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There’s no peace to be had on Mars these days. Just as everything was going well, you’re being attacked by a… fungus? Break out the athlete’s foot cream – it’s getting serious.
Introduction
Nemesis Lockdown Stretch Goals is a box of three parts. The first are some very nifty upgrade components for the base game, giving you a 3D escape rover, bunker gate and doors to block off corridors. There are additional cards to allow you to incorporate the Carnomorph and Void Seeders expansions from the original game into Lockdown as well as previous characters, and a brand new foe… the Chytrids (which we’re pronouncing ‘Chi-trids’ unless someone tells us otherwise).
We’re going to focus on the fungal nightmare for the most part as that will probably be your driving decision in getting this (or not)
Doors and demons
We’ll get the additional cards and pieces out of the way first. The 3D components really aren’t a necessity for the Nemesis, but they really do give it such a better look and feel on the table. Going from a cardboard escape rover to a lovely tactile model is fab, as is watching it trundle towards the large bunker gate as you escape.
Best of all, though, are the corridor doors which fill out the space nicely but also come apart into two neat pieces to how when a door has actually been broken by an Intruder or other ne’er do well. They really look fab scattered around the facility and are probably one of my favourite things about this entire box.
The Carnomorph and Void Seeders bits are decks of Event and Attack cards for each monster expansion, allowing you to integrate different enemies into your Lockdown experience. There’s a dual-sided laboratory board and accompanying weakness cards for each species as well, and you can use characters from the original Nemesis game as starting item and quest cards are included.
There’s even the opportunity to use the Bounty Hunter and Android characters from Aftermath as well with Action decks for both included as well as the Medic if you have that. There’s a lot gone into being able to mix and match however you’d like, and the rulebook has comprehensive instructions for adding whatever you want into your own game of Nemesis.
Chytrids everywhere
In the real world, the chytrid fungus is an infectious fungal disease that can often be fatal to amphibians. In the Lockdown universe, it’s much more infectious, much more deadly to humans and has taken the Death Cap and Stinkhorn mushrooms of Earth and made them into lumbering monsters deliberately out to kill you.
Or… not. I’ll confess that having played my first game with these nasty fungi I went and watched a couple of YouTube videos to make sure I’d interpreted the rules properly (I had). I think we’d maybe got consistently pretty lucky with the die rolls because we rarely had any kind of monster minis on the board and spent a greater amount of time managing the growth of spores, germinators and mycelium markers, none of which are ever particularly dangerous to players on their own but can potentially be hazardous and spawn much nastier things during the Event stage.
Nature walk or a walk on the wild side?
Honestly, the Chytrids fell a little flat for me. But with Nemesis (Lockdown) the huge amount of variability every game might be a factor in that. Given that spores spread along corridors from newly explored rooms based on the number on the Exploration tokens, you might have a larger proliferation of them, but they’re not inherently harmful. Pulled some decent Event cards at the right time? Nothing to see here. Rolled a die to an empty room or technical corridor? No worries either.
Even if you end up with two spores being exchanged for a germinator it’s not immediately a disaster, though granted it might be later. There just never quite seemed to be the same level of threat or danger from the spores as you get from rampaging Intruders. Maybe playing fully co-op meant we were blitzing the rooms to have explored everything so we were never staying still for very long. Maybe at the higher end of the player count it feels a bit more threatening, but at two-players, it felt more like an episode of Planet Earth than something from the deepest sci-fi horror depths.
Is the quality there?
The sculpts for the Queen, Death Caps, Stinkhorns and even the germinator cubes are what you’d expect – great looking and full of detail, as is the art on the event and attack cards. Buying these retail meant they weren’t sundropped like my Lockdown minis, but if you’re going to put the time into painting them anyway, you won’t care about that in the slightest.
Final thoughts
It’s my first time reviewing add on stuff to a main game and I’m not really sure how to bring it all together. If you’re invested enough in the Nemesis series, I think you’ll enjoy facing off against Carnomorphs and Void Seeders in a different environment, and you’ll be thankful for the mix-and-match ability across whatever else you have in your collection.
If you’re a fan of some enhanced table presence, I’d say the 3D bits will help you out a fair bit. It’s definitely helped us feel like there’s a more immersive experience happening when we’re playing compared to the (admittedly more environmentally friendly) cardboard standee bits.
Are the Chytrids worth it…? Maybe? Possibly? For me it feels like a pretty subjective decision, so I can tell you what I think and let you make your own informed decision from there.
I like old school (legally distinct) Alien stuff – monsters potentially contaminating me at a moment’s notice, bursting out of people’s chests, Queens laying eggs and everything on fire all over the place. Chytrids isn’t any of that. It’s a slower burn, extra race against the clock as the fungus takes over the facility, and with the right sequence of rolls, blind pulls and event cards, things could get nasty quickly. At other times you’re possibly much safer with this than other rampaging, blood thirsty monsters.
It still has that element of the unexpected… going from “players with slime markers get a spore on their board” to “any player with a spore marker on their board dies instantly” do come at you out of the blue, and while that’s very much in keeping with the overall theme of the games, it’s definitely a kick in the teeth when you’re two turns from victory.
My gut feel is that if you’re prepared to put the time into the management of cultivating all this fungus, you’ll get a fair amount out of this. If you want something a little simpler and menacing, maybe decided if everything else is what you need.
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