Mass Effect: The Board Game prioritizes tactical action over space opera

Board games based on popular video game licenses, much like the recently released Borderlands, are — more often than not — a bit shit. The worst offenders are those that seek to directly port the gameplay experience note-for-note from a PC or console over to an analog format. That’s why I find Mass Effect: The Board Game – Priority Hagalaz, out now from Modiphius Entertainment, so interesting. 

The game, by award-winning designer Eric Lang (Blood Rage, Life in Reterra) and die-hard Mass Effect fan Calvin Wong Tze Loon 黃子倫 (Crazy Rich Asians), feels like a Mass Effect game should, with difficult and impactful decisions around every corner. But it also knows what it is — a dice-based, action-oriented romp that simulates just a tiny slice of a much larger universe. It tickles the tactical science fiction-centered lobes of my brain meat, enlarged no doubt by years of turn-based games like X-COM: UFO Defense and its descendants, in a delightful way. And I’m interested to see where the publisher takes things from here.

Mass Effect: The Board Game is set during the events of Mass Effect 3, but does not directly represent any specific mission in that game. As such, the first playthrough has a whiff of mystery to it as players explore a downed Cerberus research vessel without really knowing what’s in store for them. This is a campaign game, but not in the traditional sense. There aren’t 100-plus missions that will take your group months or years to run through. This is a tight, three-to-five-mission arc — and each mission should only take 30 to 45 minutes to complete.

Yep, it’s a campaign game that you could theoretically play through in a single sitting. That either excites you at a deep and emotional level, or makes you angry enough to tear a phonebook in half. I think it works, even if you are paying a bit of a premium for a concise experience.

The core mechanic is very board game-y, which I like. At the beginning of your turn you’ll roll a set of 12 chonky custom dice, then divvy up three of those dice on your character sheet before passing the remainder to the right. You might need two exclamation points to fire your weapon twice, clearing a few husks from outside of a complex; or you might need to assign a multi-arrowed die in order to move up to an open doorway; or you might use a special blue exclamation point to pop off a special ability. You can even do all three, or some other combination. So long as you’ve got empty slots on your sheet and dice to fill them, the world is your oyster.

However, should one of your squadmates go down, they take three of those dice with them, locking them in place on their character sheet until you manage to revive them. Lose a second ally and you’re down to half your dice pool, back-footed and rolling uphill with terrible odds. At the same time, enemies are spawning onto the map at a frenzied rate. It’s fast, frenetic, and fluid. Understand that there is going to be a bit of a learning curve. The core rulebook is a glossy, magazine-shaped affair with more than 40 pages to absorb ahead of — or during — your first game. But if you can manage to stomach that much instructional content, you’re really in for a Mass Effect-flavored treat. 

The campaign itself is pretty clever. Every playthrough features three core missions, and two potential loyalty missions. The game includes a narrative book with numbered passages that you’ll read out loud as you make your way through the branching narrative. There’s a leveling system that adds to player abilities mid-mission, unlocking interesting new styles of play on the fly. Mass Effect: The Board Game even offers powerful boons for playing as a Paragon or a Renegade (though, just as in the video game, splitting the difference between the two isn’t quite as rewarding). Best of all, cooperation is key, with the exception here that you actually get the time to deliberate about things before coming under fire.

As a product, it also appears to have been designed with potential expansions in mind. Rather than modular cardboard tiles, the game maps come bundled inside a spiral-bound notebook. The cost to manufacture another one of those is likely pretty low, making add-ons and expansions to this core set a virtual inevitability.

Yet another interesting thing about Mass Effect: The Board Game is that it’s natively single-player. If you want to blast through it all yourself in an afternoon, that’s a perfectly sensible thing to do. In fact, once you put in the hours, you’ll be free from the manual entirely when you sit down with your friends for another session. Or you can just keep speedrunning the game yourself, trying time and again to rack up the highest score possible. 

The only downside? No smooching. Well, I guess you could hold up the miniatures and make some kissy faces if you wanted to. But that’s beneath you, isn’t it?

Mass Effect: The Board Game – Priority Hagalaz is available for pre-order now. The game was reviewed with a retail copy provided by Modiphius Entertainment. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.