Game Overview

ATO is an epic game. It took me about 250 hours spread out over a year to complete cycles 1 to 3. The games has three core elements:

• exploring a map to reveal elements of the story
• developing your ship, the Argo, following a technology tree
• periodic combats against giant monsters called primordials

Each of the three cycles have their own map, story, tech trees and primordials to fight.

The game also has a separate game mechanics where you just do the combats. I haven't even dabbled in this game mode.

Art Direction

The books and components contain a ton of excellent art pieces. The world is a weird mix of ancient Greek and sci-fi. To the best of my knowledge it is unique or at least very rare.

Components

Card stock etc. are good quality. The models used the combats are good quality and painted up well for me. The odd spear is a bit bendy but the material isn't bad. They're not on the level of collectable models but for gaming they're fine.

Playability

This is a very complex game. If that's not your thing then this probably isn't the game for you. That said, the game is very good at starting off simple and adding in more complicated rules over time. This gives you the time to master the more basic rules before having to learn the next set. The rules for exploration and technology development aren't that hard - you'll grasp them after a session or two. The complexity lies in the combat mechanics and you do need to be good with them to stand any chance of winning later battles.

Replayability

This is where I have mixed views. The game is clearly designed with replayability in mind. Most side stories have multiple ways they can be resolved and each story arc has more side stories than you could possibly access in one playthrough, the idea being that you will encounter them on subsequent playthroughs. The game also has many ways you can loose and have to start a cycle again, with scaling starts based on how many times you've failed before. The story even includes references to your ship having special time bending technology which accounts for this.

But... a cycle represents about 70 to 80 hours of gameplay. Restarting that is shear madness for most gamers. I played solo doing about two hours every day for the last five months of the year - and I was unwilling to be starting again. A gaming group that can only meet once a week or less would never consider restarting.

I came up with a few simple house rules to get around this:

• The mechanic that lets you replay a combat (a roughly two hour session) instead allows you to fudge something in your favour in the combat or replay the last turn.
• If you run out of titans and therefore can't do a combat (and therefore loose the cycle), always assume you have four basic titans to do the combat.
• If you loose due to resource loss or accumulation ignore the loss, but you can't voluntarily spend or accumulate that particular resource until you find more or drop below the maximum again. Its not always obvious that a choice will lead to these resource changes so it can feel like your game has suddenly been taken away from you when this happens.
• If you run out of game turns and just need a few more to finish the cycle (I just needed one more turn to finish Cycle 1) just play an extra turn.
• Ignore the loss by doom mechanic. Follow the rules, but just don't end the game when you trigger the final doom card. It has already implemented penalties so just continue playing with those. Again, the game just throws doom at you and it's largely beyond your control.

Writing

The writing is really good. This is a very story rich game. Each cycle has the main story and six or seven side stories, each player has up to two side stories, there's a side story for your ship each cycle and there's a set of "R&R" side stories for each cycle that are a bit more whimsical but not so far off that they detract from the main story. Then there's an overall story plot that's hidden beneath all the others. All of this is well written. I think I spotted no more than five or six typos or wrong words used in the entire year's gaming.

The rules are also very tightly written and were clearly play tested well. As complicated as it is I can't recall being confused by a rule. I sometimes mis-remembered them, but the actual wording was always clear when I checked.