Aeon Trespass Odyssey

Here’s a link to my game review: https://www.beastsofwar.com/game-review/1855072/#snav

I just finished cycle 3 with two days to spare. I’d set myself the target of completing the game before then end of 2023.

I really enjoyed cycle 3. The story had a lot of layers of depth that started to be revealed. The map had some interesting mechanics as it was split across three time periods (past, present and future) and time rifts were used to travel from one to another. The primordial fights were also interesting.

Having being thorough with my explorations and side quests I was able to talk the final boss down and void the final fight. I was going to play it anyway, but then the true villain revealed themselves. There had been hints that there was a mastermind behind current events, but they were subtle and easy to miss. I was genuinely surprised that there was a final-final battle. Even here I was able to avoid the fight by having being thorough with exploration in the cycle. An ally turned up at the last moment and was able to beat up the boss on my behalf. Having skipped the previous boss though I decided to play this battle myself regardless. It was really fun to play: my Titan’s felt suitably epic and the boss felt truly powerful.

Time to pack the game away until Cycles 4 and 5 turn up in 2024.

This is the very final model from the first box. I believe it’s Helios, God of the Sun. It servers no in game purpose, hence why I did it last. It was a nice refreshing model to paint though.

The skin was painted bugman’s glow, washed reikland fleshshade, then layered with cadian fleshtone then kislev flesh.

The hair was painted xv-88, washed seraphim sepia, then highlighted balor brown followed by zamesi desert.

The loin cloth was painted celestra grey, washed nuln oil watered down with water 50:50, then highlighted ulthuan grey followed by white scar.

The clouds were painted the same as the loin cloth except the wash was watered down drakenhoff nightshade.

The rocks were painted mechanicus standard grey, washed nuln oil, then highlighted dawnstone followed by administratum grey.

The sun halo was painted averland sunset, washed casandora yellow, then highlighted  flash gitz yellow, then given a fine edge highlight of white scar.

Having painted the Cycle 3 models and looking back into the box I realised there were two functional models left to paint – a titan that is linked to the alternate game mode, and the vantage point for the Cycle 1 big boss.

There’s also the Kickstarter Only model but that never takes part in the game. I’ll paint it up in the coming weeks.

Nothing new with the paints used, apart from the fact I used talassar blue for the trouser stripes on the titan.

I quickly finished off the Primordials and Titans for cycle 3. As before, just a quick paint job with contrast paints. For these the theme was shyish purple, terradon turquoiseb aethermatic blue and apothecary white.

Cycle 1 took me six months to complete, playing roughly one session per week. For cycle 2 I got into it more (mainly because I had no PC game I wanted to play) so I played one session most days. It took just over two months from start to finish.

Let’s see if I can play cycle 3 in under two months and finish the three released cycles in 2023 like I set out to do at the start of the year.

Pros

• I’m really enjoying the complexity of the story. It’s well executed with lots of interlocking parts.
• The way your accomplishments though the campaign in terms of story development feed in to the final battle is great. You feel really well rewarded for doing all the “side quests”.
• Progression in terms of unlocking technologies, abilities and gear also feels rewarding.
• This cycle in particular keeps offering you the choice between obvious gains at a cost of your humanity, versus help people out but your cause suffers. I chose the latter option every time but was then rewarded in the end by having powerful allies to help me out.
• A portion of this cycle has a really cool “flee your pursuers” phase that lasts about 10 game turns. It was different and tense. I really enjoyed it.

Cons

• You get hit with events outside your control which cause you to loose the cycle (loss of crew, damage to your ship, Titans being killed outside battle, amassing too much fate, etc). The game assumes you’ll loose a cycle several times and just restart. I’m not restarting a ~80 hour cycle. I just ended up ignoring these loss conditions.
• This cycle has a humanity mechanic but it never explains it. I just started to be told an event had caused me to loose one point of humanity, so I guessed I started at zero and counted down. Near the end there are some events that check your score and this confirmed I got it right. Oddly at the very end you can unlock an ending if you have positive humanity. That would be out of your control as there are loads of events that reduce it but only the occasional random event (i.e. critical hits on certain locations) that increase it. I ended on -10 and I avoided every loss of humanity where I could.
• I find many battles are quite static and don’t interact with the terrain much. It tends to just end up with my Titans surrounding the Primordial and pummelling them. Sometimes they knock me back and I have to spend a turn running back. Some are dynamic, but less than half. Not sure if it’s me not doing all the rules correctly or by design.

