Mass Effect: The Board Game – Priority: Hagalaz is just as sprawling as the video game series it’s based on. This is the first new addition of any kind toBioWare’s universe in a long time, but it’s neither an introduction of new lore or a rehashing of what we’ve already seen – instead, it takes place during the events ofMass Effect 3and brings the characters you know and love to tabletop.
There’s a lot to love about the game, but sitting down with my friends to play (they’re tabletop game veterans, I am not) only served to highlight the many friction points that hold the game back from greatness.
What’s most interesting about Priority: Hagalaz is how it translates the video game’s iconic traits to tabletop. For example, it has a branching narrative, which means you could play this game multiple times without ever repeating a mission. Each mission also gives you different objectives and decisions to make, and which missions you take on will affect what mechanics are applied later on, which makes your choices feel like they matter in trueMass Effectstyle.
It also has a Paragon/Renegade system, just like in the games – and just like in the games, getting a Paragon ending will usually require doing a lot more legwork, and net you more rewards.
Priority: Hagalaz even has loyalty missions. You can choose to complete these in between story missions, adding a maximum of two additional missions to your campaign, but you won’t be able to complete every loyalty mission in a single campaign. Successfully completing a loyalty mission will allow you to unlock a new unique ability for that teammate, making them more useful in combat.
The game gives a good first impression – it’s beautifully packaged, and everything inside the box feels premium and high quality. Inside the box is a rulebook, a narrative book, a mission book, a campaign map board, and five squadmate sheets. The latter three require you to mark progress on them, which is why they have a slightly glossy finish that allows you to write on them with a handily included dry-erase marker.
If you’re playing multiple campaigns at a time (or just prefer digital resources), you may download digital campaign trackers in a number of formats from the game’s website.
The first few pages of the rulebook explain the context of the game and how you win. Essentially, you need to track down Cerberus, whose cruiser has crash-landed on the planet Hagalaz. You need to figure out what the organisation was up to, and protect valuable research data from falling into its hands, whether by retrieving it or destroying it.
In practice, this translates to ‘War Readiness’ points – you score these every time your squad completes a mission, and you get extra for completing secondary objectives. Taking the Paragon route will usually give you more points than the Renegade route. You track these points, and the missions you’ve completed, on the Campaign Map.
Newcomers to the franchise will be hard-pressed to find any writing that usefully contextualises this game’s narrative. My friends had either played the games or didn’t care, so it wasn’t a huge problem for us, but I would have liked to see more colour and description here.
You play the game on the mission book, which you’ll lay flat to a two-page Mission Spread. The left-hand page will lay out the Mission Rules. There will be a section with a brief narrative introduction to the mission, special set-up instructions and mission-specific rules, information on enemy forces (regular and Elite), the objectives you have to complete, and conditions for Mission Failure.
The right-hand page is your game board, a grid of hexes littered with icons where you will have to place corresponding tokens during gameplay. You’ll have to navigate your minis around obstacles and walls, through doors, and out of the line of fire of turrets and enemies, all while working with your squadmates to take down enemies, collect loot, free refugees, and complete objectives.
It’s all very cool in theory, but, in practice, Priority: Hagalaz isn’t all that fun to play, at least at first. It can be complicated and overwhelming, especially if you’re coming in as a Mass Effect fan first and a board game player second. It’s certainly rewarding, though, if you’re the kind of person that values mechanical complexity on its own merits.
The narrative book is structured in a choose your own adventure style: as you play through missions, you’ll be prompted to read numbered paragraphs from the narrative book depending on the objectives you’ve achieved or failed, and the ending you chose. You’ll be reading from this during and after the mission, which helps to interweave the narrative with the gameplay.
My friends and I didn’t care for the game’s writing – the characters didn’t feel distinct from each other or even at all like their representations in the game, which is a shame since these characters are so beloved specifically for their strong personalities.
This is a particular pain point because it feels like outside of the writing, a lot of love has been put into translating these characters to tabletop. Each squadmate (Tali, Liara, Wrex, Garrus, and both FemShep and BroShep) has a beautifully detailed miniature. Each character sheet lists an array of skills specific to that squadmate, and their style of combat is tailored to their video game playstyles – for example, Wrex can accumulate Blood Rage tokens and expend them on a skill called “Wrex Not Happy”, which deals 1 damage to adjacent enemies for each token, and Tali can use her drone Chatika to deal damage, disable turrets, or unlock doors.
Speaking of tokens, there are alotof them, and they can be pretty hard to tell apart at a glance.
What makes Priority: Hagalaz particularly painful to play is that the rulebook isn’t streamlined in a way that makes it possible to pick the game up as you go – or at the very least, it’s far from idiot-proof. Gameplay itself isn’t that difficult, but it has enough steps that if you aren’t flipping through the rulebook page by page as you play, you’re going to forget a lot of crucial mechanics. My team, for example, forgot that we were supposed to be actively marking the number of enemies we’d downed, which would allow us to gain XP and unlock new skills during play. It’s hard to remember all these things while also getting increasingly panicked at the sheer number of enemies getting thrown in your path, and there areso many.
The back of each handbook has a reference sheet, but they’re not particularly helpful when you’re first learning to play the game, since they refer mostly to the meanings of icons or have very brief, incomplete explanations of the things you need to do during a turn.
This is only made worse by the fact that the rulebook can be hard to navigate. The contents page has small text and alotof items, making it very hard to look things up on the fly. Some of the column text is also small and harder to read, and the wording of certain mechanics is ambiguous enough that my team ended up arguing over how certain things should work. The game generally doesn’t feel very user-friendly, and definitely not newbie-friendly, which is something you’d expect from the first tabletop outing of a series as popular as Mass Effect.
Our first mission spiralled from a projected hour-long session to a gruelling three hours of arguing over rules, frantically flipping through the rulebook, and groaning when we realised there were game mechanics we’d completely overlooked. In combination with the lack of narrative flavour, they were so reluctant to play a second session that I ended up having to go it myself.
Mass Effect: The Board Game - Priority Hagalz’s gameplay itself is rich with complexity, and the mechanics all work together to create a very compelling experience if you’re able to put the time in, or have enough experience of similar games. It’s just a shame that its story doesn’t make all that fuss worth it.
Mass Effect The Board Game – Priority: Hagalaz
A cooperative, story-based game for up to four players set during MAss Effect 3. The game follows Shepard and their crew as they investigate a crashed ship, and fend off the various enemies who want to claim its secrets.
