Aeon Trespass Odyssey

In turn 8 I drew the ambush card, which meant I had to fight a battle with the labyrinthauros for the first time. The couple of fights I’d had against the hekaton had been frustrating because it knows my titans over a lot. They seem to spend more time on the floor than fighting.

It turns out the labyrinthauros’ signature ability is trampling, which knocks you over, or if you’re already knocked over has a 50:50 chance of killing you.

The other problem with the trample ability is that it often triggers after an attack and give the labyritnthauros an extra move. For the first half of the game I was spending most of my time chasing the monster around the board with three of my titans, while the fourth was being repeatedly knocked over and trampled.

Then I happened to look at the level two abilities for the monster, where it states that a level one (which I was fighting) does not have the trample ability. I have no idea why the game designers felt that information needed to be in the level two area and not the level one area. At that point I started ignoring the trample ability whenever a card said it should trigger and the battle became a lot more manageable.

I knew turn 7 had a battle, so got stuck right into it. It started well. I felt I had a good grasp of the rules by now and it did well right until I’d done 8 of the 10 required wounds. Then I utterly failed to inflict those last two wounds and all four of my Titans got wiped out.

So moving on to campaign turn 8, I randomly drew an ambush battle (which only happens once per game, then the card is removed from the game) and the adversary is only one tile away. Looks like I’m in for two more quick succession battles.

I had my first “normal” battle in this session. It played out much faster this time as I only had to look up a few rules.

ATO has some interesting combat mechanics that make fights escalate, rather than having your fighters wear down.

Each Titan has a rage stat. It goes up by one very time they attack. If it reaches 9 they die, but up until then it unlocks more combat abilities as the fight progresses.

Similarly Titans have a fate stat which starts at zero. They can re-roll dice during combat which also increases the stat. Again if it hits 9 they die, and many monster attacks are more powerful when they target a Titan with fate above a certain value.

Finally Titans have danger, which replaces a hit point mechanic. The monsters hit the titan and raise the danger level. Then you draw a trauma card depending on your danger level. Half the cards are bad while half are good (i.e. a flash of insight lets you look at the top card of the monster AI deck). When your danger is above 9 the deck only has two cards. One is you live, the other is you die.

The result of these three mechanics is that your Titans get more dangerous in the later stages of the fight and it actually accelerates the pace of battle.

In the end I lost one Titan. My poor “tank” was killed just one round prior to the monster falling.

I re-arranged the gaming table. My four Argonauts each have a stand I made from fibre-board. I glued matchsticks to them to create small shelves that cards can sit on. These are placed at the back of the table and I can see nearly all their stats very easily without loosing table space. All the cycle 1 cards are now out the box on the table too.

As I was playing the narrative sections I came across and event that instructed me to add a new event to the cycle 1 random event deck. This was odd as the card was already in the deck. It wasn’t until about 30 minutes later when I was going through my first story adventure that I realised where I had gone wrong. At the very end of the tutorial I somehow missed the instruction to get the main campaign story card out. This had instructions to setup the random event deck with a very specific subset of cards. The rest get added later as the story evolves. This explains how in my last session I drew and encounter with the end of cycle boss. That card should not have been there. The deck is fixed now but I’m not going to try and undo the stuff I’ve done wrong. It’s all part of the story…

Exploration of Crete is now well underway and the monster that will be chasing me around the map has arrived. Just like last session, the map exploration mechanics were all new to me so I was doing it quite slowly. But I’m sure it will speed up as I learn from my mistakes and find the best way to ensure I don’t forget stuff.

ATO is split into three cycles, each of up to 80 turns. In most turns you will just explore the map, but in about 1/6 turns there’s a scripted fight. Story events can also add fights on other turns.

Following from the tutorial where the Argo ended up in Knossos, I decided to sail south in my first turn. This tile had no special actions or story events, so the only thing to do was the random exploration deck which always happens every turn.

I managed to draw a once-in-a-game event where I had to battle the end of cycle boss. In other words, the monster I’m supposed to be able to take on in about 80 turns time. The card is removed from the game after being drawn, but the damage was already done. I got to fight this guy with my almost-naked Titans.