Well this Primordial is certainly an unusual model. My wife actually saw it before I painted it and she asked if I’d 3D printed it because it looks very pretty.

Colours as before, but with volupus pink, talassar blue and ork flesh used for the monsters trapped in the Primordial.

Not much to say about these. Colours are as before except:

The grey-green skin was achieved with a 1:1 mix of militarum green and basilicanum grey.

Added gore-grunta fur for bronze areas.

Using abaddon black to represent ambrosia gloop.

When I finished Cycle 1 I was able to bypass the final battle, having completed a side quest. However, I was curious to see how the final battle would have played out.

Most of my best Titans were dead, so I only had one of the special ones and the other three were the standard variety. They all had pretty good gear though and I had defeated the Temenos Primordial before. On the downside I had a scattering of despair token from the final storyline events.

Having completed all of the side quests in the campaign I found each one gave me a bonus in the scenario. I was able to go first (a rare and significant advantage) and I received various buffs on the Titans. I started closer and the Primordial’s vantage point was exposed from the start.

And after those three short turns, the battle was lost and the campaign would have been to if I had had to fight it.

I’ve found the combat in this game to be fun but often quite random with card draws. Sometimes they’re great for me and sometimes its terrible. Overall I’m ok with it. Just in this, the most critical battle of the campaign, luck did not go my way.

You may have also noticed the terrain never played much effect. I find this is the way in most battles. I’m not sure if its the rules mechanics, or just that I don’t have the bandwidth to use it properly while also managing every other game rule while playing solo.

The first couple of models for cycle 2 are finished.

The skulls were painted apothecary white.

The skin was painted black templar.

The weapons were painted basilicanum grey.

The flames were painted iyanden yellow, with highlights of gryph-hound orange followed by blood angels red.

Leather was painted snakebit leather.

The bases were painted the same as the cycle 1 models.

This morning I finished Cycle 1! I played the tutorial on 7th January, so cycle 1 took be almost seven full calendar months to complete. I settled into a routine where a game sessions was either a combat or the various exploration and story steps in between. Either session type took one and a half to two hours, and I usually got one session in per week. I’d guess I had about 28 sessions to play cycle 1 (i.e. about 50 hours).

Overall I’ve really enjoyed it. The story is intriguing and the combat mechanics are solid.

Some observations:

• Technically I lost several times over, but with the level of time commitment required I just kept playing. I should have lost due to all my crew dyeing, but I missed a technology which meant I didn’t progress properly for about 30 turns. Had that not happened I should have unlocked a technology allowing me to recruit crew.
• The cycle has an 80 turn limit and the map has 80 cards to explore (you explore one per turn at best). However, some areas or the map are dead ends, forcing you to backtrack, and the story has you go back and forth a bit. It is therefore impossible to explore the whole map. You can see above I never fully explored the eastern edge. But I didn’t realise this since I was only revealing one tile a time (I didn’t lay them out all face down at the start). I wasted about 20 to 30 turns leisurely exploring the map, as is my wont in RPG’s and games in general. In the end this meant I needed 83 turns to finish the game. Again I wasn’t going to restart when I hit turn 81 knowing I was so close to completion.
• I had frequent references to special characters. E.g. if you have the Minoan Guide you can do this… Not once did I encounter an option to recruit either of these special characters. I can only assume I missed it right at the start of the campaign.
• The game contains a cypher for the numbers 0-9. Occasionally you are given one, and once you have enough you can decipher some three or four digit codes to reveal some secrets. Even with the amount of time I put in I only unlocked about half the digits (one was given to me twice with conflicting information) and I never once unlocked a code. I don’t know if I was just unlucky or maybe they develop more in future cycles.
• As your Argonauts develop they unlock memories and gain powerful abilities. The last unlock usually looks really powerful but it’s a trick. In every case I encountered (about four times) when you finally reach that point you are given the choice to retire the Argonaut or suffer a permanent penalty to them. You don’t actually unlock the final ability. The first time I assumed it was a quirk of the particular track, but they all ended up more or less the same. It felt like I was cheated a bit.

I’ll take a short break while I paint all the models for cycle 2 then I’ll try to finish the next one a bit quicker.

Spoiler warning: this post covers some secret content from the end of cycle 1.

