Gen Con Wrap-Up Post 3 - In-Booth Rundowns!

Mass Effect: The Board Game - Priority: Hagalaz

Modiphius has been sucking me in lately with all of their RPG and miniatures skirmish products. Now it looks like they've got me again with a Mass Effect board game, designed by the respected Eric Lang and newcomer(?) Calvin Wong Tze Loon.

I didn't get to sit down and play, but I did stick around and listen for a round of play during a demo at the Asmodee booth. It was also being featured at the Modiphius booth!

Priority: Hagalaz is, at its core, a cooperative squad-based tactical combat game on a hex map. However, it's much more than that! In true Mass Effect fashion, players will move through missions and be presented with Paragon and Renegade choices in the form of scenario objectives. For example, a mission about haywire robots may have a Paragon objective of hacking a terminal to shut them down, while the Renegade objective will be to just destroy them all. There are also optional side quests included that can make getting that “perfect” run all that more difficult!

The Paragon/Renegade endings to each scenario will offer players different rewards and lead them down different story paths. Renegade choices will give players tokens that can set dice faces (more on dice later), while Paragon choices provide more dice for more actions.

In Priority: Hagalaz, players will select 4 of the 5 included members of Shepherd’s crew (including Shepherd). Tali, Wrex, Garrus, or Liara can join Shepherd on missions, and each character has their own unique abilities and branching skill trees. Shepherd has the most expansive skill tree, as the designers wanted to incorporate the various playstyles featured in the video game.

Each character has a large mat that tracks their individual status and progress. The tactical grid and mission status are tracked via a sturdy flipbook. All of these components are dry erase, making it easy to mark changes down as they happen.

On a player's turn, they will roll a pool of 12 action dice. They will use 3 of them for their turn, then pass the rest to the next player, who will optionally save one result and re-roll the rest. This means the last player in turn order will have the least number of options when they roll their dice, but don't worry! The first player marker moves opposite to turn order, so the last player each round will go first in the next round!

In between player turns, hazard cards will be flipped that dictate what actions the enemies will take. Combat between players and enemies is straightforward - no dice rolling here. When players use their dice pool to take actions, the action will often just say “Do X.” This means that, as long as you can roll the right dice faces, you can do what you set out to do!

Gameplay-wise, there is a big emphasis on positioning and setting up combos with your squadmates. Each character has unique gameplay mechanics that really make them feel essential (e.g., Liara can peek at hazard cards and hint to players at what's going to happen after their turn).

The entire package just looks like fun. It's a tactical game with a branching narrative and just enough randomization and branches in story paths to keep it replayable as you strive for the “best” endings. Unlike other games in this genre, though, you can play through an entire “campaign” very quickly! Each mission is ~45 minutes, and campaigns will be 3 to 5 missions long.

I'm very much looking forward to this one. The price should be fairly reasonable since it isn't a “mountain of miniatures” game, instead providing minis for only the player characters. I think this will scratch that “story dungeon crawler” itch without all the rules overhead, time investment, and inflated prices. Only time will tell, of course, but it looks rock solid from what I saw!

Primordial: Creatures of Pandemonium

The Indie Game Alliance booth is always a great place to stop at Gen Con. They host several tables showcasing a rotating assortment of indie games, and always with someone who can talk to you about the title (often, but not always, the designer!). During one such stop, I saw Primordial: Creatures of the Pandemonium. I was drawn by the large, colorful hex tiles - I'm a simple creature. I spoke to the demo staff and got a good rundown of the game, but I'll try to keep it short here.

In Primordial, you play as mages trying to rescue creatures from a landscape being overrun by entropy. The creatures are wild, though, and must be tamed before you can bring them back to the safety of your stable. The goal of the game is to have the most victory points at the end of the game, and most of these points will come from taming creatures.

So, how does it work? On your turn, you can move one space (or hop over a space containing an opponent), spend energy to advance on a development track, play beneficial skill cards, and tame creatures.

