Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
As I was packing up the 20-pound box of bits following my fifth session of The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era, the new cooperative tabletop adventure game from Chip Theory Games based on The Elder Scrolls video game, a feeling of sadness began to set in.
I was getting that Voidfall feeling. A game this heavy (both literally and strategically) was going to be exceptionally hard to get back to the table, and the life of a tabletop media member can be a bit rough, at least in the “first-world problems” sense…you are always working hard to invest in a new property, only to move on to the next behemoth.
Make no mistake: The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is a behemoth.
Beasts, Not Beast Mode
The Elder Scrolls Online—the massive video game world, created by the team at Bethesda Softworks—is an investment. Chip Theory spared no expense in its attempt to bring a slice of that world to life in a board game. In board game form, The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era almost scared me away despite the fact that I raised my hand desperately seeking to cover it for our site. (Does “desperately” seem too strong a word? The campaign raised more than $7 million, so I needed to know what all the fuss was about.)
That behemoth box is something else. It includes a 95-page rulebook which, in its near-final format, isn’t quite as long as it will be in its finished version because the index wasn’t finished. There’s a 39-page tutorial manual. Stuff upon stuff abounds: dozens of player aids for turn structure, character and class summary cards, enemy ability cheat sheets, status dice effects. Five “Gazetteer” manuals that serve as scenario booklets for each region in the game, such as Black Marsh, High Rock, and Skyrim. Depending on how you slice it, there are at least 45 different quests in the box—nine guilds that each have a series of sessions in each of the five Gazetteers.
It’s a Chip Theory game, so there are poker chips everywhere—some track the health of characters while others are the characters, complete with some very slick artwork on each double-sided chip. Some chips track your party’s XP, and some are used to denote loot on the neoprene mats.
Yes, you’ve got mats—and one of my favorite storage solutions of the year: a mat holder that keeps all the Clash and “Delve” mats comfy at night. Plus, you have a seven-slot plastic stand that beautifully keeps item cards, Delve cards, side quest cards, and a bunch of those player aid cards in one place.
All the cards are rip-proof. The cards are also waterproof. They are so slick that I kept dropping bunches of cards from my hand when I tried to pick up too many at once…yet they were surprisingly easy to shuffle.
Plus, you’ve got dice. Oh my goodness, all the dice! Dozens of dice that do it all—status dice, light fatigue dice, overfatigue dice. Adventurer combat dice. Enemy combat dice. Skill line dice in every shade of the rainbow. Lockpicking dice. A die to track each round. A die to roll for unstable conditions on the map sheets.
Woof. The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era officially had the most stuff of any game I got to the table in 2024, outpacing the likes of the deluxe version of Andromeda’s Edge, any of the 18xx games I played this year, and the Eagle-Gryphon/Lacerda games I reviewed this year (Inventions: Evolution of Ideas, Speakeasy).
Given all this, only a fool would try to regurgitate more than 200 pages of rules and scenarios to build a single review, so let’s just agree that if you want to dive into a thousand PDF files, or see better pictures of the fancy bits, I’ll let you dive into that rabbit hole on your own.
I thought the best way to describe my experience with the gameplay would be to tell you how it felt to dive into such a rich, extravagant world-building experience. Over the course of roughly 22 hours across five solo gaming sessions in a single week, I left The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era on a table in my basement so that I could jump in and out of my sessions as needed.
If you’re reading this review, you are likely getting your copy of the game in the next few weeks and looking for a bit of confirmation bias. We’ll talk about bias later in this article, because I have some. Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room: The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is the most intimidating game of the year.
The Set Up (Gulp)
The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era (which we will simply call The Elder Scrolls for this review) is a 1-4 player co-operative campaign game that the box says takes two hours, plus 30 minutes per player, to complete a single session. I picked up a pre-production copy (PPC) of the game at Gen Con 2024, and to the credit of the Chip Theory marketing team, they laid out a lot of warnings: the game is long, there are a lot of rules, and you’re going to need a lot of plays to really get a feel for what’s going on, so take time to really explore it.
So, I took my time. Let’s first clarify what it means to “play a game” of The Elder Scrolls.
