This co-op Elder Scrolls card game from a capable studio could be a game-changer

Betrayal of the Second Era

A real-life tabletop Elder Scrolls card game is not what I expected to see in 2022, but here we are, and I’m extremely interested.

The project was just announced via tabletop manufacturer Chip Theory Games as “Betrayal of the Second Era,” and it’s a co-op card game for 1-4 players (note that solo support!). Evidently it will take a lot of its foundation from Chip Theory’s own Too Many Bones, a highly successful fantasy dice throwing RPG. Anthony LeTourneau and Federico Pompili are handling the art, and the game promises “vast exploration, intense overland and underground battles, & fast-paced character progression,” via a “three-session campaign.” Although the box art is not final, it does feature an ouroboros, similar to Elder Scrolls Online. It’ll feature mats and dice, like Too Many Bones.

So there’s a lot of reasons for why an Elder Scrolls card game is making all these specific moves, and why it’s timed the way it is. Throughout the last two years, co-op and solo support for tabletop games have been growing an exponential amount, and some games that didn’t even have solo support have been adding it in via rule modules. Card game production is also significantly cheaper than ones that require excess plastic and figures, which have been having intermittent shipping issues. Chip Theory Games is also the perfect fit for this, given how much they’ve grown to become a legitimate force in the tabletop industry as of late.

As for when you can actually buy it or interact with it in any way, it’s coming to Gamefound (a crowd funding platform) in October of 2022. A mid-2023 release at the earliest is likely, and since it’s Chip Theory, there will probably be a lot of optional extra pledge tiers to get premium stuff from.