Jeez, RPG board games are so hard to get right, aren't they? They have to deliver adventurous, imaginative freedom, a real sense of setting and characters, and meaningful storytelling, all in the structured confines of a physical boxed game with components and systems that work satisfyingly on the table, time after time. That's a tough old cookie.
The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is one of the biggest, most ambitious examples I've ever seen. Since we had a free copy kindly provided by for review by Chip Theory, I've played a full campaign, and I have Thoughts. This is not a formal review of the game, and I'll explain why later, but I do want to explore my feelings about it. And that means first acknowledging the absurdly difficult task this game sets out for itself.
In my view, 'RPG board games' are always a wrenching compromise between their two competing halves. The best board games, I think, are finely tuned systems with defined edges, that create supreme depth inside those edges, and generate emergent stories during play, without any pre-determined narrative. The best tabletop roleplaying games, on the other hand, find greatness by unleashing players' creativity to work outwards, making up brand new stories as you play. Trying to bind both together into one box where all the words have already been written for you is a huge trade off: you lose both the pared down mechanical elegance of the board game and the borderless storytelling of the RPG.
Translating a beloved, open world videogame RPG into a board game has always seemed to me ten times harder still. You'll have a more tactile experience, of course. RPG fans love maps, figurines, and such, and there's a sublime attractiveness to the idea of your favorite open world adventure hopping from screen to tabletop, turning into something you can touch and hold. It grabs me every damn time.
But, without a computer to do all the heavy lifting, a board game can't directly replicate the scale, interactivity, and sheer, natural immersion that enlivens a triple-A open world RPG. The closer you get to a direct, one to one adaptation, the more your table gets bogged down in stat trackers, extra turn phases, variables, and nine billion tokens. Shockingly quickly, you can end up with more paperwork than game.
Storytelling is another mountain to climb. Your average 80-hour open world RPG videogame contains tens of thousands of lines of writing, to flesh out its main storyline, side quests, NPCs, random events, and so on. You can squeeze that much narrative into a board game, by including 200+ pages of story supplement books (and TES: Betrayal does just that, which we'll get to) but the problem is delivery.
I think experiencing a good story in an open world game is about coherency, naturalness, and authenticity. Factions and characters are already out there in the world, doing their stuff, and you're just discovering them, bit by bit, in ways that make sense and feel believable. The RPG videogame designer's darkest art is in cynically engineering the game to ensure those realistic 'chance encounters' happen often enough to keep players engaged - but it's far, far harder for a board game to do that.
Even if every word in those narrative booklets and event cards is pure gold, everything has to be choreographed perfectly to have a hope of achieving the 'natural' world building a major videogame can give. Without the computer to do that complex choreography, you as players have to handle it, and that's never, ever seamless. Even in Frosthaven - a 10/10 title we firmly name the best RPG board game ever made - I still find this effect a bit jarring.
For my money, it's better for a board game to narrow its focus to one linear, carefully crafted storyline, and house all the player choices within it, rather than chase impressive scale and replayability by attempting a video-game style behemoth, full of branching avenues and multiple overlapping storylines to explore.
Which brings me to my thoughts on The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era. Because it's this game's wildly over-ambitious approach to storytelling, more than anything else, that made my 12-hour campaign a pretty disappointing play. It's a shame, because as an Elder Scrolls fanboy, I wanted to love it. And there's so much to love in this box.
For one thing, the components are second to none. Its splendid neoprene mat maps (map mats?) wipe the floor with Frosthaven's cardboard tiles. The box design and included storage trays are ace. Its hundreds of custom dice are delightful, and every book, map, and token is a treat for the peepers. As for Chip Theory's trademark weighted poker chips, they're so nice to play with that they still brought me joy even after I got bored of having to stack and unstack them constantly.
The core gameplay loop is solid. Much like Frosthaven, it's a series of dice driven, tactical combats fought on grids, linked by quests that send you from place to place in a lovingly mapped campaign overworld. The primary 'roleplay' offering here is a lavish tabletop version of The Elder Scrolls games' character building suite - races, classes, skills, and equipment - and honestly, it delivers.
Your neoprene player mat has a limited grid of spaces for skill dice, set out in rows. You'll start with a couple 'skill lines', but as you visit trainers in game and unlock new sets of skills (Daedra Summoning, say, or Heavy Armor), these fill up your quota of rows. Your Magicka (which affects spell range); Stamina (movement speed); and HP can also be trained up - but these, too, compete for mat slots, with pretty little pearly tiles I really want to (but will not) eat.
So every stat bump and every new skill trained (or existing one leveled up to add more action dice to use in fights) is at the cost of another boost you might have had. It's elegant, thoughtful, satisfying to do, and lends itself to proper brainy character builds.
Your race and class are handled well, too, with just the right level of detail. Each race comes with a single, once per encounter special ability, while classes offer an additional slate of offensive and defensive powers that neatly complement the main skills.
Regular skills involve rolling their unique dice, applying the effects, then waiting for them to recharge in the neat little cooldown track shown above. Class abilities, though, are fueled with Tenacity: a resource that's mostly generated passively by 'fail' rolls on skill dice, but can also be topped up with canny use of certain skills, creating tasty combos. Equipment and item cards you loot or buy in town add extra spice to the soup, and can help link up loose ends in your build nicely.
It all makes for a compelling (if sometimes brain-taxing) action economy, as you and your party-mates work out the combinations of rolls and skills that'll give the best bang for your buck. This intuitive and well designed vehicle for building different skill sets, combos, and synergies between players is my favorite part of the game.
Your journeys through the 'overworld' of Tamriel also add some pleasing bits of narrative color in between what is essentially a long procession of fights. One touch I really enjoy is each region having its own campaign map special rule.
When traveling through Black Marsh, for instance, the unpredictable climate messes wildly with travel. One day you're happily tramping away, the next you're piling on fatigue cubes as you're forced to slog through monsoon mud at half speed, or even stop altogether. Moments like this really can immerse you in your fantasy role, as you wish for the rain to stop so you can outrun those pursuing bandits.
It all works, and while the admin workload is inevitably heavier than the average board game, it's generally well oiled and manageable. It's not rules or admin bloat that soured my 12 hours with TES: Betrayal.
It wasn't even the fact that the game randomly generates an "enemy pool" for every fight by picking chips from a bag, regularly creating combats where the foes you're facing make little narrative sense. That was very annoying, though; when a three hour quest to confront a gang of bandits ends with a fight against three bandits, two skeletons, and a rat, something's gone wrong, in my opinion. Don't procedurally generate, kids, it's bad for your health.
No, what broke the camel's back was that the game's branching, three-chapter campaign monumentally Did Not Work For Me. To be clear, it absolutely doesn't lack for quantity. One of Betrayal's big selling points is offering quest filled 'gazetteer' booklets for five whole provinces of Tamriel, each with enough optional routes through for many different playthroughs, and it definitely has that.
A full game of this lasts around nine hours, broken into three sessions. Each chunk takes you through one story quest (plus side quests along the way, if you take them on), and the campaign ends with a larger capstone quest and a challenging boss battle. Across the five included books are dozens of quests, laid out 'Choose Your Own Adventure' fashion. At the outset, you'll pick one of the quests on offer for the first chapter, then at the end of chapters one and two you'll be offered three possible quests to move onto, most of which take you to a new region, with its own map, book, cards, and enemy spawns.
When I learned this was how the story worked, my alarm bells went off immediately. Mixing and matching slices of different stories into one Frankenstein's Monster creation doesn't sit well with me, even when the quests and settings have theoretically been written for that express purpose. It reminds me of Exquisite Corpse, the old party game where each person draws one section of a figure without seeing the rest, and everybody has a good laugh at the resulting hell-spawned mishmash. Good for a five minute lark with a pencil, not suitable for a nine hour fantasy adventure.
But I gave TES Betrayal's branching story the benefit of the doubt, and played a full campaign, using the recommended starting point for first timers (mine took several extra hours thanks to learning and looking up rules). The resulting story did not surprise or delight me.
The actual writing is decent, and it's not like the quests aren't appealing in themselves. Based on the three I played, each is fine; it's just that they didn't meaningfully link together at all. We carried a sample of magic sap from one side of Black Marsh to the other, and the mystic guild who hired us said 'thanks very much, now go track some smugglers for a different guild, one province over'. So we did, and that was fine, but utterly unconnected from what went before.
And at the end of that quest, the booklet simply had an NPC straight up tell us that a previously unmentioned Wood Elf called Deslandra (the game's ultimate Big Bad in all versions of the story) was doing unspecified, evil cult things, and we really ought to go deal with her. So we did, and it was fine. But there was no actual story being told, no logical progression of events, no gradual build-up or characterization for the villain or their evil plot - and so the final confrontation just felt hollow, arbitrary, and deeply weird.
It all felt a mile wide and an inch deep, which is a criticism that snootier RPG aficionados often level at Bethesda videogames. But, say what you will about Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, they each have a coherent main storyline with a believable, motivated antagonist and half decent supporting characters along the way. In my single campaign, TES Betrayal had none of these things, and my dismay at that poured cold water over the whole experience.
So if I'm generally down on this game, why is this a general 'impressions' think piece, not a formal review giving you my full conclusion and a score out of ten? Well, it's because:
- I haven't played enough of it yet.
- I don't want to play any more.
I could review it based on one campaign, and I think it'd be a fair test, from the perspective of your average gamer. This isn't a TV series you've got to let build for weeks; if a board game disappoints you after 12 hours, it's fair to say it's not for you. On that basis, I wouldn't personally recommend this game.
But at Wargamer, we firmly believe that tabletop games being long, or complex, or requiring extended time and effort to mine the true value from, does not disqualify them from being great. When Mollie Russell wrote our Frosthaven review (structurally a similar game to this one) it took many weeks, and far more than 12 hours of play, to experience enough of its ocean of content to be sure it merited a perfect score. I don't like 'choose-your-own' branching storylines, and I didn't enjoy this one, but it'd be unfair to grade TES Betrayal without giving it the same longform treatment.
And, digging a little bit into some other reviews that contribute to this game's storming 9/10 score on BoardGameGeek, it's clear a lot of folks who've played multiple campaigns found much more to love, with some relishing piecing together more of Chip Theory's main story from different angles, via multiple playthroughs.
While I think that's a lot to ask of new players, I can't in good conscience mark a game down based on bad story when I haven't seen 90% of the acres of 'story' that's in the box, especially when other folks who have seem to really love the story. I can't discount the possibility that another nine-hour campaign or two might change my mind completely. I doubt it, but I'd have to give a lot more irreplaceable hours of life to find out, and I just can't face that right now.
So for now, all I can say is: I wanted to love this game, and it let me down on the first outing. Maybe in the sunlit uplands of 2026, when we'll all have more time and better health and all the evils of the world are healed, I'll give it another bash and I'll see the light. The core gameplay and components are lovely, after all. Maybe next time I'll be a Stealth Archer, they're always fun.
If you've played a ton of this game in multiple different playthroughs, I would genuinely love to hear your thoughts and find out why I'm totally wrong - come join the free Wargamer Discord community and we'll chat!