Mass Effect Boardgame

These are some of my notes regarding the Mass Effect boardgame.

These are my personal notes to help me remember things about it as well as a way to link to important resources.

=> PC Gamer advance blurb (March 2024)
=> Polygon advance blurb (March 2024)
=> Warhammer June2024
=> Dicebreaker (March 2024)

Interview with Calvin (game designer) on how he put the game together (my mini transcript notes from this video are here=> Mass Effect Interview Calvin – Beyond Solitaire

Audio only YouTube interview with Eric Lang (co-designer)

This note from the video: “I would just like to highlight that it’s mentioned in the video that there will be a pre-order on the official website “with some other fun bonuses for collectors.” ”

Notes from someone who played the game and kind of a summary of the above interview with Eric Lang

=> https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3313752/notes-on-mass-effect-the-board-game-from-ukge-and

This is the posted summary:

1. There is a common dice pool shared among the players.
2. The first player rolls the dice. Uses some dice for two actions, The first player rolls all the 12 dice, uses 3 of them for their actions. the rest of the players use the remaining dice. The next player clockwise can first ‘save’ a die result from the remainder, then rerolls the rest and uses 3 of them. Once there are no more dice, pass the first player counterclockwise, which means the last player is now the first player.
3. You have unlockable abilities, some of which have a prerequisite ability. You need XP to unlock them, and there are mutually exclusive paths.
4. Cerberus hazard cards are flipped at the end of each players turn to spawn enemies and activate turrets
5. You can hack turrets and doors
6. You get XP by killing enemies
7. If you get damaged, first you reduce your shield level, if your shield isn’t completely depleted, at the end of the turn it replenishes, if the shield is reduced completely, and then you get damaged again, you’ll lose HP.
8. Line of sight is done simply via flat edge of hexes.
9. Mission objectives have either renegade or paragon ways of finishing them.
10. Enemies have opportunity attacks if you go past them without killing them
11. The game “Board” is a book, JoTL / Near and Far style, that is wipe clean
12. Player boards are wipe clean and you can fill in XP levels, tick of abilities etc.
13. There are 14 missions with branches. You have main mission then can do loyalty missions. There is a unique map for all of them. The most you will do is 5 missions in a single play through. There are 420 combinations of missions approaches
14. If you do paragon mission successfully you get a paragon dice that can be used for extra actions
15. If you get the renegade outcome you get renegade tokens which can change dice faces
16. Game is due in November and should be available at Spiel

 

Final Fun Note … in 2017 this company wanted to make a Mass Effect board game and may have started on it but couldn’t get permission to do so. This is how the company put it: “EA has for company policy not to collaborate with third companies so it was impossible to reach an agreement”