Games like The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era don’t come around very often. The size, scope and scale of Chip Theory Games’ latest effort — not to mention the cost of producing it — speaks volumes about the confidence of the company, and perhaps more so of the increasing numbers of people who invest in their games.
The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era follows breakout successes Too Many Bones and Hoplomachus in the use of premium quality components like poker chips, dice and neoprene mats in place of more common materials, whilst bringing the gameplay experience together in a more cohesive form.
The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is an entirely cooperative experience that works with one to four players, but is arguably best when played either solo or between just two people. Three or four player games are still completely playable, but tend to run quite long if one or two of the players are new to the game system. Each campaign in The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is based around a three session campaign concept, where the players will work progressively towards an encounter with a big bad — building experience and collecting items as they go.
There’s a real sense in The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era that you are not only playing a relatively faithful game set in The Elder Scrolls universe, but also that you’re experiencing the culmination of Chip Theory Games experience to date. For example, you can clearly see the dice upgrade system from Too Many Bones here, and I dare say that some of the mechanics that drive the campaign in Hoplomachus are replicated and enhanced here.
Anyone who has played either of these games before will see the similarities in The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era, whilst those who are not familiar with either should simply rest easy that this game brings some of the best features from those games to bear in a universe that you probably already love (given you’re reading this review). The box includes six different regions, each with its own storybook (called a gazetteer) and a range of battle maps, cards, dice and poker chips that are either region agnostic or used in specific circumstances.
Each game begins with character creation. The players choose a race (such as a High Elf, Khajiit or Argonian) and then a class. They then place a player mat and cards for both their race and class in front of them. They take a poker chip of their race and then health chips to place under it to represent them in the game, and then they populate the player mat with chips for stamina and skills (such as bow, sword or whatever).
A quick word on the components here — the player mats are beautifully crafted neoprene and the box even comes with a plastic overlay to “save” characters between sessions. The skill chips are thick, colourful plastic. The cards are made from a sort of plastic-like material that is apparently waterproof (though I’ve no intention of testing that). The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is perhaps easily the most overproduced game I have ever seen. It’s a truly beautiful product to own and examine — and players are immediately in love with it from the moment they set up their character.
With character selection done, the next thing to comment on is probably the campaign structure. There are various scenarios to work through, including a tutorial setting that omits some of the character creation aspects and simplifies a few other elements of the game to help get you up to speed. Assuming you get past this relatively quickly, you can choose a scenario and a location in which to play it — meaning that scenarios have additional replayability and variability based on the location you choose to play them.
A few things change based on your regional setup and potentially (probably) the scenario you play. As an example, each game will use two bags filled with enemy poker chips — each double-sided and showing values one, five, ten and twenty. The one/five chips go in one bag and the ten/twenty in the other, and these bags are seeded with a mixture of local enemies and generic ones. There aren’t tons of enemies specific to each region, but then again these chips are big, heavy and expensive so it’s unreasonable to expect too much more.
Whilst I am talking about the enemy chips, let’s talk briefly about fights and how you get to them, but before I do that, I need to touch on regional exploration. Each of the regions features a map that the party will explore over roughly twelve in-game days per session. The region maps feature city and encounter spaces, with the former always resulting in a city encounter (with its own rules) and the encounter spaces offering peaceful, combat and unstable variants that are determined by a card draw.
Peaceful and combat encounters do exactly what they say, whilst unstable encounters can offer either of these outcomes, as well as some that perhaps blur the lines a little bit. There’s more experience to be had from combat encounters, but as you might expect there’s also an element of danger that you need to be aware of. Specifically, when you set up a combat encounter you’ll follow whatever instructions it comes with (including setting up the battle map accordingly) and then you’ll draw enemy chips from the bags to equal the party experience level multiplied by the number of adventurers.
