Review: MASS EFFECT: THE BOARD GAME - PRIORITY: HAGALAZ is Cooperative Fun with Many Paths to Choose From

Towards the end of 2024, Modiphious Entertainment 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 falls into a category that I like to call “Legacy Lite”. It is available now at your favorite game stores for about $40-50 on average.

I was very excited as I love the Mass Effect trilogy of video games and Modiphious was kind enough to provide me with a review copy. All thoughts below are my own though.

“The Reapers have invaded the Galaxy and the Citadel Races are on the verge of losing the war. In a race against time, Commander Shepard must lead their squad through a crashed Cerberus cruiser on the remote world Hagalaz to uncover its sinister secrets, but deep within the shattered cruiser stir dangers far worse than the Cerberus forces that guard them.

“MASS EFFECT - Priority Hagalaz is a co-operative, story-driven game for 1-4 players designed by Eric W Lang and Calvin Wong Tze Loon 黃子倫. A branching, narrative campaign allows for multiple playthroughs with a different experience every time.

“The story changes in response to your actions - your early choices influence later missions. Gather Shepard’s squad from a selection of teammates from the Mass Effect trilogy: Liara, Tali, Wrex, and Garrus. Customise and upgrade your squad through experience and optional loyalty missions.”

Before I dive too far into things, let’s outline how this review should go. First, we’ll talk about the structure of the campaign and various gameplay mechanics. Then, we’ll discuss the physical components.

I’ll wrap this all up with final thoughts and how well I think Priority: Hagalaz brings it all together including whether or not I had fun playing it and if I’ll continue to do so.

Much like legacy games, Priority: Hagalaz has a narrative campaign that you will play over multiple play sessions. One thing that I think is positive is that the narrative of Priority: Hagalaz is not just ripped out of the Mass Effect trilogy while still letting you play as Commander Shepard and friends.

Speaking of, for each session, you and any friends joining you (up to 4 players are allowed) will take on the role of Shepard and three allies out of Garrus, Liara, Tali, and Wrex. Throughout the campaign you complete between three and five missions depending on if you want to do the optional Loyalty Missions.

One of the great things is that at each level of the campaign, you can choose which mission to play next (with minor limitations). There are three starter missions you pick from, then each one feeds into two out of four possible second main missions, and then each of those get funneled into three possible final missions.

This already provides a multitude of possible outcomes allowing for tons of replay value. Add to that the fact that each companion character has a loyalty mission that you can sprinkle in as either your second or fourth mission and that adds even more possibilities.

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

Each character (including Shepard) has a variety of abilities and can gain experience to unlock additional abilities as you play. Typically, each character can unlock about one ability per mission with potential to get an extra unlock after the mission concludes if you meet certain criteria.

All of these abilities are very thematic to the characters that we all love and finding different combinations is definitely one of the draws of replaying Priority: Hagalaz.

How does gameplay work in Priority: Hagalaz? The first turn of a mission is always given to Shepard and then it rotates clockwise with the first player rotating each round counter-clockwise.

On a character’s turn, they roll all available dice, activate abilities from Stars, reroll all Stars, repeat steps 2 and 3 until there are no more Stars, then you can assign up to three dice to actions that you take as you lock them in, finally pass all dice that were not used to the next character.

The actions you can complete are typically movement, combat, hacking, reviving downed allies, or mission-specific ones. Depending on the state of the board and the dice rolls, there are some turns later in a round that feel much less helpful because of limitations, but it is nice that when the dice are passed to a character, that character can keep a single die from the previous roll. This allows you to mitigate the luck of a die roll to some degree.

At the end of each character’s turn, they do have to flip up their Hazard card given to them at the beginning of the round and follow it. These cards are what trigger enemies and are almost never a good thing. They can have enemies activate and move/attack, trigger turrets to fire at the team, spawn enemies, and more.

There are even cards that shuffle all previous Hazard cards back into the deck and if those resolve a number of times you lose (very Pandemic-like). This helps give you a timer and pressure even when you’ve gotten to a decently chill board.

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

Paragon victories permanently add one die to the pool while Renegade victories give tokens you can spend to manipulate a single die result. Loyalty Missions have a single route to victory, but you’ll be rewarded by that character getting access to a powerful new ability.

Now we’ve reached the game components section. Most components in this game are simple cardboard tokens. This includes enemies, turrets, doors, special abilities, Tali’s drone Chatika, etc. You also get translucent colored cubes to track some abilities, health, and shields. There are a total of 14 dice (two for Paragon victories and 12 from the start) and two decks of Hazard cards (one for Cerberus and one for Reapers depending on the mission). Each character gets a laminated character sheet with all their abilities and stats designed to be used with a wet-erase marker to track ability unlocks and experience gains. The campaign tracker is also designed to be used with a wet-erase marker. This makes it very easy to reuse the same materials across nearly infinite play throughs as you merely wipe the boards after finishing a campaign. Finally, we get to my favorite part: the miniatures. The game comes with a detailed miniature for each companion and two for Shepard (one male and one female). I really love these minis and hope to one day give them a worthy paint job. The only thing I would maybe change is that it could have been cool to have the omni-tool on Male Shepard and the energy ball for Liara to be translucent, but that would have been harder for production. Overall, I feel like the components are good quality.

Before I leave this section, let’s talk about the insert. I think Priority: Hagalaz has a solid insert. They even give you a ton of smaller plastic bags for storing components in. The only thing that I would have done differently is to make the included bags smaller. Overall, there just are not a ton of tokens for any given aspect and so the majority of these bags are not even 20% full because they’re so big. Honestly, that’s probably my only gripe about this part of the game which is awesome.

Finally, what do I think are the overall pros and cons for Priority: Hagalaz? I think the cons are relatively few. First, it was not made clear that Loyalty Missions are included in the rear of the Mission Book. I will admit that 90% of this con is user error as it took me way too long to just flip to the back of the Mission Book. I kept looking between the first and second main mission maps for the Loyalty Missions to no avail because I was worried about spoilers. However, when I looked in the Rulebook there was nothing that I saw that outlined this small detail. Another small con is that the wet-erase marker does take a while to be set and not easily wiped so you do have to be cautious once you’ve marked something.

Meanwhile, I think there are lots of pros for Priority: Hagalaz. The replay value is insane with the use of wet-erase markers to track things. Also the variety of options for character abilities adds another layer of replayability which is always phenomenal. Particularly if you’re spending $50 on a board game. In addition, I already mentioned that I love the miniatures for this game. If you want miniatures for the enemies, they also sell those separately although they do cost a pretty penny to get.

At the end of the day, I’ve genuinely enjoyed playing Priority: Hagalaz. Out of the two legacy-lite games that I’ve played, I definitely prefer the flow of this one. Due to the campaign nature, I do feel like it’s hard to bust out as a casual game night choice, but if you have a small group of friends who want to spend the next 3-5 gaming sessions tackling this game, I think it would be a good time.