Nexus Ops 1st Edition

Really, Nexus Ops is a great example of a classic style game "modernized" and cleaned up into light gaming perfection.

It's got a tiered combat system like Shogun/Samurai Swords. You've got the whole building troops/collecting resources, feels a lot like Warcraft or something similar.

Instead of turtling, you've got two motivators to get out there and kill some bugs--one, your mission cards almost always award you points for doing some smashing, and two, the "Monolith" in the middle of the field grants POWERFUL cards to he who controls it. Let someone sit on the Monolity uncontested for a few turns and I assure you the game will conclude not long after.


Great bits, tons of combat, awesome card play, and all this for a four-player light wargaming smash-em-up that takes 90 minutes to play. You simply can't beat it. For $20 or less you'd be foolish not to have a copy of this.

It's a touch too light in places, and you're sometimes going to want something heavier, so I can't go the full 6. But this is certainly one of the great Ameritrash games. BUY IT.

I think I'm most let down by this because it's GREAT at what it does: it's a lite dicefest. I feel like there should be variable player powers or something to spice things up, but I still really enjoy the game. Cool plastic pieces, but the monolith piece sucks. Lots of good mechanics here, minus the fact they don't mention how to keep track of who you've moved in one turn, but that can be fixed (we do it by always moving those farthest away first). Great intro to the genre and one that can EASILY be taught, which for a bad teacher like myself, is well worth the price of admission.

If you told someone who doesn't play a lot of board games to imagine a game that was like Risk crossed with Starcraft the PC game, the game they'd imagine would likely be very similar to Nexus Ops.

The mission/victory point system punctuate the slugfest giving it an added layer of depth without complicating or diluting the the final product. The modular board adds a fair amount of replayability, and the theme should please the inner 12 year old inside everyone.

I fell in love with Nexus Ops because of the "Wow! Cool!" factor but I keep playing it because behind the theme lies a really excellent if simplistic game. As someone who hasn't been in the hobby even a full year yet and was introduced to Euros through Xbox Live Arcade, I should probably be a predominantly euro gamer. Not counting the few times I played Risk 2210, Nexus Ops gave me my first taste of new AT and I fell in love. Nexus Ops really is the perfect Ameritrash Gateway Game.