At some point Chief Justice Roberts may have had a "long game." But along the way, he he lost that game.
In Citizens United v. FEC (2010), the Chief Justice wrote a concurrence that seemed to lay the predicates for overruling Roe. Consider this observation:
[I]f adherence to a precedent actually impedes the stable and orderly adjudication of future cases, its stare decisis effect is also diminished. This can happen in a number of circumstances, such as when the precedent's validity is so hotly contested that it cannot reliably function as a basis for decision in future cases, when its rationale threatens to upend our settled jurisprudence in related areas of law, and when the precedent's underlying reasoning has become so discredited that the Court cannot keep the precedent alive without jury-rigging new and different justifications to shore up the original mistake.
