How Mass Effect Became a Board Game [IGN]

Mass Effect: The Board Game – Priority: Hagalaz

However, the magic ingredient for the project was Eric’ trusted co-pilot, new designer Calvin Wong Tze Loon 黃子倫, whom Eric describes as a “superfan” of the sci-fi series. Calvin was understandably thrilled to have the opportunity. “When I got the invite to co-design and do narrative work, I screamed out loud,” he admits. “In some ways, I haven’t stopped screaming since!”

Priority: Hagalaz is set aboard the titular planet of Hagalaz, on which a rogue cruiser from the terrorist cell Cerberus has crashed. The game tells the story of Commander Shepherd and crew infiltrating the ship to discover its secrets in the hope of gaining an edge in the ongoing war effort against the terrifying Reapers. While the planet of Hagalaz was featured in both Mass Effect 2 and 3, it’s not central to the plot and seemed an odd choice to set the action of the board game.

Turns out this choice was Calvin’s. “It’s the Shadow Broker planet from Mass Effect 2, and a planetwide storm provided a very dramatic time limit with which we could pressure the players,” he explains. “From a personal perspective, I always liked filling in the corners of stories I liked. We saw the storm, briefly, in the video game. What if we came back?”

Although the designers steered the game, they did so in coordination with the Mass Effect team at Bioware to ensure that the game stayed true to their original vision for the setting and characters. “We wanted to make sure that the objectives and narrative text both fit canon and the heroic tone of the series,” says Calvin. “For example, Bioware asked us to include extra text saying that various prisoners and civilians rescued by the squad would be picked up by Kodiak shuttles so that it was clear they were being rescued.” Eric adds that it was also Bioware’s idea to have two different hazard decks to differentiate areas of the cruiser.

Mechanically, the game is a cooperative affair in which players pick characters from the franchise and work together in tactical combat missions, defeating enemies and securing on-board objectives. The introduction, events and outcome of each mission are woven together with snippets of narrative text. This is a crowded genre, potentially including critical behemoths like Gloomhaven, but Priority: Hagalaz has two innovative features, aside from its popular license, that make it stand out from the crowd.

Firstly, it’s a campaign game that you can play in a single evening, with your team undertaking 3-5 hour-long missions – it’s your choice how many, and it’s easy to “save” your game state between sessions – across a branching structure of 10 different scenarios which can lead to different endings.

“We wanted the most epic experience that was also approachable by the vast majority of players crossing over from the video game series,” says Eric. Calvin picks up the theme, saying “As board gamers, we know the pain of completing one mission of a campaign, packing it away and knowing it could be months before you saw the same friends again to do the next mission. So we wanted to give players that feeling of getting a ton of bang for their buck. See everything! Play it over and over!”

Second, the game has a clever action dice system in which the first player each turn rolls a large pool of dice, picks the results they want to use, then passes the remainder to the next player who can lock in a single result and re-rolls the rest. Action dice, where the rolled faces indicate what actions you can undertake, are an underused concept in design, although they made a recent appearance in Dune: War for Arrakis. They allow a designer to achieve a fantastic balance between strategy and excitement, while ensuring a game doesn’t grow stale once you’ve mastered the strategy. Passing the dice pool between players is a novel way of using them, making player order and timing absolutely critical to your tactics.

This is one of Eric’s contributions to the design. “I borrowed that mechanic from an unfinished cooperative skirmish game I was working on, and was waiting for the right fit,” he tells IGN. “I love how it models the chaos of squad combat without requiring the stress of real time.” Interestingly, dice are not used to determine combat results: if you roll a combat action face and decide to use it, you hit automatically and do damage depending on your character. “You’re a squad of competent pros, so this allowed us to avoid the frustration of ‘roll to hit – miss!’,” explains Calvin. “The option to save a die increases co-operation between players, as I’m looking at my friend’s situation and asking them if they’d like me to leave them a specific die so they can bail themselves out of it, which enhances the feeling of being an elite squad.”

