The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is Near Perfection

Chip Theory games are well known for their games that use, well, chips! And while I’ve always been impressed with the production of their titles, I’m not sure I would say I ever longed to play things like Too Many Bones. It seemed interesting to me, but what was the hook to keep some of the friend group playing when we had so many other campaign games to finish.

Enter the Elder Scrolls, a theme so good it made me rethink my decisions on Too Many Bones and begin building my Too Many Bones collection. The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is a near perfect campaign experience in my opinion, so let’s hop in and find out why! For more insights, check out developers interview about this game.

Campaign games have become much too long in my opinion, or lack any real replay ability if they are a decent length. Games that are too long aren’t necessarily bad, but they do take a while. For example, our first run-through of The Lord of the Rings: Journey’s in Middle Earth took over 18 hours to complete, which mind you involved learning the rules.

Getting through the first box of Descent: Legends of the Dark also took an extraordinary amount of time, due to the building of all the levels and terrain. With Betrayal of the Second Era, Chip Theory promises an experience that will last 10-12 hours broken down over three sessions. That is outstanding.

Why would you come back to this again once you’ve done a campaign? That’s the brilliance of this system. With a number of different quest lines to explore – Mages Guild, Dark Brotherhood, etc. – and a bunch of different areas to explore in – Skyrim, Black Marsh, etc. – each experience is pretty unique.

Sure, you might tramp through familiar lands more than once, enter cities you’ve been in before, and so on, but that’s how the Elder Scrolls video games work, so why not here. And with the game constantly pushing you to complete your Guild quest by the end of day 12, you won’t be able to go everywhere in one game anyways, which again, I enjoy.

Rest assured, there is plenty of variability here and you could easily run a half dozen campaigns and almost no threat of playing similar content – that, in my opinion, is pretty impressive. And the difficulty of what you play, where you choose to roam, and so on will vary. My first experience wasn’t overly difficult, although we did get into a few tough moments throughout. We built three really good characters that worked well together – doing that is half the fun.

Character creation in Betrayal of the Second Era is something I’ve never really experienced before. Everyone has similar stat lines – health, magika, stamina, etc. – but then you can build out your character using skills you can pick up in towns. I chose an archer, for example, and went crazy buying dice that allowed me to attack at range.

How these dice worked together was so interesting, and choosing what types of dice I wanted for the long game was really important. Did I want to do area damage a lot, or risk rolling to put statuses on enemies? Or did I want to load up my cool down track with Level-1 dice and then hit with another that gave me a few points of damage per level 1 dice in my track?

These decisions were tough to make, and each and every time we looked at various skills, we took a while to really examine what was available, and how it would help, not just for ourselves but for the group. I wouldn’t say the system in the game is overly confusing, but a bit too much to write about here. We suggest checking out this video (and the entire series of videos) from Chip Theory Games to learn more about how Betrayal of the Second Era plays.

What Chip Theory does really well in this experience is attempt to constantly give you a risk-versus-reward opportunity. You can go crazy with your dice, do a lot of damage, but you are going to take some fatigue which will slow down your ability to get those spent dice back. You can maximize the ability of a weapon (item card), but if you do you need to discard that item. I love that choice, and it always feels like it matters. A lot of those decision become group decisions, which really enhances the cooperative feeling of the game. “If I over-exert myself here and take a bit of fatigue, can you finish him off on your turn?”

We talked about the production of this game in another article, so please check that out, but the production plays so well into how the game works. There is quite a bit going on in this game, and your first session at least will require a lot of looking things up in the rulebook. But once you understand the core elements of your player mat – where dice go, how to track various things, etc. – the game flows so incredibly well.

Used dice move to your cooldown track, and at the begging of each turn, you can recover dice from the left side of the cool down track equal to your cool down value. Active dice go above your stats area and remain until discarded. Drained dice go to your player card, and are no longer available for that battle. It sounds like a lot, but the fact that it all makes logical sense and there are dedicated spaces for everything makes it so much easier.

Betrayal of the Second Era is not a light campaign game in any sense of the word. Logical and strategic planning is required to build characters worthy of completing all three sessions. Session one might feel like a breeze, but as you gain more experience, you’ll inevitably fight harder and harder enemies. If you don’t sufficiently use your experience to create a better character, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. That’s the type of campaign experience I want, where you constantly need to be building out your character.

While some may see this as a game of luck – with all the dice rolling – I strongly disagree. There are plenty of ways to improve your character as time passes to maintain your ability against growing challenges. And yes, if you fail to do this properly, you might become overwhelmed and lose.

I cannot say enough good things about this experience. While I like different campaign games for different reasons, this is the one I’m enjoying the most right now, and for good reason. Not only does it have a theme I love, but the gameplay was so much better than I was expecting. If you’ve been turned off by the concept of Too Many Bones, or dice based campaign games, perhaps give it a shot – it might change your mind like it did mine!