Mass Effect Board Game Designer Eric Lang Is Telling Gamers Not to Support Companies With “Bigotry”
Eric Lang posted to Facebook this week with a message that had a specific target.
“I also encourage not financially supporting games or Kickstarters from creators with a public platform and history of bigotry,” Lang wrote. “Especially transphobes, in the year of our lord 2026. F--- TERFS always.”
Lang did not name FryxGames or designer Jacob Fryxelius directly. He did not need to. The post arrived in the context of a years-long boycott campaign against Terraforming Mars, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed board games ever published, targeting the company’s CEO Enoch Fryxelius over social media posts from 2020 that included sharing content from gender-critical activist Posie Parker and expressing support for Sweden Democrat leader Jimmy Åkesson. Enoch deleted the posts and issued a general apology. The boycott calls have continued regardless.
Lang calling for a financial boycott of companies with “a history of bigotry” while positioning himself as the industry’s moral arbiter is worth examining given his actual track record.
Fandom Pulse has covered Lang’s career extensively. He leveraged his identity for career advancement at Cool Mini Or Not, where he eventually had to step down. In October 2024, Lang co-designed the Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz board game and added pronoun designations to the character sheets. When players left negative reviews on BoardGameGeek citing the pronoun inclusions, Lang publicly called them “f---ing manbabies” who “can’t handle looking at pronouns on a character sheet.” BoardGameGeek subsequently removed the negative pronoun-related reviews from the ratings. Lang then posted on Bluesky: “I’m so proud of Mass Effect, and so endlessly tired of the F---ING MANBABIES who try and tank our BGG rating because we took 10 seconds to add pronouns to the squadmates?” He deleted the X post but left the Bluesky version up, writing: “Deleted the stupid post because, well, you know why. I hate deleting posts that I stand behind, but f--- it. Twitter sucks so f---ing much.”
More recently, Lang was accused of using Chinese slave labor in his manufacturing chain. His response to the designer who raised the accusation: “Consider kissing every square inch of my Black a**.”
Lang posted on Facebook last week warning gamers about tariffs: “Hey, Maybe don’t come at game industry people demanding education about tariffs RIGHT NOW.” The man lecturing the hobby about ethical purchasing decisions was telling his own customers to stop asking questions about where the products are made.
The campaign against FryxGames and Terraforming Mars follows a familiar pattern. Enoch Fryxelius expressed opinions in 2020 that were standard center-right Swedish political positions: skepticism of transgender ideology, support for a mainstream conservative party, and defense of a commentator popular in that country. He was not Jacob Fryxelius, who designed Terraforming Mars. He was not the game’s artist. He was the CEO of the family business. The posts were deleted. An apology was issued. None of it mattered to the boycott crowd, which has continued circulating the screenshots at every opportunity.
Terraforming Mars remains one of the highest-rated board games ever made. The audience for the game has, in the majority, separated the product from a CEO’s social media activity from six years ago. That is a reasonable position. It is the same position the gaming press takes toward designers on the left who express political opinions in public, including Lang himself, whose pattern of insults toward customers and accusations against competitors does not appear to have affected his career opportunities.
Lang is entitled to his opinions. He is also entitled to encourage people not to buy products he disagrees with. The audience is equally entitled to note that the designer calling for boycotts based on “bigotry” is the same person who called his own customers manbabies, told an accuser to kiss his behind, and leveraged his race for industry positions.
Do Eric Lang’s calls to boycott FryxGames carry credibility given his own track record with the hobby community?
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My son saved up some allowance so he could buy the Terraforming Mars Big Box. Money well spent. He could not care less what a relative of the game’s designer might have said, but being a target of leftists usually makes him want to support a product more.
So Eric is saying that we shouldn't buy his games, that's a good idea, I like it.