While the dice pool does enhance cooperation between the players, games where everyone is working together can suffer if one player tries, intentionally or otherwise, to take over decision-making. Eric has designed a number of other cooperative titles, and doesn’t feel it’s an issue in Priority: Hagalaz. “In my opinion, this is an overstated problem,” he says. “There are various ways to mitigate it, one of which is dynamic complexity, allowing tension between players’ advancement goals, introducing light competitive elements. Our game has this in spades.” He’s talking about the way characters develop between missions, rewarding each player’s achievements with their choice of new powers to use in the next game.

Whatever innovations the game brings to the tactical combat genre, it is perhaps more important that it plays and feels like a Mass Effect game, something the designers were keenly aware of. “We designed the squad members from the ground up to replicate the fantasy of those characters from the video game,” Calvin tells IGN. But for many players, the designers included, what makes the series stand out from its peers is the sense that your in-game choices have a profound effect on the unfolding story, ensuring your own journey has a sense of uniqueness that reflects your decisions. Designing that into a board game, with its relatively limited set of narrative and components, is a huge challenge, but Eric and Calvin felt it was important to meet it head-on.

Their tool of choice was the way missions can end in three states, a difficult “Paragon” victory, an easier “Renegade” win, or a loss, each of which feeds into the next mission. If you aim for the highest grade, you might end up failing completely. “Do you risk the more difficult idealistic path for wilder upgrades, or take the safer, more pragmatic path for more steady upgrades,” queries Eric. “Another way is that the missions you choose impact future missions directly. It’s the most elegant implementation of a branching narrative that we liked.”

Eric notes that this is something players can, and do, decide on the fly. “We noticed play testers sometimes abandoning the Paragon objective when things got too hot, therefore making a narrative choice via a tactical decision,” he recalls. “That’s such a cool moment, because even though you don’t actually fail the campaign if you lose the mission, players just organically decided the risk was too high and took the safe win instead of sticking it out for an idealistic, but perhaps doomed outcome. And maybe they can try again in a future play through!”

With only 10 missions total, even with a branching structure and a variety of characters to choose from, it feels like the game might have limited replay value. But the designers think that not only is that not the case, it’s actually part of the way it conjures the Mass Effect sense of meaningful decisions. “Being able to replay a short campaign also lets players see the various outcomes of their choices as they try it again and again,” Calvin points out. “Each playthrough encourages players to try different builds for their favorite squadmates and see how those skills play off each other. Players could choose to funnel all the squad’s power into one character, or spread it out amongst others. Agonizing over who gets which level up and how to assign the skills so that synergies are created amongst the squad is a really cool set of choices.”

This kind of design is meat and potatoes to Eric. “I specialize in modular replayability, which is fancy designer-speak for games that present fun scenarios that change significantly depending on which components you choose to bring to the table,” he explains. “Two campaigns played side-by-side where you choose only one different mission and one different squadmate should have a very different feeling with the same rules set. I’m not a fan of disposable content; we wanted to design scenarios with a number of fun ways to approach and solve, while forcing players to adapt. Picture something like 10 intertwined games of Pandemic with different endings to work towards.”

It’s clear that Priority: Hagalaz is something of a labor of love, where both designers have worked hard together to try and identify what made the series special for them, and bring that across to the very different realm of tabletop play. The result doesn’t just pop on the tabletop thanks to the video game assets and plastic figures, but fills a small gap in the narrative of the original trilogy’s final game, Mass Effect 3. How the board game fares as part of the wider franchise is yet to be seen – Eric would only say there are “plenty of ideas in the works” – but in true Mass Effect style, your decision on whether to play it might impact its future in an as-yet unforeseen way.

You can pre-order the game here. It’ll be available at retail on N7 Day: November the 7th.

Matt Thrower is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in tabletop games. You can reach him on BlueSky at @mattthr.bsky.social.