Many of you may be familiar with the Elder Scrolls line of role-playing videogames. The series sports games consistently found in lists of the best videogames of all time. Elder Scrolls: Arena appeared in 1994, Morrowind in 2002, Oblivion in 2006, and finally Skyrim in 2011. From Morrowind onward the games have been showered with mods, re-released and redeveloped, and it has almost become a meme to see if a particular platform can run Skyrim. With such a strong role-playing pedigree, creating a boardgame that might stand up to the series is no small task. Chip Theory Games, a company known for developing deep games using premium components have taken on the challenge and succeeded wildly. Granted, the game is not cheap (it retails over $200!) but what you get is a game that captures much of the feeling of building and growing a character in the videogame but now you get to do it together with friends while sitting around a table together! Like the videogames, Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era can be played again and again, adventuring through multiple different provinces, pursue dozens of main quest stories, and (perhaps most importantly) construct and nurture player characters of almost innumerable variety. When one realizes the game can provide a group of 4 players with hundreds of hours of unique gameplay, one might claim the price averages out to be a bargain.

In The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era, players take on the role of adventurers travelling across the world in search of adventure. Over a series of three sessions, players increase in power, eventually gaining enough strength to engage in a final battle in the last session. The game map forms a framework for players to explore as they encounter peaceful or (more likely) antagonistic/combat encounters. These could be simple 1-room combats or a more involved dungeon-crawl type experience. Because the entire game is only three sessions, players increase in power significantly over the course of a single play session, providing a strong sense of building power (and tension.) The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era (TESBotSE) has a vast amount of source material available. Players who love combat and upgrades will enjoy the character growth (and its huge number of options) while story-oriented players should find satisfaction in the depth of background in the world. Fans of Chip Theory Games will know what to expect in the box – lots of dice, maps, and cool poker chips making a game that may even survive a trip to the bathtub. TESBotSE has been out for a bit less than a year but there is already a crowdfunding effort for a 2nd printing and several new expansions to the base game (along with a mammoth storage option to go with the mammoth game…) It ends October 31st.

The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era
Designers: Josh J. Carlson, Michael Gernes, Logan Giannini, Ryan Howard, Salem Scott, Josh Wielgus
Publisher: Chip Theory Games
Players: 1-4
Ages: 14+
Time: 2-4 hrs per session
(review copy provided by publisher)

TESBotSE plays in two different modes. The first is an over-arcing storyline where the players’ party roams around on a map, interacting with towns, quests, or initiating encounters (both peaceful/story-based and combat-oriented ones.) The second mode kicks in during those combat encounters. Players maneuver around and fight in a hex-grid layout. This could be a single large room, a cavern exploration that is built up while you play, or (typically a final boss) a large set piece area with multiple linked map tiles. The game is huge and involved in many ways so I will only describe it in broad terms here, enough so that my evaluations will make sense. Feel free to visit more in depth reviews if you need to figure out the details. (Note: there is a pretty good detailed tutorial book that comes with the game that can also be downloaded here.) The basic process is a daily movement around the game map, which may or may not result in a combat situation. Since player powers lean heavily into combat options, expect combat situations more often than not.

Continuing in the Chip Theory theme of way, way too much stuff in the box, the 10 kg / 20+ lb base box contains five different maps (provinces) to explore, each with their own Gazetteer. There are a few generic encounters and lots of common enemies but each area also has province-specific encounters and a few map-specific enemies one might meet to play towards the theme of the map. At the start of a 3 session campaign players select a guild to belong to and a province in which to explore. The two combine in the province gazetteer to set players off on their main quest objective. The second session typically has players explore the guild quest in a different province, all culminating in a big bad showdown in the third session. With nine guilds to join and five provinces to explore, there is going to be plenty of variety in the game – even before one starts down the path of expansions (one so far, two more coming in the crowdfunding drive.)

Each game day, the party moves about the map and (usually) plays through an encounter. This could be as simple as visiting a town to rest and restock, interacting with a sort of peaceful side-scene where players can make a choice, or (most often) some sort of combat encounter. These encounters tend to come in two flavors, a Clash encounter (which is mostly a one-room set piece fight) and a Delve encounter (which is a progressively revealed dungeon crawl.)

The game has a great way to manage characters and their growth. Each character has basic statistics but they also get to choose a (eventually several) skill tree to learn. These skill trees give a character dice to roll. In a combat, players roll dice for their characters and put them in a Recovery Track once they’ve been used. At the start of a player’s turn, they get to take some of their used dice in the Recovery Track and put them back into use. Thus, a player could go all-in on one turn and roll lots of dice, but that means they’ll only get a few back at a time over the next few turns. There’s a special kind of grey “fatigue” die that can also appear in the recovery track and those tend to “clog things up” and make it harder for players to cycle their dice over and over again right away.

