Unleash Hell – NEXUS: Arena Combat System in Review

In a sea of overproduced and excessive board games, NEXUS: Arena Combat System manages to stand out. The box is large and attractive. Emblazoned on the front is a giant crab-arm mutant battling in an arena with a sarlaac in the foreground. It punches you in the face with cool.

When you open the box it hits you again.

Inside are some of the best miniatures I’ve seen. They are skillfully pre-painted and exceedingly stylish. This applies to the four large character figures, as well as the various pillars, spike pits, and saw-blades. For people not used to playing with fully painted games, it’s like unearthing a relic.

The setting is otherworldly sci-fi fantasy with horror intonations. The figures scream with terror and the atmosphere is fantastic. There are strong Dreamblade vibes. On the surface, everything about this game is fuckin’ rad.

It’s irreverent and crude by the way, so I’m just playing along.

This is a gladiatorial combat game. The format is a straightforward free-for-all with the winner being the player who inflicted the most damage on their adversaries.

While this is direct and sensical, everything else is less so. Just like the large box and deluxe hardware, there is quite a bit going on here. In the case of rules and systems, I’d say far too much.

On its surface, this is a zany dice-based brawler. It looks like it sits somewhere between Gorechosen and Wiz-War. But that’s not really what it is. This game is more Car Wars or Battletech. It’s unencumbered by modern game design principles.

Take the scoring system. This is the mechanism everything else is subservient to. When you inflict damage on your opponent you grab physical coins that represent their health and place them in your play area. The idea of using health tokens in a dual role as VP chits is dandy.

But not when you’re accumulating dozens of these plastic tokens.

They’re plucked from player panels organized by body location as well as a general health pool. It’s like a big tray of poker chips where certain sections are slotted off and need specific amounts of tokens. There are hundreds of these coins in the box. Setup is an enormous burden and entirely inelegant. This is the top-down warning flag for the entire experience.

You will sometimes randomize which body location is damaged. Other times a specific limb will be targeted. This depends on the type of attack you perform. There are several. If a body part is completely degraded, the fighter suffers ongoing penalties.

The turn structure is also bizarre. Each player rolls a die with values such as INST, DEFT, and CUNN. These map to traits on the player tray, and there is a hierarchy determining which roll goes first. Oh, you also roll a standard D6 to resolve ties. You then increase a die which serves as a counter on your command panel. This die corresponds to the trait and may be spent for certain benefits during the round, such as resisting being knocked prone or talking shit. That’s what the ability is called, I’m not being cute.

The standard D6 also serves to split your character’s action points for the round. You always have a total of six, but a portion must be reserved for movement and a portion for other activities. Your die roll must then be one of the two allotments, with the remainder being assigned to the other category. This sounds more confusing than it is. If you rolled a “4”, you would need to spend four points for movement or four points for actions, with two remaining points spent on the other category since the total is always six. If you rolled a six, well, then you’re only moving or attacking, not both.

Let’s get back to combat. It’s enormously swingy and often ineffectual. Landing blows can be difficult, resulting in many turns of inaction. Sometimes your swing just cracks skulls and everything aligns. If you have them against a wall or pillar, or if you are attacking them from the rear, you will receive bonuses which may cascade.

You can also spend those action points to do crazy stunts like shove someone to the ground or drag them into a spike pit. With the latter, you have to be careful as there’s a fifty-fifty chance you fall into the hazard as well. Hapless victims randomize which square they bounce to after being impaled, scattered like a cannonball in Warhammer. Sometimes you end up on a safe space and can lick your wounds. Other times the scatter die tosses you into a pillar and you bounce back into the pit. This can keep happening. In one memorable instance I saw a player go from nearly full health to a wet bag of fleshy slop as they bounced all over like a pinball. We laughed. It was genuinely funny.