The game is set up to be played as single sessions. Each campaign length, though, is variable. That’s because each campaign could include up to three sessions if the party stays alive long enough. There’s a way to keep a session (and by extension, a campaign) going when you are about to lose if you tap a once-per-campaign guild ability that essentially bails everyone out. I am sure this was included because luck often determined how “well” I played each campaign. You are gonna get hosed from time to time with a scenario’s setup and dice results.
I am a completionist who wanted to “win” the game at least once fair and square, so I never used the bailout option. (I also never won.) I intended to play five campaigns, but because I kept dying I only got to the third and final session of one of my five playthroughs. In three of my campaigns, my party of one got murdered off by the end of the first session.
That also happened to be my play sequence, meaning my first three campaigns ended in failure before I could get to a second session. I played on the standard difficulty four times and the Apprentice, or “easy”, level once. For the standard setting, my cooldown stat began each of those games at one die. I am not going to do a deep dive of combat here, but just know that this is a dice combat game where you only get dice back to begin your next turn based on the cooldown number…and more dice is good.
I learned that the hard way many times!
The Enemy Pool
On my fourth run, I made it to session two before getting killed off, and what I learned over my first few solo plays is that the game’s EP stat (Enemy Pool) is vital to survival. The game’s math is simple: you have to face enemies based on your party XP, or experience points, multiplied by the number of adventurers (usually this is human players, but in at least one case this also included an additional adventurer earned through mission rewards).
So, if your party has four XP and you are playing with two human players, your EP stat is eight.
The EP system is a blast. You have to make the most efficient use of the EP stat to populate a map with baddies, based on the math of using as many enemy poker chips as needed to reach the EP number. Bad guys come in four flavors: levels 1, 5, 10, and 20. So a Clash that begins with that EP stat at eight means you have to populate the map first with a level 5 enemy, then three level 1 baddies, for a total of 8.
In The Elder Scrolls, you want to have scenarios where you can face a single level 5 bad guy every time before you take on a map where you have to face four level one baddies. Taking out four level one baddies—in one battle, that four-enemy pool had 17 hit points to my four!—is a tall task early in a character’s lifespan, and that was my downfall almost every time.
But the learning curve here is great. The Elder Scrolls is hard—I’m not sure this is Dark Souls (the video game) hard, but it’s not a cakewalk, even when you drop to the Apprentice level, which I only did for one play. I like that the game provides a solid challenge and my mistakes guided me towards taking advantage of all the things the game has to offer to make combat challenging but not impossible. (Well, mostly. Sometimes it was impossible.)
There are so many systems to interact with here. Each player has a character, with starting stats and a once-per-battle ability. There are about a dozen characters to choose from, and there’s a wide variety of different flavor art to find your tribe. I went with the Redguard purely because it had the most Black characters. (Yes, people of color…rejoice! Chip Theory did a great job providing a solid mix of characters to select.) Then you’ve got to choose a class, which can be done manually or through an introductory jailbreak sequence to help players pick a bit more randomly.
I went with the Acrobat class after that introduction in my first campaign, then decided that rather than playing the game five times with five different characters and five different classes, I wanted to get great at using just one of each. (I did change guilds, though, which offered different missions within the same locations.) This ended up being a great move, because by my fifth and final campaign, I became a master-level Acrobat and constantly finding ways to use “tenacity” (a resource earned when your die rolls miss, as well as through other game effects) to heal up or move my character to distant parts of the map.
The player mat? Awesome. You got stats to track and dice to hold, so I was really happy with the clean layout of the mat. Plus, it doubles as a storage solution for all your trackers, so you can keep the neoprene player mat inside of a plastic storage unit that closes up to keep your dice in one handy place. Even though I was given a PPC version of the game, the mat storage worked wonders, especially when I covered things up each night before my kids used the basement as their play area. (I can’t afford to have my setup blown by those kids!)
The manual says you’ll need a roughly 3’x4’ area for your play area, and that was about right. Still, it’s a lot—you absolutely want to leave this game out between plays because it is a nasty beast to set up each time separately. I am certain I would not have played The Elder Scrolls five times had I needed to tear it down and set it up multiple times. (Of course, I was playing solo. A three- or four-player setup is definitely going to take up more real estate.)
