on its own. Intruders move because the Event card drawn each Event Phase tells them to, by their symbol and through the matching corridor number, and the pressure comes from tokens being drawn out of the bag and dropping into the room they appear in. The only deck that actually plays the aliens is the optional mode where the first player to die takes control of the Intruders and cannot win, which is a house favourite once everyone at the table knows the rules.

One more rule that surprises people: you cannot directly attack another player. The crew have implants that stop direct violence, so the only way to hurt another Character is indirectly, with fire, an Intruder you were friendly enough to lead into their room, or a well timed door.

Contamination, and the card that hides infection

Contamination cards are the quiet horror of the whole box. They sit in your hand exactly like Action cards and clog it, but they can never be discarded to pay the cost of an Action.

Every Contamination card hides whether you are INFECTED until you look, and the way you look is the Scanner or a Surgery, Canteen, Shower or Antidote effect. Being INFECTED means a Larva has been placed on your Character board, and a second Larva kills you and drops a Creeper into the room, so you are always choosing between spending precious actions to check yourself and spending them on the objective you actually need. Then, at the very end of the game, every surviving Character shuffles their whole deck and draws the top 4, and a single Contamination card of any kind among those four is instant death. It is entirely possible to survive the whole ship and lose to your own hand.

Characters, objectives, and who can actually win

Six Characters ship in the base game, drafted at random: the Captain, the Pilot, the Scientist, the Scout, the Soldier and the Mechanic, each with their own 10 card Action deck and their own starting position.

At setup every player is dealt two hidden objectives, one Corporate and one Personal, out of 18 total in the box with 9 of each. You keep both face down and you do not yet know which one you are bound to. The moment the first Intruder miniature appears on the board you choose exactly one of the two, and the other is removed from the game without anybody seeing it. That moment is a real fork, because some objectives simply want you off the ship and some want a specific other player to never make it home.

Because the objectives are hidden and personal, Nemesis can end with any number of winners. The rulebook is explicit that a game may result in none, some or all of the players winning, and that the other players achieving their goals has no bearing on your own victory. If you love the moment in Root when the table realises one player was quietly playing a different game, Nemesis runs on that exact fuel, except here the different game is usually “make sure I am the one who lives.” There is also a fully cooperative mode in the box for tables that want no betrayal: each player takes a single objective, all of them must be completed, at least one Character must survive, and the Emergency Room AutoDoc revives the dead. Solo play draws two cards from the Solo and Coop objective deck, keeps one at the first Encounter, and halves the items in each room with rounding up.

Corrections: what the old page got wrong

The old copy of this page got a dozen load bearing rules wrong, and several of them would have cost you a game. Every one is fixed here, in a single table.

The old page said	What the rules actually say
Combat rolls batches of ten sided dice, then rerolls hits, and a failed reroll loses the attack	A Shot costs 1 Ammo and rolls one Attack die once, then you check endurance against the blood icon on Intruder Attack cards. No rerolls exist
An AI deck controls Intruder movement	There is no AI deck. Event cards move Intruders by symbol and corridor number each Event Phase, and escalation comes from drawing tokens from the bag
At 1 to 2 players you control two Characters each	You control one Character at every count. Pods scale with the count, and solo changes the objective and item rules, nothing else
Solo play uses a dummy hand or open objectives	Solo draws two Solo and Coop objective cards, keeps one at the first Encounter, and halves each room items with rounding up
Every secret goal is live from the start in one pool	You are dealt 1 Corporate and 1 Personal face down and keep only one when the first Intruder miniature appears
The crew includes a Soldier and an Engineer	The six Characters are Captain, Pilot, Scientist, Scout, Soldier and Mechanic. There is no Engineer
The box says 1 to 3 hours, so plan for 2 to 4	The verified playing time is 90 to 180 minutes across 15 turns. A first five player game runs long as experience, not as a number the box carries
Organizers are almost essential and metal coins replace the trackers	Both dropped. Neither is verified against the rulebook

If what you actually want is the same heavy feeling but with the backstabbing happening out on the board in open daylight rather than hidden behind a hand of cards, Food Chain Magnate is the game that does that, and it is every bit as mean.

House strategy: how we actually survive (not official rules)

None of this is in the rulebook and none of it changes a single rule. These are the habits that took our crew from a total wipeout to actually getting somebody home.

Explore with a plan, not on reflex. The Noise roll punishes wandering. Decide which two rooms you genuinely need before your Player Phase, take the shortest path between them, and treat every extra empty room as a gamble you are choosing to take. The map is modular and only 5 of the 20 room tiles come out per game, so the safe routes and the choke points are different every night.

Contamination is a resource problem, not a horror problem. Because Contamination cards clog your hand and cannot pay costs, every one you carry is a turn you cannot spend. Put off Scanning yourself until the endgame draws close or until you can do it with an action you were spending anyway, but never walk into the final draw holding four Action cards and a Contamination you never checked.

Finish your objective early, then survive. The objectives in the box are not all escape objectives, and plenty of them are done mid game once you reach a specific place or hold a specific item. Closing yours off early turns the last few turns into a pure escape puzzle, which is far easier to win than juggling a half finished objective while the Intruders are hunting.

