20 Strong: Nemesis Review: Rolling a Mixed Experience

Welcome to this week’s review! This week I’m taking a look at one of the newest decks for a popular solo game. So, without further ado, let’s jump into it.

Disclosure: A review copy of this game was provided to The Meeple Digest in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.

20 Strong: Nemesis is a new standalone game in the 20 Strong series. For those unfamiliar, 20 Strong is a solo game utilizing a deck-based system and 20 dice, hence the name. There are already quite a few 20 Strong decks released at this point, but this one is a new deck that has tie-ins to the Nemesis board game from Awaken Realms. The 20 Strong: Nemesis Core Set contains all of the necessary components, namely the 20 dice and chip tracker, without needing to own any previous 20 Strong decks. And unlike other 20 Strong decks, the Nemesis deck can be played both solo or multiplayer. However, for the purposes of this review, I’ll be mostly focusing on the solo experience.

To preface, I haven’t played any of the previous 20 Strong decks, and I’ve never played a Nemesis game, so my perspective will be as a completely new player. Similar to the Nemesis board game, the primary goal of 20 Strong: Nemesis is to escape the abandoned ship before succumbing to the aliens. In addition, each player starts the game with two hidden objectives, and your secondary goal is to complete as many goals as possible from one of your two objective cards. These could include activating certain rooms, escaping with full health, collecting a certain number of items, or defeating a certain number of aliens. In multiplayer games, these objectives might even run counter to other players’ objectives, such as being the first to escape, making the game semi-cooperative. While I can’t speak for the multiplayer objective cards, I liked how these objective cards provided some direction for each game and added some variety to each playthrough. There are also a large number of heroes, each with their own stats and unique skill, which adds to the variability in the game.

The core gameplay loop consists of committing and rolling dice from your available pool to perform certain actions. There are five different colored dice and each one has a different probability of rolling a hit. Once you commit dice, regardless of the result, all dice are exhausted and will have to be recovered before being rolled again. I personally found this strategy of managing your pool of dice to be quite engaging. Should I commit a die that has a higher probability of rolling a hit or push my luck by employing my weaker dice first?

Another interesting element to this strategy is that whenever you roll a critical hit on a die, it increases the noise level. Whenever the noise level reaches a certain point, it spawns an alien enemy that you’ll have to deal with. Ideally you only commit the fewest necessary dice to complete your action, but if you commit too few, there’s less likely of a success, which wastes an action and exhausts all of the dice. There is some nice luck mitigation in that each hero has a strategy value, which determines how many times that player can repeat the commit and roll steps. Therefore, if you roll poorly the first time, you could choose to commit additional dice the second time to increase your odds at a success.

It’s also worth mentioning that the art and components are excellent. The deck of cards is waterproof and made of durable PVC plastic, meaning sleeving isn’t necessary to protect the cards. The cards themselves look quite striking on the table, with lots of embellishment to make icons and colors pop.

Another key selling point of the game is that there’s relatively little setup, besides separating and shuffling each of the different decks, and I could comfortably finish solo plays in under an hour. Unlike other larger box games, I expect 20 Strong would be much easier to get to the table solo.

Moving onto a few negatives, I personally found the game a bit challenging to learn from the rulebook alone. I mentioned 20 Strong: Nemesis was my jumping in point to the series, so this might have contributed to it. I understand the small form factor needed for the rulebook to fit within a card box, but this also made it difficult to reference when I needing to look up certain rules. This also meant that examples within the rulebook were almost nonexistent. There is a QR code you can scan at the front of the rulebook that offers a tutorial, but I wasn’t able to get it to work on my phone. Chip Theory Games does have a How to Play video on their YouTube channel, which helped quite a bit.

I already mentioned the dice mechanic, and naturally this can lead to a fair share of luck of the dice. I think the biggest luck element here is with the critical hits, sometimes you might just get unlucky and roll a bunch of them, which can unexpectedly increase the noise level, spawning enemies. Other times, critical hits might be infrequent, so you’ll see relatively few enemies throughout the game.

Finally, while I enjoyed managing my dice pool, I found the core gameplay loop not that compelling. A large portion of the game is exploring rooms, and some of the rooms require other rooms to be activated first before they can be activated. This leads to some occasional backtracking, and also a fair amount of luck. Games could end relatively quickly if you happen upon the right combination of rooms early, whereas other times the game could drag on because of needing to backtrack. Therefore, much of the game is moving between rooms and occasionally having to deal with an alien enemy when the noise level gets too high. The rooms are split into two different decks, so if you’re searching for a specific room, at least you can narrow it down to only half the cards, but even then, I found myself navigating the ship in a fairly linear way.

While I enjoyed the dice mechanic and the small form factor, 20 Strong: Nemesis was a miss for me. I’d be open to trying it multiplayer, but for now, I don’t anticipate returning to it solo. Therefore, the game is difficult to recommend, unless you’re a big fan of Nemesis and are looking for something smaller and easier to table. I’ve also been playing the other two Awaken Realms decks, Tainted Grail and Etherfields, and spoiler alert, I’ve been enjoying those quite a bit more. Stay tuned next week for a full review on those!

With that, I’ll wrap up this week’s review! If you’ve played 20 Strong: Nemesis, what are your thoughts on the game? And what are your favorite 20 Strong decks? Happy gaming!

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