The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era (BotSE) can trace its roots to a previous Chip Theory Games board game called Too Many Bones, which has very good ratings on BGG. In comparison, BotSE has an improved adventuring part, the combat on hex maps is somewhat better than the previous square grid, and character development is a bit more gradual and thus easier to understand. But both games are close to 4 in the BGG weight / complexity scale. If you look for BotSE rules videos on YouTube, you'll find that people need over 1 hour of video to explain the game and it's 98-page rulebook. As a result, our first session was a lot slower than expected, and we spent a lot of time trying to solve rules questions. A 4-player session of BotSE is supposed to be 4 hours, and we needed about 7, including rules explanation and playing the tutorial. I think we can get that time down to 4 hours, once we are all solid on the rules, but at the start the rules are quite a hurdle.

Complexity isn't the same as difficulty. BotSE is sometimes scary, as the enemies scale with the player XP multiplied with player count, and that goes up quickly. But with a group of players who have some notions of role-playing games and their tactics, like having a tank, a healer, and some damage dealers, we didn't really get into too much trouble even on our first session. It felt a bit like a game that was hard to learn, easy to master, at least to master to a level where you win without problems. Well, the same could be said about most role-playing games, whether pen & paper or on the computer, so that isn't really a big negative. But it is important to be aware that what you are getting in BotSE is more of an experience, a fun adventure game, rather than a tactical puzzle. As long as you don't completely waste your XP on skills you never use or unlearn, and you have characters that can work together, you will normally be fine.

The interesting part of BotSE is its campaign structure. Other campaign games need a lot of sessions to play through the game once, we just finished two campaign games in around 20 sessions each, and Gloomhaven needs something like three times that. If your group can meet at best twice per month, that means the campaign game is a commitment for a full year. BotSE needs only 3 sessions for one campaign, but each campaign is a combination of one of 6 regions (including the first expansion region) and one of 9 guilds that have quests in each region. So you play a "quick" campaign of three sessions, and then reset, choose fresh characters, and start in a different region with a different guild. With each region having region-specific events, monsters, and quests, that is a lot of replayability.

Overall The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is quite a good game and great fun, once you mastered the rules. But I would say that you can get equally fun campaign games with less complex rules, without losing too much on tactical variety and interest. There is a certain aspect of "this is complex for the sake of being complex" to this game, instead of "this is complex to add to your tactical options". On the positive side, BotSE has a much better long-term replayability than other campaign games, which are more scripted. There is more randomness in BotSE, from random encounters, to random monsters, and of course lots of random dice rolls. That can result in great adventure moments, but necessarily is less tight than a more scripted campaign.

You can get a copy of The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era directly from the Chip Theory Games store, and if I just select the base game and the expansion I have, it adds up to €284.90 including shipping, which is pretty much the same price I paid when crowdfunding. I ordered the premium health chips for another €40 there too. I don't think the other deluxification options make much sense, as the component quality is already so high. €85 for a black and white neoprene battle mat? Not worth it, in my opinion, as the 3' x 5' (90 cm x 150 cm) format then places a lot of restrictions on how to set up the game on your table, especially if the table isn't much larger than that. In the end, regardless of what options you take, this is a luxury game. If you love board games and have sufficient money, you might consider this worth it, but it certainly isn't for everybody.