When you move onto a tile, you take all of the energy on your destination tile, then draw from a communal bag to refill the tile for the next person who lands there (after you leave - one mage per tile!). Since only one player can be on a tile, and creatures can only be tamed from matching tile types, the game can turn into a space/movement puzzle in which you are trying to gather the required resources to tame a creature AND land on a matching tile so you can tame it. Hopefully, no one swipes the one you're working towards before you can get to it!

The advancement tracks offer benefits as you move up them, and they play a key role in creating powerful turns if you can time your advancements well.

The creatures in your stable can also offer great benefits! While some have instant abilities that are spent when you tame them, others offer ongoing powers or end-of-game scoring.

The “entropic energy” mechanism is what makes this game stand out from similar titles. Entropic energy will get added to the board as creatures are tamed, and it can be collected alongside normal energy. However, its uses are more versatile, and it doesn't count against resource limits at the end of the turn. It DOES count as a point penalty at the end of the game, however, so you must be sure to spend it! The trick of it is, at the beginning of the game, entropy is added from a supply next to the board. As it's spent by players, it is added to the communal blind bag used to refill spaces. You will start to see more and more entropy on the board as time goes on!

I’m a little fuzzy on the endgame, but if I remember correctly, it varies based on the entropy mechanic. I can't remember if the final rounds of the game are triggered when the entropy supply is depleted, or once a certain amount has been drawn from the bag after that point… But I do remember thinking it was clever and kept players on their toes. Should you keep picking up entropy if the game is ending soon? Do you even have a choice, now that the energy you need is stuck sharing a tile with entropy? Maybe you can use one of the advancement tracks or a creature power to get around it, or do something else altogether? Tough decisions!

Primordial: Creatures of Pandemonium is shaping up to be an interesting pawn-movement, resource management, movement puzzle game with a unique blind bag resource mechanic. The way each player can choose how to advance their tracks, as well as the asymmetry in abilities that will come from taming different creatures, looks very interesting. I also think the movement puzzle on a crowded board with other players will be great fun! I'm looking forward to seeing this develop, and maybe we can get another look at it next year! 

Shard: Spiral Arena 

Shard Studios, the makers of the Shard RPG, are working on a dueling card game set in the same universe! While it's still in development, they were hosting ticketed demos/playtests during the con, and they had a prototype copy at the booth to explain how it works. It's been a little while since the booth demo, and I can't find much additional info online, so my memory is a little shaky! Bear with me!

In this game, each player takes on the role of a martial fighter, with the goal being to defeat your opponent in melee combat. To do so, players will take turns attacking by playing cards from their hands and enhancing them with cards from the top of the deck. Defenders will have the opportunity to play cards to defend themselves, and once all cards have been played and revealed, the success of the attack is determined, and play passes to the defender.

Shard: Spiral Arena has big elements of bluffing and hidden information. The specifics are a bit hazy now, but I know that cards have a gem value that varies between 0 and 3-ish. When you play an attack, you must use a card with a minimum number of gems (2?), and you can “enhance” it by stacking a number of cards from your hand beneath it. The gems from these cards will be added to the attack value, but they are kept hidden from your opponent. This is where some of the bluffing element comes into play.

I remember that there is also a way to draw from the deck and add some of those cards to your attack, but I unfortunately forget the details. As the defender, I know you play cards to block, and that you have your own method of bluffing or calling the attacker’s bluff, but again, the details escape me.

I know this is coming across as a muddled mess, but I DO remember how I felt during the run-through. Shard: Spiral Arena worked hard to integrate the setting into the cards by invoking over-the-top and brutal maneuvers, as well as giving some narrative and mechanical asymmetry to the fighters. I thought the game looked punchy and quick, and it seemed the sort of game you'd want to play again the moment it finished. The bluffing and push-your-luck elements looked very fun for a two player game, and it seemed like the kind of thing you could play between bigger titles or when you just don't have enough time for a long game. I thought the mechanics themselves were fresh and interesting, at least in my opinion. The only game in our collection that I could vaguely compare this to is Duel of Wands, but that's only at the absolute surface level (based on an RPG, head-to-head battler, bluffing). Shard: Spiral Arena definitely had more bite to it than Duel of Wands does. I hope I see this on the con circuit next year. At the right price point, I'll just pick it up, but otherwise I'll try to sit down and actually play a demo session!