It’s time to talk about what may be the most enjoyable part of the game, constructing one’s character. Each player starts with a race (10 possible) and a class (15 possible). A race defines some starting stats and gives a special ability (like prevent damage once per battle or take an overfatigue die to take a full second turn.) Classes give thematic abilities (healing, creating an undead minion, inspiring other players to take an action, improving one’s attack, etc…) Class powers are not triggered using dice. They use a resource called Tenacity. Some powers spend Tenacity while a few rare ones simply provide an ongoing benefit as long as the character has a minimum level of Tenacity. The primary way to gain Tenacity is to roll a “dud” roll on one of your combat dice. This is a nice consolation prize for a poor roll.

With all this stuff going on, it is important that it is as easy as possible to manage one’s character. Thankfully, Chip Theory’s overproduction(?) of the game comes to our rescue. All the cool dice awarded a player from their skills are stored in a handy mat. This mat even rests in a plastic enclosure that can be sealed shut to keep everything tidy between games. (Remember, the campaigns last over 3 sessions – about 1 per long-ish evening.)

The photo here (of my nimble skirmisher little dude) shows his attributes (red, green, blue) as well as several slots of dice. I’ve learned a few “1 Hand & Shield” brown dice which do damage and protect me, and a bunch of “Acrobat” yellow dice that have me jumping speedily around the battlefield stabbing things in the back… Note the grey fatigue dice at the bottom. My character has a Recovery of three which means the two grey and the single white combat die on the left will be recovered next turn. I’ll have to wait for a later turn to get that yellow one back.

Combat arises in three main ways. A Clash is a one-room set piece of opponents that are fought. A Delve is a progressively revealed map that typically requires eliminating opponents but can sometimes be accomplished purely by exploration. Finally, there are a few Dungeons consisting of a much larger set piece consisting of several pre-revealed tiles and typically unique setups. These are usually reserved for a big send-off at the end of a particular session.

There are some handy rules to place enemies onto the game board. Basically, the stronger the party is, the stronger the monsters are. This means the game doesn’t have to worry about scaling the difficulty of any specific encounter. It can just say “put guys here and here” and the players follow the enemy placement rules to automatically put out the correct power of monsters. The enemies come in levels of 1, 5, 10, and 20. These are mixed and matched to reach the correct level of difficulty based on the number of players and how experienced their characters are in the game.

Each Clash or Delve will have its own rules for success, with a default of eliminating all enemies. The Clash/Delve ends at the end of the turn after success is met. (Thus some players will still get a turn if success happens mid-round.) It is fine for players to be eliminated as long as at least one character survives to the end. Most (non-mainline) quests can be abandoned by retreating if necessary but then players typically receive no award.

Verdict:

To summarize gameplay: Players pick a guild to belong to and a province to explore, the two together determining the party’s overarching quest for the first session. They move about the game board, gaining experience through encounters and side quests until they meet up with (and hopefully defeat) the final goal of the first province. At the start of the second session, the party chooses a second area to explore (along with its guild quest.) All along the way players will be gathering items, new skills, and experience points to spend on new dice. The third and final session will involve a major showdown with the final boss, all based on the area picked for the second session. When the boss of session 3 is defeated, the players have “won” the game and can start a campaign all over again.

I must say that this game captures my imagination about as much as a good old paper and pencil role playing game. I can’t wait to get it back onto the table to level up my character and try him out. That is the game’s strength. Long gone are the days where gamers could play some boardgame for a (long) evening and go through a complete power arc of their characters from small fry to action-hero studliness. Designed to be played over three sessions, there’s room enough for a character to grow and improve but not so much room that power increases have to be drip fed. There are some great 20+ session boardgame campaign games that have an epic story arc, but when it comes time to play, I spend several hours exploring and fighting off the bad guys and end up with a reward of…. I can now reroll a die every once in a while… Contrast this with TESBotSE where after the first three encounters players have most likely doubled or tripled the dice they have available – and many of those dice have funky powers to boot. I’m not going to say character level like that all the time, but after an evening’s game session I can point to my character and say “look at all that cool stuff I just got.”

And there is a lot of cool stuff to get! In just the base game (there is already one expansion out) there are five provinces and nine guilds which means there are about 45 different main quests to experience. Taking into account that you do two provinces each game, that’s still 20+ games you’re going to play before seeing even a partial repeat. Add in side quests and all the player options and there is a PILE of material to keep the game fresh for a long time.