An example here would be that if you had two adventurers at level nine, that would generate eighteen enemy pool points, meaning that you then need to draw enemies from the bag to equal eighteen points, beginning with the largest chip you can. In this example, you’d draw one value ten enemy, one value five enemy and then three value one enemies. I really like this system, and it makes combat clashes in The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era very simple to set up and run and get stuck into.
Town encounters are usually quite welcome, offering a chance for the players to rest, rearm and collect quests. Each adventurer will get two town actions, and pleasingly The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era does away with currency altogether — prioritising the fun of obtaining new items that change the game rather than adding an additional mechanic to manage. Players can use their actions to take one of the available items, choose a new quest from the board, or visit the kiosk associated with their Guild.
I haven’t mentioned guilds yet, but in The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era these play a significant part in driving the main quest forward, forming the basis of much of your adventure and playing a key mechanical role in how the scenarios play out across the different regions. When it comes to visiting towns, the guild kiosk will offer very different benefits depending on your guild. Thieves may get extra items to choose from, fighters might have opportunities to take on unique quests and so on.
Whilst city encounters are essential and peaceful encounters add a lot of the flavour that makes The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era what it is, the real meat of the game comes in combat. With a specific battle mat setup and the enemy chips drawn, players must use their items and abilities to overcome whatever enemies the game throws at them. This is where I feel Chip Theory Games borrow from their other very popular game, Hoplomachus, to offer a simple “AI” that drives enemy behaviour and maintains a good level of challenge throughout.
Each enemy has its own behaviour, much of which is driven by keywords. Enemy health, like player health, is tracked with plastic chips placed underneath the enemy token and must be whittled down. At the start of the game when you have one simple skill to use yourself, and you’re facing a small number of enemies with at most one keyword each, this is very simple to manage. As you gain experience and add new skills and face more powerful foes, things do get more complex and this is partly why I say the game can go long with multiple players. With just one or two, especially when you know the game, things run a lot more smoothly.
That said, levelling up your characters and adding new skills is one of the most enjoyable and fun elements of the game. The player board that I mentioned earlier includes four tracks that fill from both left and right, so as you add new skills to the right, you’re limiting the amount of upgrades you can make to the left hand side. Typically this means that if you want to make a powerful fighter, you might choose to put a two-handed fighting skill opposite your character’s inherent magicka track — thus over time as you learn more about two-handed fighting, you ultimately end up reducing your potential for magicka in the future.
This system forces players to make a difficult choice even when choosing something to benefit them. It’s not that the excitement of levelling up is “reduced” because of the consequential impact on another skill, it’s more that the player is forced to think ahead about what kind of character they want, and is then incentivised to double down on skills they really want, rather than splashing their abilities all over the place and ending up with a weaker character overall.
I realise at this point that I am coming up on three pages of writing and yet I still have a lot more to say about The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era. It’s not that this is the perfect game or anything, but I do feel like gushing over it quite a bit. This is partly because the components are so good, somewhat because I love The Elder Scrolls universe and then no small part because The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is a genuinely good game. The only real flaw I’ve found so far is that it’s long and laborious to set up and get into, and by the end of a campaign the number of keywords and things to remember is unwieldy at best, unmanageable at worst.
So with that minor criticism levelled, let me try and wrap this thing up. The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era probably is the most impressive game I’ve ever had on my table. It doesn’t try to capture everything about such an epic universe as The Elder Scrolls and the games that have taken place in it, but it does try to capture all of the best bits. This includes a fantastic character creation and development system, brilliant fights and a story that is present but which doesn’t descend into reading reams and reams of boring text.
The production value is absolutely off the chart, and whilst in my one experience of Too Many Bones that came at a slight detriment to the gameplay, there’s no such issue in The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era. This is clearly the culmination of many years of design experience and lessons learned, as well as a passion for the source intellectual property. In short, as long as you can afford it, The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is a game that I would highly recommend to anyone who is a fan of heavy-ish adventure games, role-playing games and dungeon crawlers of all kinds.
The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is available now.
