Review: Nexus Ops, A Close Quarters Combat Game With Replay To Spare

Nexus Ops was pitched to me as the game Risk should have been.

Now, that’s a lofty bar to set, as personally I find Risk a rollicking good time. Nevertheless, I took the challenge and experienced the game for myself. Sadly this time around there would be no Japan where I could stockpile my armies until the other players' patience was exhausted, causing them to come after me, fail, and then watch me take over the rest of the board, my maniacal laughter filling the room while I rolled my blue cannons over their silly little 1 unit resistance.

Yeah, I really don’t blame them for not playing with me anymore.

Regardless of my questionable strategies, those really don’t apply to Nexus Ops. As you can see, the board is made up of 17 tiles, or sectors, each fitting into one of 4 categories: Liquifungus Forest, Rock Plains, Crystal Spires, and Magma Pools. There is one sector in the middle, that being the monolith. Each player (up to 4) has their own 3 sector base, each one containing a refinery.

Refineries are important to keep and hold, as this is the main way to gain rubium, which allows you to buy new units. There are four opposing companies to choose from, all of which are trying to claim the moon’s resources for themselves. They only truly differ in their reasoning for being there, and of course in their color, but the units themselves are consistent across all four choices. The units are made up of Humans, Fungoids, Crystallines, Rock Striders, Lava Leapers, and Rubium Dragons. Humans are the cheapest, but good for holding territory (see tip above) while your other forces are elsewhere.

All other units have various advantages and disadvantages depending on what kind of sector they are occupying. For example, Crystallines are harder to hit and can inflict more damage if on a crystal spire sector. These sectors can also affect movement, as units like Rock Striders can move an extra hex if going towards or through a rock plain. There are plenty of different factors to consider every turn, which greatly appealed to me, but not so many that they become overwhelming.

You claim territories by either exploring that sector (if unoccupied) or by attacking and defeating the other units already there. Every sector at the beginning of the game contains one of a few different rewards. Either it will be an additional unit (or units), a refinery, extra rubium, or my favorite, a combo of energize cards. The others are self explanatory, but energize cards can drastically affect battles, as most of them allow either additional attacks, upped dice rolls, etc. We will go over battles in a second, but first let's talk about secret missions. At the end of every turn, you get one secret mission card. These cards are all worth different amounts of victory points. A standard game is won by collecting 12 victory points. Once you fulfill a secret mission requirement, you turn in that card and gain that amount of victory points (ranging from 1 to 3).

Nexus Ops is a board game of fierce sci-fi battles and fantastic alien creatures in which two to four players control factions of corporate troops and strange life forms on an alien moon. Players deploy troops from their home base to explore the landscape, mine resources, purchase troops, win battles, and fulfill missions, all in an attempt to gather enough power to claim the moon for themselves.

Now this is a combat intensive game, so how about we get to the meat and potatoes portion of it? Combat goes pretty quickly once you get going, and is a combination of dice rolling and adjusting to terrain effects. Each unit has a combat value, and that determines how much it takes to hit the other person, as well as its defense. If 3 players have a unit each in the hex, player 1 can attack player 2’s unit, win, and even though player 1 won that particular battle, the hex is still contested, since player 3 is still there. The game heavily skews towards the aggressor when it comes to sector control and battle, as there is really almost no reward for just holding or defending what you have. If a defender loses all of his units in a sector, he gets an energize card, but that is it.

Meanwhile, if the attacker wins that sector, he gets a victory point for winning the battle, whatever resource it had (if it had one), and might also fulfill a secret mission to gain another point towards victory. The various unit types are all needed at some point, and while the importance of one or two might change slightly depending on your play style, the game still encourages you to use a little bit of everything at your disposal to achieve victory.

Combat was fun and at times tense, but without being bogged down in the convoluted minutia that can happen in some games of this ilk. I did, however, find it hard to decipher the actual reward or definition, if you will, of the word battle. The rules use the word several times, but it has slightly different meanings. When defeating a unit, it is referred to as a battle, yet you don’t gain any rewards or control of the sector for just winning one battle, as you have to eliminate all other players from the sector before it is considered winning a "battle." Not a big thing, but it took several consults of the rules before me and two other people could truly suss that out, so it's worth mentioning. Labeling the defeat of a unit something different might have alleviated that confusion.

There are no expansions for Nexus Ops, a rarity nowadays, but the truth is the game doesn’t need one. The creators included about 6 to 8 additional gameplay modes and side options to keep you plenty busy. One of those, Vortex, changes the game completely with just the flip of one hex. Plus, even if you just want to play a standard game, you can flip the units card over to play with alternate versions of the standard units, complete with different stats and abilities. There is so much replayability here, and the core game only takes about 45 minutes to complete. I supremely enjoyed my time with Nexus Ops, and can’t wait to give it another go.

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