29. Nemesis
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/167355/nemesis
1 play with 4 players in 2023
I moved recently and discovered that there's a board game meetup right near my new place. But the cafe is small and game slots are competitive. I was late to sign up for the event and there was only one game with vacancies - Nemesis.
Nemesis is a "semi-co-op" game where multiple players are capable of winning, but some game conditions can cause all players to lose. It's loosely themed around Alien, where there are intruders on a spaceship, and you spend most of the game wandering the spaceship, taking small actions like checking the direction of the ship or the condition of the engines, and try to fulfill a secret personal objective in addition to trying to bring the ship home without getting slaughtered by the alien intruders. There's a lot of randomness as you roll for noise and a lot of fiddliness, and in general I'm just not a big fan of the semi-co-op game genre.
One of our crew got blasted by the aliens with about 20-30 minutes left out of a 2+ hour game. One escaped. The remaining player and I went down with the ship, with him preventing me from leaving out of spite and the ship blew up. I really didn't find the game very fun despite the kinda neat story that arose from it, but it was good to get back into the meetup scene a little.
yet all azuarc of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness