Can You Enjoy The Elder Scrolls Board Game Without Playing The Video Games?
I've never played any of The Elder Scrolls games. Actually, that's not completely true: I once rented Skyrim from a Redbox (god I'm old) and played it for an hour before returning it. At the time, I was thinking "Why would I spend this much time and energy leveling in a game I only play by myself". Keep in mind, this was during one of my big World of Warcraft phases.
As a general rule though, I've always been like that – never really took to single player RPGs, instead preferring to play games with other people. That's why I latched onto World of Warcraft so much, why I play board games, and also why I like tabletop RPGs so much. For me, there's something about experiencing a story with other people that makes it more meaningful. (It's also probably why I have never done much solo board gaming either.)
The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era (TES), from Chip Theory Games, was the chance to dip my toes into two different pools I've seen but never experienced. Not only The Elder Scrolls, but Too Many Bones (TMB). I've talked with numerous people about TMB in the past, and those that are familiar with my game tastes have sung the game's praises and talked about how much I would enjoy TMB. All of the games from Chip Theory Games look super amazing, and I'm always a big fan of awesome components. Yet, these cool components usually come with an increased price and I'm not always a fan of paying for a $150+ game that I'm not sure if I'm going to like.
Note: YES, I know I play buy Warhammer 40k. Shut up.
I've also never taken the time at conventions/gaming cafes/game days to see about getting in a taste of TMB. Until a friend of mine was having a game day for The Elder Scrolls board game and invited me to play. I knew that TES was based off of TMB, so I was curious to see how it played. On that day, I got to try out a small portion of the game, and I was hooked. I immediately reached out to Chip Theory Games and managed to get a copy of the game to see how the full experience went.
Zones of the Elders
Note: I'm not going to spend any more time comparing this game to TMB since I haven't actually played that version. If you have, let me know in the comments where the game differs. From here on out, I'll just be focusing on TES.
How do you get started with this monstrosity? A lot of organizing game components. As you can tell, there is a LOT to this game, so getting everything out can take a bit. Luckily, the game comes with a lot of plastic organizers to keep things in. Some of these you use to store cards & bits in-between games, but even still there's a bunch of card decks to separate and shuffle up. You'll also want to choose a difficulty level, although I'm not sure why you would want to pick a level other than the basic (maybe you hate yourself and your friends? In which case, I hear diplomacy might be a game for you). Then, you'll decide what area of the world you want to play in. There are 5 zones in the base game:
The Elder Scrolls
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Apparently the 6th zone is coming at some point but might be like 10+ years in development. Ok I kid, but you'll see why I made the joke when you see the actual zones:
Western Black Marsh
Cyrodiil
Morrowind
High Rock
Eastern & Western Skyrim
Hey, I recognize some of those names! What this means is that no matter which game got you into The Elder Scrolls, you can have your board game experience start with an environment familiar to you. The first expansion adds the Valenwood zone (along with extra classes, items, monsters, etc...), and there's a gamefound campaign that's just finished up to add even more zones to the game.
Time to make a character! If you've never played before, there's a "jailbreak" scenario that gets you used to the mechanics of the game that will give you a complete character by the time you finish it. Everyone gets to pick a race and class, which give you your starting stats and some specific bonus abilities to flavor your character into the standard "roles" that you see in tabletop RPGs and dungeon crawl games (tank, healer/support, damage). As you go along, you'll gain XP and level up in a couple of different ways. First of all, each class card has a "Novice" and "Master" side. Everyone starts on the Novice side, and during the game when you complete the specific achievement on the Novice card, you'll flip the class card over and get access to the more powerful Master versions of your abilities. The other way of leveling up involves spending XP to increase your stats & buy new dice.
The DICE! Probably the coolest and most frustrating aspect of the game. Definitely one of the most fundamental, as the game comes with over a hundred of them. Each character starts with 2 basic combat dice. You roll the dice to do damage, then put them in a cooldown track at the bottom of the board. You can't use them again until they come out of the track. While you are playing the game, the characters will get access to new skills that provide the extra abilities that you will use during the game, each of which comes with new dice that you can spend XP to acquire. By the time you finish a campaign, you're character sheet/mat will be chock full of dice to roll. Except that's a lie, because they'll all be in the cooldown track as you wait for them to slowly come back to you to use.
12 Days of Our Lives
When you break it down, the actual gameplay is pretty easy. You pick a starting quest and then advance through the story through multiple "days". If you take longer than 12 days, you lose the game (I guess the Elder Scrolls 6 developers have lost several times over then...even if you replaced "days" with "years"). During the day, you'll move through the region, triggering encounters. These encounters are the meat of the game. Many of them end up turning into combats, but not all. Some of them are decision points where the party must choose one of several options (pretty similar to the road/city cards in Gloomhaven), while the Town encounters are where you can rest, get new side quests and dice, or purchase items.
After the encounter, the party will do any end of day activities and the region "activates". Normally, this is just seeing if the weather changes, which can have an impact on how fast you move around the map. In one of the quests that we ran in the game, this is also where some competing bandits moved to try and get closer to us. Towards the end of that quest, it added some extra tension as we didn't know if we were "doomed" or if we had another day to try and get closer to our objective.
Even when you get into a combat encounter, the overall flow is pretty simple. Almost all of the encounters use the same hex mat, with the "entrance tile" that the players start on put in a different place. The card triggering the encounter will also let you know if there are any items on the map to pick up. Then you'll reach into a big old bag of monsters to populate the map. I'm not joking here. At the start of each "game session" (a campaign consists of 3 game sessions), you'll get an "EP" value (enemy pool) based on the difficulty you are playing at, how many characters are playing, and at what point of the campaign you are at. The monsters are broken down into Level 20/10/5/1 stacks, and you randomly draw to fill up your battle map with the correct EP in the fewest amount of monsters.
For instance: If you end up with 52 EP, then you'll place 2 Level 20 Monsters, 1 Level 10 Monster and 2 Level 1 Monsters
In a battle round, all the players take a turn, moving around then spend actions rolling dice to activate their abilities and damage the monsters. Then the monsters go, starting with the highest level monster and rotating down. Each monster has symbols on its token to designate how it choses its targets and which heroes it will move towards on the board. If you haven't died after all the monsters go, then you get to keep playing! And on and on......
Is it Good Though?
I'm just going to TL;DR this - I love this game. It has just about everything I like in a game: a compelling story that unfolds with all the players, dice (DICE!), great components, even miniatures! Actually, scratch that last one. You'd think for a $200+ game there would be a ton of minis, but there isn't one to be found. Also, you might think that I would ding the game for not having minis, but you'd be wrong there too. Just like the monsters, all the player characters in TES have a poker chip that corresponds to them, with a stack of red & white chips underneath that token to represent how much health they have. It totally works for me and also gives me a chance to fiddle with poker chips in-between my turns to keep my ADHD at bay.
Speaking of poker chips, if spending over $200 on this game isn't enough money for you, there's also a bunch of additional upgrades you can buy. On my first play of TES I got to use some of these upgrades, like the "upgraded" health tokens and the character folios. I put "upgraded" in quotes because I'm not exactly sure what the difference was. It's probably that the upgraded ones are actual clay while the regular health tokens are just plastic, but the regular chips are of good enough quality it didn't even matter to me. I still got that perfect "clink clink" sound as I fumbled with them, so the upgraded chips are to me not really worth it.
The character folios, on the other hand, are a COMPLETELY different story. We nicknamed these guys the "Cheesecake Factory Menus", because look at them! They totally look like them! But these folios have pockets in the front & back covers for your character & class cards. In the middle, there are a bunch of sleeves for you to put in your skill cards, and pages in the back to organize your items as well. Having played with them first and then not having them for our longer playthroughs was a very different story. Not having that neat little compact form factor for everything meant the cards were SPRAWLING all over the table.
Speaking of organization, I do have one big gripe with the game. I appreciate that the rulebook and the quest books are separated so you don’t have one giant tome on your table to flip through (Note: again, yes I know Games Workshop, stop it!). However, that main rulebook really needs to get broken down even further. While the overall flow is pretty simple, there would often be small questions that we would have that would have us flipping from one side of the book to the other. Granted, most of this is because it could easily be two weeks to a month in between play sessions, but I think that is probably going to be the case for most people. I'm actually tempted to take the rulebook to work and unbind it, pull out the "Battle Rules" section of the book and rebind everything together separately.
Omg I love this page so much!
Conclusion
I really love this game, and remember I have no attachment to the franchise. I do think your experience will be best if you get a group committed to play and schedule out dedicated time to play (every Sunday, every other week, etc.). Just like if it was D&D or something. Will keep the game fresh in your head.
Speaking of best experiences: Buy the dang Character Folios. It's like $60, but trust me they are totally worth it.
I forgot to mention that the base game also includes a box packing reference for how to put everything back into the box. As in, not a reference on BGG, an actual sheet included in the box. I want this game to win all the awards now.
Notes/Disclaimers: I generally assume I know nothing. So if I've missed something, let me know in the comments. If you like these types of posts, consider subscribing to our patreon. Lastly, thanks to Chip Theory Games for providing a review copy of this game.