The Mass Effect board game will come with little guys and, dammit, now I want the thing

Shepard, Liara, Tali, Garrus, and Wrex on the cover of Mass Effect the board game

(Image credit: Modiphius)

Modiphius, the tabletop publisher that just announced it's making a Discworld RPG, is also planning to put out a Mass Effect board game. Cannily, it focuses on fan favorite companions Liara, Garrus, Tali, and Wrex. All will be packaged in 32mm plastic form, along with two Commander Shepards—one FemShep and one BroShep. (Presumably the bad guys are all cardboard tokens or something.)

And with that, my resistance to tabletop games based on videogames melts. My need for little guys means I now own boxes full of expensive plastic like Cthulhu: Death May Die, the re-released Avalon Hill version of HeroQuest, and a Warhammer: The Old World set that has like 90 skeletons in it. My thirst is unquenchable. I just like little guys, OK?

Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz will be a co-op game for up to four players, set during Mass Effect 3, which makes me wonder why Wrex is included, but not EDI or James Vega. Actually, I know why he's not there. Poor, unloved Vega. The board game's story goes that Shepard's squad is investigating a crashed Cerberus research ship on the planet Hagalaz, just before a dangerous storm hits. It's a race against time with both Cerberus guards and the creatures they were experimenting on to slow you down.

Each mission will take between 45 minutes and an hour to play, and you can string together three-to-five missions in a branching campaign, with decisions you make earlier on having consequences in later missions. You also get to upgrade your squad between missions, improving their abilities and gear. Sounds like it's really trying to emulate the Mass Effect experience—minus the smooching, of course.

Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz was designed by Eric M. Lang and Calvin Wong Tze Loon 黃子倫, and is scheduled to be released in 2024 through Asmodee, at which point I will sigh and add more little guys to my pile of unpainted plastic. At least it's only six this time.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.