I’d been holding off playing the Pursuit’s End battle (the final boss fight against the Hermesian Pursuer) until I’d painted the model. In my last session I successfully “killed” the monster (not just defeated it) which allowed me to unlock this final showdown battle.

One of the special rules for the battle is that the Hermesian Pursuer isn’t toying with us anymore so it can destroy equipment and does more damage. The thing is I’d been playing it like that since after its first fight as I’d either misread or forgotten the rule from one game session to another.

The battle started off very badly. One of my titans was disembowelled turn one. Turn two a titan got so badly beaten up its danger went to about 25 (10 is enough to have a 50:50 chance of killing you). This actually triggered a special rule where there was a chance my death was legendary. It turns out it was, and it triggered a secret event where my titan was possessed by the power of Hades. I have to admit this was awesome. My titan proceeded to half kill the Hermesian Pursuer with her free bonus attack, which triggered a critical that gave yet another bonus attack. She only had two turns before the possession ended and her death was guaranteed, but it was epic.

Then my third titan was disembowelled. I couldn’t believe I was being this unlucky so after the game I counted the deck and there are three disembowelled cards out of 16. I had thought there was just one.

By this point I just had to do one more wound. In truly cinematic fashion my one remaining titan hit the Pursuer’s most vulnerable spot, criticalled it, and then rolled enough damage to confirm the blow.

I finally got around to painting the cycle 1 models that I missed when I did the first round of painting. The paint schemes match those from the first batch.

I haven’t posted an update in a while because I found that although the monster fights continued to be a challenge and the story elements were interesting, the write-ups were very samey. So I kept playing but didn’t bother to do a write-up after every session.

To summarise, I’ve circled Crete once and have now developed the technology to explore the internal rivers of the island. I’m trying to find King Minos in here somewhere.

And then…

I got to turn 42 and the game ended.

Bummer.

The loss mechanic for the game is the accumulation of doom tokens. Every five or six tokens progresses the “negative” side of the story, and once you finished the sixth “negative” phase the game ends. Conversely there are six “positive” sides to the story, and to finish those you either collect progress tokens or achieve some other objective. I was on the fourth “positive” phase when the game ended.

I am a little miffed. I amassed 11 doom tokens simply from exploring the map, and I therefore had no way to avoid them. The other 20 or so came from in-story decisions I made, but again I could not avoid these unless I read ahead and cheated to avoid them. I tried to determine which choices I am “supposed” to be making but was never able to do so. In one story I’d be aggressive and be rewarded, in another I’d behave the same and be penalised. I never gained doom tokens for loosing a monster fight (i.e. when player skill comes into play).

Given the above, and the fact I’ve spent about 40 hours spread over four months playing so far, I’m just going to keep playing. I’ll find some other way for doom token’s to penalise me, so I’m not just ignoring the negative consequences of them.

While I’m reflecting on the game there are a few other things I’ve noticed.

• The technology tree seems “bugged”. Techs come in two flavours – combat and non-combat. The non-combat side has been stuck for 20 turns. I researched everything I could and then the only tech left to me requires that I have explored at least 45 map tiles (which is impossible before turn 45 at least). So I’ve missed out on the last 5 non-combat tech upgrades.
• The cards for two of the Titan upgrades are missing. I’ve searched the entire box twice and they just seem to have not been produced, or they are in a secret envelope I have not been instructed to open yet.

Overall I’s still enjoying the tactical combat and the interesting stories, so I’m happy to keep playing. I’m just going to ignore the seemingly arbitrary “game over” message.

I just noticed that I labelled my last few entries as being from cycle 2. Not sure how I started making that mistake as I’m still playing cycle 1.

In terms of game turns I’ve completed circumnavigating Crete and I’ve started my second lap, this time further out from the coast.

During this session I also had my third battle against the Labyrithauros. This time it was the first battle where it was truly allowed to use trample, which was very infuriating. This means that after it attacks it often runs off trampling over my Titans. I found that if I tried to anticipate it trampling to a location, it didn’t do it. If I anticipated it would stay still, instead it trampled off. When I could actually pin it down and get some hits in I did damage at a decent rate.

On the face of it sounds like ranged attacks would be the answer. I only have one Titan with ranged attacks right now. The problem is you can only carry a weapon in each hand, and that includes shields. It’s not like you can effectively give every Titan a ranged attack unless you deliberately choose to sacrifice the use of shields or two-handed weapons.

