Sidequest: Nemesis

• Designers: Jakub Caban and Bartosz Idzikowski
• Publisher: Board & Dice
• Players: 1-4 (would not recommend more than 2)
• Age: 14
• Time: 60-90 minutes on box.  Approx 70 minutes in actual time in my solo play
• Played: once with review copy provided by publisher

Captain Jessica Kowalski’s crew has been offered another offer from the Corporation. Apparently, a ship carrying a precious load vanished a few weeks ago. The mission was simple: locate the ship, assess the situation and make sure the cargo reaches Earth. However, the last log entry was rather unsettling. She recorded: the AI of the ship detected alien lifeforms, labelled Intruders, aboard. Silence is scarier than usual…

Side Quest: Nemesis is a game of puzzles and enigmas by the designers of the Escape Tales series, but now in the Nemesis universe. SideQuest: Nemesis offers captivating puzzles, an interesting scenario and difficult choices to make while under pressure. The game will test your creativity, your perception, your open-mindedness. Be aware the silence aboard is not a good sign and intruders are hiding in the darkness. Complete your mission and avoid being contaminated at all costs!

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT – I won’t spoil any of the puzzles, but I will describe the architecture of the game a bit just so you understand how it works. If you’d rather not know, then skip to the “My Thoughts on the Game” section.  Though, honestly, I don’t think that anything I will describe in the structural sense would lessen your enjoyment of the game should you play it…

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So, when you unshrink the box, you’ll find that the first thing you see is: “Start Here.  This game has no rule book”…  And, as it turns out, you’ll end up learning the game as you play.   You are directed to take the first card from the deck and read it, and thus begins the rules.  Sure, it’s not a “book” but instead it is words on cards.  

There are plenty of other things in the box other than cards – you’ll see a few “sheets” as well as some punchboards.   They are all clearly labeled and the game tells you when you will need certain things.  This game is essentially a bunch of puzzles that you will have to work through; and as you need certain props, you’ll get access to them.

There is a pretty neat answer matrix that you use to check your answers.  Essentially, each puzzle gives you a four color/character/number answer, and you will transpose these values onto the answer matrix.  If you have given the right answer, you’ll get a clever checksum to ensure that your answer is correct and then you’ll be directed to a new card in the deck to continue your adventure.  Work through the deck of cards, solve the puzzles, and then at the end, the game will rate you on how you did.

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My thoughts on the game

So, Sidequest: Nemesis is an interesting start to a series. I can say this because I have two games already (Nemesis and 7th Sea).   One of the more intriguing features for me is that this is set in the world of a boardgame, but not one that Board & Dice has published (Nemesis was by Awaken Realms).  The art is very reminiscent of the original board game on which it is based, though it is important to know that you need no previous experience with Nemesis to enjoy this.  Knowledge of the original game will not help you at all – the puzzles here are essentially independent of that. FWIW, I haven’t played Nemesis, so I can say for sure that everything worked just fine without me knowing anything about the base game…

I have heard from other people that the original game involves exploring a spaceship that is rife with aliens and other baddies.  You follow a similar sort of path here, as the story takes you from room to room in the ship.  In each one, you have a puzzle to solve…

Overall, the puzzles here were reasonable, maybe even described on the easy side… Though there was at least one in the box which I felt required a pretty severe mental leap to solve.  I was unable to do that, and I can say that the hint sheet included in the game can be quite useful when you hit a wall and can’t figure out how to start a puzzle.  Some of the puzzles have a single hint while others give you sequential levels of hints – I think that this is probably a reflection of the overall difficulty of each puzzle.  Some of the puzzles are really quite simple and I’d have a hard time coming up with more than one level of hint for them!

I really liked almost everything about this one as far as the puzzle-game goes.  It’s compact, has puzzles that seem fair (well, maybe one that was a bit of a stretch).  The one thing I did not agree with was the player count.  For me, this game is best played with 1.  MAYBE two… but definitely never with 4.  In fact, we started this one at regular game night with 4 players, but aborted after the first two puzzles.  The cards and bits are so small that realistically only one player can work on things at a time.  You might be able to have someone look over your shoulder, but there’s no way that four people can participate simultaneously on a puzzle, and the game is so linear that you’re only working on one puzzle at a time.  Sure, it would be helpful sometimes to bounce ideas off of other people, but it’s more of a frustration when three people are sitting around the table watching the fourth person actually solve the puzzle.  We put the game away at game night and I finished it by myself the next day.

On the bright side, nothing is destroyed in solving the game, so we just ended up passing it around the group, and it’s over 50% of the way through the group as I’m writing this.  In fact, for those who are interested, leave a comment below and I’ll likely give my copy away as a giveaway when my group is done with it.  One curious thing is that if you want everything to fit back in the box, you might need to put all the chits back into the punchboards – the well in the box insert doesn’t really fit the components otherwise… Also, it would make it much easier for the next person as they can quickly find the requested punchboard and get the pieces they need to solve their puzzle.  You probably don’t want to throw out the insert as you will use it setting up the game to hold some of the sheets in place.

The game is a one-and-done, like almost every game in the genre, as the solutions to the puzzles never change.  The difficulty on the box is rated at 2 out of 4, and this feels like a fair rating.  I’d be happy to recommend this for anyone looking for a small and compact puzzle solving experience.  

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me…