Mass Effect board game designer Eric Lang has been harassed into silence. The tabletop designer spoke out against bad faith, culture war-motivated review bombing of the licensed tabletop game. This caused an additional wave of harassment leading him to delete certain social media posts.
The Mass Effect Board Game Review Bombing
Eric Lang made a social media post on Bluesky on the launch and critical reception of the Mass Effect board game. The post stated that he was proud of the property and was "so endlessly tired" of manbabies review-bombing the game over the inclusion of pronouns on squadmates' character sheets.
These posts included a ratings breakdown of the reviews on BoardGameGeek. It had a healthy mix of positive reviews, a few middling, and a large number of 1/10 reviews bringing down the review average.
Shortly after, co-designer Calvin Wong Tze Loon posted an updated ratings list with the negative reviews gone. In a post thread, Lang asked if BoardGameGeek removed the "waaahh pronouns" reviews from the site. Loon responded, "idk, none of the 1s have comments." Lang replied, "I feel perfectly safe in assuming the motivations."
Within minutes,a new wave of negative reviews went live. As of right now, the Mass Effect board game is sitting at a 5.0 out of 10.
The majority of these reviews are clearly motivated by bad-faith actors, acting out of spite toward Lang's comments. Review comments include phrases such as "This game sucks. The developer called customers names," "not a game for man babies such as myself" and most tellingly, "I do not have time to spell this out again. Curious was my previous review was removed."
Eventually, Lang deleted these social media posts. As for why this was done, a more recent post may provide context. Lang states that death threats are reported to authorities and he will show any violent and aggressive DMs publicly without hiding poster names.
With this in mind, it is clear that Lang deleting his posts wasn't him reconsidering insults towards a fanbase, but a result of targeted harrassment by an anonymous mob motivated by culture war talking points regarding the normalization of gender identity.
As for our official review of the Mass Effect board game, we enjoyed it. The game is compact, blends skirmish combat with branching narrative paths, and captures the spirit of the game, even if the story it tells "feels like a cut mission."