The Gameplay
The world-building, the flavor text on cards, the characters and classes, the region names…this is why you may have dropped $200 on the game. It’s just a blast to open the Gazetteer for Skyrim to look at the names of the quests, the locations, the baddies, and the dungeon titles. The attempts at immersion here are off the charts, so those willing to read introduction sections in character, or take the time to read all the text on a side quest card, or anything like that will be rewarded with the kinds of treasure you look for in a campaign game experience.
Do some side quests. Take the manual’s cues on when a session wants you to complete the first stage of its path. Sometimes, you’ll see a note that says “do XYZ task by day 6”, so I always found myself stumbling around doing a side quest or discovering an icon on a large region map on days two and three. I would stop and do Town Encounters to pick up items or sleep off a particularly rough map encounter at the local inn to recover full health and clear status dice from my cooldown area.
I spent the majority of my time with The Elder Scrolls doing the combat thing, and I was mostly pleased with how this worked (especially after I figured out how to better approach the EP system). Like Chip Theory’s Hoplomachus: Remastered, combat is tied closely to an approach that requires knowing what every other unit on the map can do. That’s a tough thing, and I found myself staring at the double-sided list of enemy abilities non-stop even by my fifth and final review play. Some abilities are localized to the region of play. This means, on some maps, you have to refer to the first page of the Gazetteer to know what the word “Native” means on a chip, while other boss or quest characters have a small modifier to what a word might mean on another enemy chip.
This is where The Elder Scrolls stumbled for me a bit. It was hard to just run in and do a combat sequence. Each enemy has a lot to keep track of, including its range, how many adventurers it can target, and its ability listing. When factoring that across as many as eight individual enemy units plus the adventurer party (and any companions the party has at that time), the map was occasionally a mess, particularly during the Clash sequences—and those make up the majority of the game’s combat.
I mentioned the word “bias” earlier, because I’ve got a bit of recency bias towards the excellent dungeon-crawling dice chucker Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan. That’s because Fateforge is simply an easier combat experience to manage, even with more enemies on each map. I think the dice-driven decisions are fun in both games—and very different, because of the cooldown requirements of The Elder Scrolls—but Fateforge didn’t make my head explode quite the way that The Elder Scrolls did.
Combat is still satisfying here, particularly when you work out a way to level the odds when overwhelmed by a sizable number of enemy units. Item cards became really clutch during combat because of the stance requirements in The Elder Scrolls. Combining range (the Stamina stat), the number of dice to use for a combat action (also Stamina), and my One Hand and Shield skill line dice, it was always a fun puzzle to determine Murder Efficiency (ME)—my term!—on the map.
And I’m a big fan of a reward system where I can loot chests on the map during play, possibly giving me a chance to tip the scales by getting a little lucky and finding great loot. The Elder Scrolls does loot right, with so many different kinds of things to grab in the game. I love the lockpick system when attempting to get treasure out of a chest. The limitations on active items (four) feels right. I loved swapping out items from my pack to make the best use of my stuff for an upcoming battle, and even when I got robbed with a Steal action from an enemy, it never felt unfair. (Also worth noting—I got robbed a LOT in The Elder Scrolls, particularly when I was lower on health because of the rules around the theft process. That will definitely make some players angry because of the way the game doubles down on dealing pain!)
Spending XP to add dice, more health, or upgrading my cooldown stat was also easy and a fun puzzle to do between combat or quest activities. I like the tension of having skill line dice in the same lines on my player mat as attribute tokens. I might not be able to max out my health if I’ve got skill dice on that same line. I also found value in adding the basic combat dice. When doing that in line with my cooldown stat, I was rolling 4-5 dice every turn by the end of my only three-session campaign.
Completing portions of a guild quest to get minor and major keywords was also important during my fourth and fifth campaigns, so it was fun to hunt around and find ways to make things easier. But nothing made the game easier, as a solo player, than getting a companion. In my fifth campaign, it was fantastic to get a companion to help take down enemies but also to soak up hits, all while not counting against my EP. In some ways, it felt like I was cheating by even having the help!
My Personal Bottom Line? “Tableability”
The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is the biggest thing Chip Theory has ever attempted, and it shows. It is a AAA production from a company already well known in our industry for accepting no substitutes. I showed the PPC to about a dozen people who play games at my house from time to time, and everyone was shocked by the extremely high level of quality. Backers: you are getting a world-class product for the investment you made on the front end.
