Review: Mass Effect: The Board Game – Priority: Hagalaz is a cooperative fun with many paths to choose from

Towards the end of 2024, Entertainment Modium and Portal Games released Mass Effect: The Board Game – Priority: Hagalaz.

The game was designed by Eric M. Lang AND Calvin Wong Tze Loon And it is part of a category that I like to call “Legacy Lite”. It is now available in your favorite games for about $ 40-50 on average.

I was very excited because I love the Mass effect The trilogy of videogames and changes was so kind that a copy of a review. All the thoughts below are mine though.

“The harvesters invaded the galaxy and the breeds of the citadel are about to lose the war. In a race against time, the commander Shepard must lead their team through a cruiser of Cerberus on the remote World Hagalaz to discover his sinister secrets, but deep in the elderly in dangerous crusher much worse than the forces of Cerberus who keep them.

“Mass Effect-Priority Hagalaz is a cooperative game and led by the plot for 1-4 players designed by Eric W Lang and Calvin Wong Tze Loon 黃子倫. A branched narrative campaign allows more playthrough each time with a different experience.

“History changes in response to your actions: your first choices influence subsequent missions. Collect Shepard’s team from a selection of teammates from the Mass Effect trilogy: Liara, such, Wrex and Garrus. Customize and update your team through optional experience and missions of loyalty. “

Before immersing myself too much in things, let’s outline how this review should go. First of all, we will talk about the countryside structure and various game mechanics. So, we will discuss physical components.

I will wrap everything with the final thoughts and how well I think Priority: Hagalaz He unites everything, including whether I had fun or not playing it and if I continue to do it.

Just like Legacy games, Priority: Hagalaz It has a narrative campaign that you will play on multiple game sessions. One thing I think is positive is that the narrative of Priority: Hagalaz It is not only torn from Mass effect Trilogy while allowing you to play as commander Shepard and friends.

Speaking of, for each session, you and all the friends who join you (up to 4 players are allowed) you will take on the role of Shepard and three allies from Garrus, Liara, such and Wrex. During the complete campaign between three and five missions depending on whether you want to make optional loyalty missions.

One of the great things is that at every level of the campaign, you can choose which mission to play later (with minor limits). There are three start -up missions from which you choose, so each feeds on two possible main missions out of four, so each of those is channeled into three possible final missions.

This already provides a multitude of possible results that allow tons of reproduction value. Add to this that each company character has a mission of loyalty in which you can spread as a second or fourth mission and that adds even more possibilities.

As mentioned above, you can only bring three companions per mission, but four are included. This means that you will have to adapt the composition of your team just like video games for each mission.

Each character (including Shepard) has a variety of skills and can acquire experience to unlock additional skills while playing. Generally, each character can unlock about an ability by mission with the potential to obtain an extra release after the mission ends if certain criteria are satisfied.

All these skills are very thematic for the characters that we all love and find different combinations is certainly one of the draws of reproduction Priority: Hagalaz.

How gameplay works Priority: Hagalaz? The first round of a mission is always given to Shepard and then revolves clockwise with the first player who revolves every round in an anti -eral sense.

In turn of a character, they launch all the dice available, activate the skills from the stars, re -enter all the stars, repeat the passages 2 and 3 until there are more stars, so you can assign up to three dice to the actions you undertake while I block them, finally pass all the dice that have not been used to the next character.

The actions you can complete are generally movement, combat, hacking, resuscitation of the allied or specific allies for mission. Depending on the state of the board of directors and dice shots, there are some curves later in a round that seems much less useful because of the limitations, but it is nice that when the dice are moved on to a character, that character can maintain A single nut from the previous roll. This allows you to mitigate the luck of a dice roll to a certain extent.

At the end of the turn of each character, they must turn upside down their danger given to them at the beginning of the round and follow it. These cards are the one that activates enemies and are almost never a good thing. They can have enemies to activate and move/attack, trigger turrets to shoot the team, generate enemies and more.

There are also cards that revived all the previous dangerous papers in the deck and if those resolve several times when you lose (a lot Pandemic-Pleases). This helps you give you a timer and pressure even when you arrived at a decently cold table.

While any mission can fail as indicated above or by the death of Shepard (as in video games), each main mission can also be completed in two different ways that reflect the Paragon and Renegade paths and each method provides a different buff.

The Paragon victories permanently add a nut in the pool while the sedated victories give token that you can spend to manipulate a single dice result. The loyalty missions have a single path for victory, but you will be rewarded by that character who receives access to a new powerful ability.

Now we have reached the component section of the game. Most of the components in this game are simple cardboard tokens. This includes enemies, turrets, doors, special skills, talika of such, etc. Also get translucent colorful cubes to trace some skills, health and shields. There are a total of 14 dice (two for the paragon victories and 12 from the beginning) and two decks of dangerous cards (one for Cerberus and one for the harvests depending on the mission). Each character gets a sheet of laminated characters with all their skills and statistics designed to be used with a wet eterase marker to trace the unlocking of the skills and experience earnings. The campaign tracker is also designed to be used with an eterase marker. This makes it very easy to reuse the same materials through the almost infinite game while simply erases the axes after finishing a campaign. Finally, we come to my favorite part: the miniatures. The game is provided with a detailed miniature for each partner and two for Shepard (one male and one female). I really love these mini and I hope to give them a worthy painting work. The only thing I would change is that it could have been nice to have omni-tool on male shepard and the energy ball for liara to be translucent, but it would have been more difficult for production. Overall, I feel that the components are of good quality.

Before leaving this section, let’s talk about the insert. I think Priority: Hagalaz It has a solid insert. They also give you a ton of smaller plastic bags to keep the components. The only thing I would have done differently is to make the bags included smaller. Overall, there are not a lot of tokens for a given appearance and therefore most of these bags are not even 20% full because they are so large. Honestly, this is probably my only complaint on this part of the game, which is fantastic.

Finally, for what I think the pros and cons herself are Priority: Hagalaz? I think the cons are relatively few. First, it was not clarified that the loyalty missions are included in the back of the mission book. I must admit that 90% of this scammer is the user’s mistake as it took me too long to move on to the back of the mission book. I kept looking between the first and second maps of the main mission for fidelity missions unnecessarily because I was worried about spoilers. However, when I looked in the regulation there was nothing that I saw that they outlined this little detail. Another little scammer is that the wet eterase scorer takes some time to be set and not easily canceled, so you have to be cautious once you have scored something.

In the meantime, I think there are many professionals for Priority: Hagalaz. The value of the replay is crazy with the use of wet elase markers to trace things. The variety of options for the character’s skills also adds another level of replayability which is always phenomenal. Especially if you are spending $ 50 in a board game. Also, I already said I love miniatures for this game. If you want miniatures for enemies, they also sell those separately even if they cost a nice penny to obtain.

At the end of the day, I really liked playing Priority: Hagalaz. Of the two heredity-lite games I played, I certainly prefer the flow of this. Because of the nature of the campaign, I feel like it was difficult to eliminate as a choice of random evening, but if you have a small group of friends who want to spend the next 3-5 game sessions to face this game, I think you would do it be A good time.