playing the mass effect board game
As a Mass Effect fan, and I am very grateful that my wife gifted me the (relatively new) board game Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz :)
I am completely smitten with it! You can tell so much thought and love went into it by a huge fan who knows their stuff. The gameplay was translated so well to this format, and the characters and their abilities stay very true to the games. Nothing feels weirdly renamed, missing, or wrong, or too vague. Nothing feels like they had to compromise.
All materials are beautifully printed on thick, glossy paper with amazing artwork, consisting of three spiral bound booklets and separate character and scenario sheets to track stuff on. The dice feel great, the tokens are sturdy, you have five character minifigs that are nice, two card stacks that look and feel high quality, and you get a little sack with the Alliance symbol on it and a marker pen with the Mass Effect label on it. Just feels like they went the extra mile with some little details they knew fans would love :)
The concept is less a static boardgame, but a whole campaign you can play through with different paths, missions and outcomes.
Instead of having to build a map via different physical parts or a map you unfold in each scenario, you open the specific map page in one of the spiral bound books and play on that. Less mess, cooler maps!
You use the included colorful stones and marker to track skill progress, XP and unlocked abilities on the character sheets, as well as the tracker for each scenario for what you did or didn't do, and the tracker for the whole campaign. Thanks to the glossy/laminated finish, you can just remove the markings on any material so you can easily play again.
There are different starting missions, character loyalty missions, and depending on your choices (what missions to do, who is loyal, how many War Points you get, if you play the scenario as more Paragon or Renegade, etc.) you get different sections in the Story Book, so it's a little like a "Make Your Own Adventure" book where it says "If you did this, continue reading at xyz, if you did the other, read abc". This is so amazing for replayability!
Gameplay-wise, it is easy to get into, but hard to succeed initially. It takes you a bit to get to know how the game expects you to behave and what you should focus on, and it can be difficult. If you do not focus on taking out at least 1-2 enemies each turn of a character (or at least weakening them), you will quickly be completely overrun as new enemies spawn frequently and existing ones get activated after each character turn. While shields recover, health only recovers with medigels you may find in the scenario. Just like the real game, characters love to go down and have to be revived (lol). If Shepard goes down, the scenario fails.
As it was our first run through one of the possible routes of the campaign, we gave each other a bit of grace. There were a few moments where we realized we had played wrong (discovering a new rule or that we had applied it wrong, like for example, realizing later that you cannot split movements on the same die), and then either decided to do it right from that moment on, or create a map state as close as possible to how it would have been if we had been playing right.
In the Loyalty Mission for Garrus, there's the option to actually monumentally fuck up Shepard's position in a way that completely traps them and makes moving away without dying impossible based on how the map is structured in that spot and due to a specific boss spawning. We agreed that if we had known this trap could occur when the enemy spawns, we would not have positioned Shepard this way or made her run away immediately. As we didn't wanna start over because of this incredibly niche problem/beginner mistake, we agreed to reset to an earlier boardstate as best as possible where Shepard wasn't standing in that horrible spot. I know it's technically cheating, but we really wanna focus on getting to know the game and progressing forward in the story as best as we can while learning :p
I'm not sure a non-Mass Effect fan would like it as much; maybe the gameplay isn't convincing enough to stand on its own without the game relation. But for me, it's so fun to get back into a world with these characters again. I love it, and there are expansions announced for it, too! I hope they aren't cancelled, would love to have and play them.
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