One Titan was knocked over then gnawed to death. Poor guy…

Eventually I was able to hamper the Labyrinthaurus’ movement with a critical hit on its Maze Fragment location. It didn’t last much longer after that.

This turn it was time for my first level 2 monster fight. Now any Titans pushed off the board edge count as being thrown of a cliff and die. Also every third wound inflicted on the monster gives it a free signature attack.

I started the session with my first fight against the Hermesian Pursuer. This is a monster that chases you across the map throughout the game.

Round one it knocked everyone down and scattered my Titans around the board. I only managed to do one wound, though that’s not bad going for round one.

Aeon Trespass Odyssey has a battle mechanic called escalation. At the start of a battle a monster has a deck of level 1 AI cards and a deck of level 1 body location cards. When you successfully wound a location, you replace the location card with one from the deck one level higher. This represents you ripping off armour or exposing vulnerable locations, so as the battle goes on you wear the monster down. But what also happens is you remove and AI card of the level of the hit location and replace it with one of the next level up. This means as the monster gets more injured it behaves more aggressively.

Round two one of my Titan’s stood up.

Round three the monster drew the one level 2 AI card in its deck (thanks to the one wound I did in the previous round). This attack killed a Titan just by staring at it and then it was battle over. Special defeat conditions for this particular monster’s first battle.

Oh well… on to map exploration.

Exploration went well. I’ve now unlocked God Form mechanics, where under certain conditions my Titan’s can take on the form and powers of a God briefly. To begin with I’ll have access to Zeus.

The amount of technologies I have access to know is so big that I need an A1 board to lay them all out on. The map has also grown so much that it needs its own A1 board.

I thought I’d finished painting all the models needed in cycle 1. Then I found I need to battle another monster next turn. That’s the problem with a game like this which is full of secrets. There’s no easy way to look ahead to know what will happen to know what to paint.

Anyway…

I just went for a simple contrast paint paint scheme. They look good enough on the table for a board game.

Gold/blonde hair: iyanden yellow

Trees: ork flesh

Roofs/tabards: blood angels red

Sea: terradon turqoise

Stone: skeleton horde

Grass: militarum green

Dark flesh: darkoath flesh

Brass: gore-grunta fur

Steel: basilicanum grey

Wood: wyldwood

Titan studs: black templar

Pale flesh: guilliman flesh

Slug flesh: volupus pink

Sail clothes: apothecary white

Wings: syish purple and apothecary white

Pink skin: 4:1 apothecary white:volupus pink

Sea marker rims: mordian blue

Land marker rims: rhinox hide

Turn 13 say my first “normal” battle against the Labyrinthauros. Having fought it once in the ambush battle I knew to correctly ignore its trample ability while it is still only level 1.

I was unlucky fairly early on and drew a “Heroic Death” card for one of my Titans in round 2. This meant they died much earlier in the battle than you would normally expect.

I quickly made up for that by being able to score a critical hit and open up a vulnerable spot. This allowed one of my Titan’s to mount the monster. From here their hits can gain a bonus to wound and the Titan can ignore any monster responses to their blows. The Titan was able to remain on the monster’s back until the end of the battle and do a lot of damage while they were up their. They were even able to use another critical hit to tear off one of the monsters tabards which has given them a “secret” special gear card.

Overall I was able to handle group tactics a bit better now that I’m more or less on top of the core combat mechanics rules.

I was all set to spend another hour or so exploring the map before the next scheduled monster fight, but on turn 15 the adversary made a two tile advance and caught up with me. I stopped playing and will have to battle the monster at the start of my next session.

I got to do lots of exploration in this session. As it turned out my pursuer didn’t move much so I didn’t have to do that encounter. I made enough progress exploring my ship to unlock the ability to summon nymphs, which is great as the only reason I got interested in this game is the fact I’d already bought and painted most of their nymph models.

I also progressed the “doomed” side of the story to trigger a major negative effect, which in this case was a battle with the Alpha Temenos again. This time I was definitely supposed to do it and I was a little bit more prepared. Not only had I been able to equip all my titans with armour and a weapon, but I’d painted them up too.

I managed to inflict three wounds, enough to declare a victory in this tough fight. I also managed to do so without loosing any titans, though two came very close and were only saved by their new armour.

Overall a good session with both multiple exploration turns and a battle, played in two hours 40 minutes. A full monster fight would have taken longer but still doable in a reasonable evening session.