It’s a little less funny when this happens early in a game that can take over three hours.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the turn. Remember that D6 you’re rolling to break ties and divide your actions for the round? It also corresponds to a numbered slot on your command panel. This is the “Turning Point” system. You mark each number as you roll them. Hopefully at some point in the bout you have rolled each of the six-sides at least one time. This triggers a dramatic Turning Point where you draw a card in addition to receiving temporary bonus damage on your next strike. You just have to remember you get that damage bonus, even if you don’t land a blow for several more turns. The Turning Point cards are wild and tap into the energy the game promised. This is a neat moment that’s worth witnessing.

But getting there is a drag.

Often, you will just roll a number you’ve already marked. While this results in no progress towards the Turning Point, the real affliction is in wasting everyone’s time. This frequent occurrence is often the trigger to re-arrange the various traps scattered across the board. This is how spiked pits appear. When an already marked Turning Point position is rolled – by any player – a new pit appears on a random space on the board. It can pop up anywhere. Sometimes a player is unfortunately legged, having one of their lower extremities completely sheared off their body. Again, hilarious.

If all of the pits are already on the board, then you re-distribute all of them when this trigger occurs. It’s not difficult to imagine what the middle and late game feel like. When you’ve marked five out of the six possible Turning Point results, you begin to have repeats every round. This happens for everyone at the table. The pace of play slows to the speed of a legless cretin dragging himself across the arena floor because they’ve just been struck by spikes for the third time this game.

There’s a range of moods that flitter across the brain in NEXUS. Humor is omnipresent. Initially, the absurdity is welcome. The game genuinely seems to deliver what it’s selling. At some point there’s a subtle shift and annoyance sets in. Later, you begin to wonder if there’s something satirical going on. I’m still trying to work that one out.

By the way, you’re not actually playing as a gladiator. You’re the lanista behind the scenes, hence why wounds scored are represented by coins. As capitalism has taught us, it all comes down to money.

This dual-charactership means that your asymmetric configuration is influenced by two separate roles – that of your lanista as well as your fighter. This is not a bad concept. The implementation leaves something to be desired, however.

Like much of the game, the ideas are bursting with creativity, but the development feels undernourished. An example is the Scavenger. This warrior has whosits and whatsits galore. They roll on a table at the beginning of play – the same table used when players rummage through crates scattered about the arena – and receive a random item. Cool shit.

Except when you roll a booby trap result and have a bomb blow up in your face before play even begins. Or if you get a melee weapon, negating your character’s innate bonus with ranged attacks.

It really is funny.

NEXUS is committed to setting. All of this fighting takes place on large space barges. Everything is given specific terminology to lay the groundwork. Player boards are called the Aerie Command Panel. Gladiators go by the moniker of Helots. There are Turning Points, and Ratio Dice, and a quirky combat modifier called the Sliding Dice Scale (SDS).

Look, there is so much here. A large chunk of it is terrific. You can set yourself on fire and then grapple someone to burn them. You can lose your footing and slip on the literal guts of a felled Helot. You can push people into whirring sawblades. It has this overall tone of Battlebots meets Gladiator that is wonderful. But it can’t really collapse all of this into a coherent vision. So much of play is spent trying to do something. Very little actually happens on a minute-to-minute basis.

It also suffers under the weight of its own systems. Unlike Wiz-War where the bulk of activity and rules is distributed to cards, in Nexus all of the actions are present and readily available. This means the rulebook is 50 pages and the player aids are lengthy. It also means you will frequently be reconciling questions and adjudicating collisions in systems. Even after several plays.

It’s brutish and often fails to craft the experience it promises, which is a total bummer. I approached this game with a large amount of vigor, hoping for something fiercely independent with a similar design philosophy as studios such as Devious Weasel or The Emperors of Eternal Evil. That energy was not returned. Instead, every play has left me haggard and used up. There is no joy in heavily criticizing a creator’s passion project, particularly an indie, but NEXUS: Arena Combat System is what it is.

 

A review copy of the game was provided by the publisher.

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