As a game, I recognize the design quality here, and even though I have quibbles with the weight of the combat administration, it was still fun to figure out the combat puzzle. Delves were my favorite type of combat (between Clash, Delve, and Dungeon formats) because it reminded me of what I love most about “fog of war”-style combat games—I love opening the door to the next room and NOT knowing what’s behind it. I only discovered three Delves during my five campaigns, and while I know now that there are ways to pick a guild and lean into sessions where the Delve format is more prevalent, I didn’t understand that as well when I began my plays.
Running around each region is fun. (I spent all of my time in either Black Marsh or High Rock, so that I could get to know those regions better than if I just dropped in for a single play of each of the five regions.) I laughed out loud a few times at some of the text or dialogue lines from other characters. The content here is rich and well-written.
It blows my mind that The Elder Scrolls has so much content in the box. I am not sure a single person will ever be able to see it all. When you think about a game that way, issues with price go away—the current price to pre-order The Elder Scrolls is about $230 before shipping. But for a game that offers nearly 50 different quests that play out over a 1-3 session campaign each…EACH…wow. “Here’s $230…because this might be the last game I need for a year or two!”
My biggest negatives might not be negatives at all for some playgroups, so note that while I thought these were failings, they are highly situational. This starts with the rulebooks. I love the way the tutorial guide is presented, by walking through the early stages of a two-player game. It was a great way to get me into the action, but it also required a lot of reference back to the main rulebook, which ultimately led to me just reading the entire rulebook, which, don’t forget, is 95 pages long.
Those 95 pages are mostly text. Sure, there are pictures from the enemy chips of some of the bad guys, but there are very limited numbers of illustrated gameplay examples. For a visual learner, I think the rulebook here makes for a very difficult onboarding experience.
As a reference manual, though, the rulebook is excellent. I was surprised how often I could find everything I needed from a quick glance of the table of contents, and the spiral binding meant I could quickly flip to the page I needed and keep the rulebook open as I navigated a sequence with the rule in question. (Strangely, the main rulebook and all five Gazetteers are spiral bound, but the tutorial guide is not, so it was harder to keep the tutorial open on my table. I am not sure if that will change with the final version or not.)
The difficulty is the difficulty: The Elder Scrolls is hard. While that was a positive for me, I wonder if that will turn some off. Everyone’s different about how they feel regarding difficulty in a co-op game; I would prefer to win about 25% of the time. I like it when it feels truly special to win a co-op game as long as the game’s sequences continue to be interesting, so The Elder Scrolls worked because the decisions during each session made for fun fare.
The main issue I have with The Elder Scrolls, though? “Tableability”, my made-up word for the ability of any game in my collection to get to the table across the widest variety of my game groups.
Simply put, The Elder Scrolls is almost never going to have a chance to make it out regularly. I’m never going to teach a game with a rulebook this big to other players. I would happily play it with a gamer that already knows it (maybe they have their own copy, and are looking to kick off a campaign with other folks near my home), but I think a single session with three players is going to take 4-5 hours. That means I’m looking at a campaign that ranges from 12-15 hours…and I have to depend on my friends to reliably come back and play it again and again.
My multiplayer tabletop campaign experiences have had a rough go since I had captive audiences to call upon during COVID. Maybe you’ll have better luck, but I haven’t so far!
This is another place where my bias towards RPG-style games like Fateforge comes up again and again. The Fateforge app does some of the work. It’s much easier to set up and teardown, and the rules overhead is significantly lower. The world-building isn’t on the same level, but if I want to chuck cool dice and make interesting tactical combat decisions, Fateforge is pretty dope.
As a father who has a busy life outside of tabletop media, The Elder Scrolls is going to be a difficult one to get out regularly. Even my copy of Voidfall—which doesn’t even have a campaign component!—hasn’t made it to the table in 2024, because each time I want to set it up, I think about the prospect of that activity and run off to eat dinner instead.
For many players, I’m excited to confirm that you have found your next Gloomhaven. The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is a triumph, a special experience for anyone who enjoys a good, meaty dungeon crawl. I’m not even a huge Elder Scrolls Online fan, so if you are a fan of the video game world, you simply must sink your teeth into the board game. Clear your holiday schedule because you are going to need all the time you can find to play this one!
Add Comment