Read the Event cards, not just the map. Event cards move Intruders by symbol and corridor number, so the card that resolves in the Event Phase is telling you exactly where the monsters are about to go. Two turns of paying attention to the symbols tells you which corridors are about to get hot, and a strong player reads the ship movements before they read the ship map.

Talk to your table, but guard your hand. In a semi cooperative game the strongest tool is still information, and the strongest defense is not saying what you are holding. Offer help, coordinate fire and doors, and keep your objective and your Contamination to yourself until the moment revealing them wins you something.

Is Nemesis good for families? Our honest take

No, not for younger kids, and I would rather be plain about it than dress it up. Nemesis is a heavy horror game for teens and adults, with player elimination, body horror and hidden objectives that sometimes require another player to die.

Emma at 10 can follow a game and it is still not her game. Alex at 7 is not going anywhere near that ship. This is a grown ups and experienced friends kind of night rather than a Friday family game, and it belongs on the adults shelf next to the other late night experiences rather than next to something your eight year old can jump into. The theme is genuinely frightening, the game can eliminate a player before the final act, and the hidden objectives drop a family that plays to relax into direct personal conflict. That is wonderful for the right table and a bad idea for a relaxed family night.

If what you actually want is a heavy game the whole family can share across ages, Great Western Trail is our pick for a deep game a patient older kid can sit in on, and our best board games top 50 list is the place to start for lighter family picks that will not frighten anybody. Nemesis is a deliberate exception to that rule, and we love it anyway.

Which Nemesis to buy

Start with the base game, always. The whole 15 turn semi cooperative experience is complete in that box, and both expansions are for people who already love it.

Version	What it is	Best for
Nemesis	The base game, 1 to 5 players, six Characters, 15 turns, the full hidden objective experience	Anyone ready to be frightened, and the only box you need to start
Nemesis: Aftermath	Epilogue expansion. Adds a shorter 45 to 60 minute epilogue played over five turns after a normal game, five new Characters and a shuttle board	Tables who have finished several 15 turn games and want to see what happens next
Nemesis: Lockdown	A standalone Mars base game for 1 to 5 players, semi or fully cooperative, no base game required	Players who want the Nemesis tension in a fresh location without owning the base game

Aftermath is not more of the same, it is the follow up to the specific story you just survived, a short sequel played in five turns once the main game is done. Lockdown is the one I would point most people to second, because it is standalone on a Mars base and it ships with a fully cooperative option for the friend who never wants to be betrayed on turn nine.

• Similarities: Both are games about a table where nobody fully trusts anyone, and the fun comes from reading the room while everybody pretends to cooperate.
• Differences: Root is an open asymmetric war game where each side plays by different rules out in the open. Nemesis runs one shared ruleset, hides a secret objective behind every player board, and adds body horror, infection, a hard clock and player elimination.
• Why this game fans will enjoy it: If you love Root for the reveal, when a friendly neighbor turns out to be the traitor, Nemesis is that same reveal inside a survival horror film, and it is the one we break out when the group wants to be properly frightened.

Frequently asked questions

How many players does Nemesis support?

Nemesis is a 1 to 5 player semi cooperative survival horror game for ages 12 and up, and it runs about 90 to 180 minutes across 15 turns. The base box supports every player count from one to five, and the solo and fully cooperative modes are printed in the same rulebook.

How do you win Nemesis?

You win Nemesis by completing the single secret objective you chose at the first Encounter and by surviving, either hibernating while the ship jumps to Earth or launching an Escape Pod you are still inside. More than one player can win, and so can nobody at all.

How does a game of Nemesis end?

A game ends one of three ways: the Time marker reaches the final red space and the ship jumps into hyperspace, the self destruct marker reaches its skull space or a ninth Fire or Malfunction marker blows the ship apart, or the last awake Character dies, hibernates or escapes. Then the victory check runs in order, Engines, Coordinates, Contamination, Objectives.

Is Nemesis cooperative or competitive?

Nemesis is semi cooperative, so the crew cooperate to keep the ship and each other alive, but every player holds a hidden objective and other players winning does nothing for your own victory. Some objectives require that a named player never makes it home, and the box also contains a fully cooperative mode for tables that want no betrayal at all.

How do noise and encounters work in Nemesis?

You roll a Noise die every time your Character enters an empty room, and a result of 1 to 4 places a Noise marker in the corridor with that number. If you are ever told to place a Noise marker where one already sits, you resolve an Encounter instead, which can pull an Intruder into the room and, if the number on the token is higher than the cards in your hand, triggers a Surprise Attack.

What do Contamination cards do in Nemesis?

Contamination cards sit in your hand exactly like Action cards, but they can never be discarded to pay the cost of an Action. Each one hides whether you are INFECTED until you Scan it with the Scanner or through a Surgery, Canteen, Shower or Antidote effect, and every survivor shuffles their whole deck and draws the top 4 at the end of the game, where a single Contamination card of any kind kills them.

Is Nemesis good for kids and families?

No, not for younger kids. Nemesis is a heavy horror game for teens and adults, with player elimination, body horror and hidden objectives that sometimes require another player to die. Emma at 10 can follow a game and it is still not her game, Alex at 7 is not going anywhere near that ship, so we save this one for grown ups nights and friends who know what they are signing up for.