Mechanically, I love how each decision is balanced. It’s almost like no specific decision is the right choice 100% of the time. Players can take on many skill lines, but because they “bump” in the middle, the more you specialize the less you can generalize. Of course, the freedom to take on any skill you want is also very nice… there are no pre-formed restrictions to prevent odd builds. I like how dice are cycled and recovered. There seems to be space for players to specialize in churning dice with a high recovery value and characters who might have a lower recovery but more dice to spend. Most dice have one or more “dud” sides but these almost always give a player tenacity – there are times where players are actively hoping to roll “duds” to get their tenacity back up!

The difficulty scaling throughout the game is so elegant. Simply multiply experience by player count and use that many points of enemies – drawn out of a bag. Setup, once figured out, is fast. While not ideal, it has worked for me when we lose a character for an evening. We just scale by 3 players instead of 4 players and we’re on our way. When the party “fails” at something, sure you don’t get experience, but you also aren’t greatly penalized for failing to get that experience (although the way final boss battles work it does set you back a little there…) This means you aren’t going to doom your entire 3 session campaign by one or two early battle failures.

There are a few downsides. The game is moderately, but not overly complex. This is not something you’re going to play with younger kids. The players need to be comfortable dealing with lots of rules (all the dice to special things, the monsters do special things, etc.. etc…) If you have one person to manage all the rules wrangling it isn’t too bad, but someone has to. If learning games is not your thing, just getting started may be a bit of a hurdle. Thankfully there are lots of resources. There’s a step-by-step tutorial book where players can follow along, and the tutorial was even put in the DIZED app which is an app you can call up on a tablet and have it lead you graphically through the tutorial as well. There are many video tutorials and playthroughs – I do recommend those found on the Chip Theory site as a good start.

The other issue is game length. To cram a whole campaign into 3 sessions the sessions can get pretty long. This is not something I’ll be able to pull out at an after-school activity and play for a couple hours. Expect that first session to go several hours as players adjust and build their characters, something that is slower at first until players get a better feel for what they want their character to become. Even with several video-watches and rules-reading my first “session” took three evenings to pull off. Expect to add a couple hours to that session with new players, although an experienced player leading other players should drop that a fair bit. If all the players are somewhat familiar with the game I could see the game actually getting down into 3 hour sessions.

The game is set up to store all the character and campaign information between sessions but a single session is long enough that it would have been nice to make it easier to “pause” a game mid-session if players run out of time that evening. You can cram some information together and make notes of the situation, but in general, the game is expecting you to completely finish a complete session before breaking down for the night.

I am always loath to bring a new “giant” game into my home. There’s only so many places I can cram extra-large game boxes. It’s particularly frustrating when the size of the box is somewhat gratuitous. However, TESBotSE justifies its presence. It’s huge because there is just so much stuff in there, and the majority of the “stuff” is there to add variety to what is a thoroughly enjoyable game. It has managed to simultaneously provide a wide variety of narrative or adventures with a huge variety of (viable) character options and builds. The two together mean that I will have a lot of play left in this box for some time to come.

Expansions:
The game has piles of stuff, but once you’re dozens of hours in and you want even more options and variety there are options. There’s a Valenwood expansion available that gives a new area to explore, three new classes, and three new skill lines (types of dice to roll.) As mentioned at the beginning, there’s currently a crowdfunding campaign for a reprint along with more stuff. This time around there’s several separate expansions available. There are two new regions, each with two new classes and new skill lines. The Heroes of Tamriel expansion is a hero-centric one with a pile of new races and two classes and two skill lines. Fur and Fang brings werewolves and vampirism into the mix. Finally, there’s Shadows of Oblivion which adds in some bad-guy themed content. This expansion is meant to make the game harder for those seeking a challenge. There’s also a mega-storage all-in thingy in development alongside a more budget oriented “extra box” that should, in theory, hold all the extra stuff that can’t fit within the original box. For those interested, the funding campaign runs through October 31st…

Kid Factor:
OK, this is going to require at least a teenager to really appreciate, preferably a very focused young teenager or at least interested older teen. There’s lots of story text to read, but reading isn’t really going to be the big issue here. I would say you could play the game with a younger kid but you’ll need to do most of the heavy lifting of strategy, etc… It should be possible to build a character that is fairly straightforward to play (I do damage, I defend, I heal the others, etc…) so that a younger kid can participate but someone will have to help them keep track of the bookkeeping. As for content, there are bad guys, some alcohol references, and the rest is mostly left up to players’ imaginations. In general, I’ve been pleased with Chip Theory’s choices for artwork, etc.. Most people are wearing plenty of clothes and armor and most of the enemies are not gory/scary just for the sake of shock value.

Tags: Game Reviews, Unplugged