The battle was painfully slow. Having left it a couple of weeks since doing the tutorial I’d forgotten all the combat basics and it seemed every action required me to look up a new rule or keyword in the rulebook. It didn’t help I was fighting an end of cycle boss who is clearly intended to be fought by more experienced players.

This guys specific mechanics are interesting, in that he slowly fills the board with a labyrinth causing your Titans to become more lost as the battle progresses.

In the end though my four Titans were doomed to die horrible deaths. My four Argonauts survived, although one suffered a mental trauma and became selfish (unable to provide teamwork bonuses to the others) and the other has become scared of labyrinths (a story effect likely to kick in later). Argonauts remotely “pilot” the Titans, a bit like a fantasy version of Mechs being remotely piloted by a cyberpilot.

However just fighting this guy automatically unlocks access to cycle two, meaning I could bypass the first third of the game. I’m not going to. I’m playing this game for the journey not just to get to the end.

The whole session took two and a half hours, which wasn’t bad considering how much rules looking up was required. I reckon going forward I can easily do several turns of map exploration and a battle in a few hours.

Before my next session I’ll sort through the box again and separate out the cards and tokens I now know I’ll need in cycle one. That will also speed up the gameplay.

Here’s the final scene where Temenos has killed all my Titans.

A quick look on Etsy revealed various storage solutions and character trays that could save space, but I’ve been down this path before. I could easily spend £100 to £200 on accessories which would look cool, but even if I do manage to play ATO through once this year, there’s a good chance I’ll never play it again.

I decide it would be better to go for some more generic solutions that I can re-use with other board games in the future.

Step one is to get some deck holders so I can hold the decks upright. This will save desk space, make it easier to grab the cards, and keep the decks together. When they’re just stacked in a pile on the table you can accidentally knock them, forcing you to keep decks a certain distance apart.

I found this file on thigiverse (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:623008). I rescaled it to be 65mm wide (which should work for the normal sized cards) and resized it again to be 45mm wide (which should work for the small sized cards). After printing these off I should be able to store most of the combat decks nice and compactly.

The tutorial consists of your first battle, followed by six turns of map exploration. Over the course of both you’re steadily introduced to the core game mechanics.

It took about an hour and a half to get everything out the box for the first time and setup all the card decks, etc. Only after did I realise there is a guide on the manufacturer’s website with an “ATO our of the box guide”. Oh well. I only encountered a few head scratchers.

The tutorial itself only took two hours for both the battle and exploration.

I’m in the very fortunate position of having now moved into a house with a spare room where I can leave ATO setup permanently on an old dining room table. This is going to help a lot. When I played KDM it took five to six hours to setup, do a fight, do the settlement phase, then pack up. Based off the tutorial I’m guessing I’ll be able to play a battle and six exploration turns in two to three hours. But we’ll see how that evolves in the coming weeks.

As you can see in the photos above the decks required for cycle 1 (after the tutorial the game consists of three cycles, each of up to about 70 explorations) and the battle board take up an entire dining room table. I have to remove the battle board to do the ship exploration. As exploration involves playing down cards to build up a map, I’m not going to want to keep putting the map away in between battles. This was not a problem in KDM as the hunting was rather abstract – there was not map.

I’m going to have to come up with some ways to be clever with table space to play the game efficiently…

There are a lot of people saying Aeon Trespass Odyssey is a spiritual successor to Kingdom Death Monster. Both games are fantasy and resolve around a cycle of four characters fighting a monster, then after the battle returning to camp to build it up ready for the next battle.

In KDM your characters are the survivors that live in a settlement. In ATO your characters “pilot” Titans 10’s of feet tall and their base is the Argo – a giant steel ship sailing the Mediterranean sea.

In terms of mechanics, at first glance the monster battles seem fundamentally similar, with a few key mechanic differences. ATO does seem to be a bit more streamlined though for faster play. My first KDM fight took several hours, whereas the tutorial fight in ATO took about one hour.

The out of battle part of KDM consisted of using resources to build up your settlement, craft gear, and one story event per turn. In ATO you actually have several (usually 6) turns of exploring with the Argo between battles. It looks like this element of the game will be much more significant in ATO.

Finally, the physical product themselves have some differences. The boxes are about the same size. KDM is jet black and ATO is pure white. Card quality etc are excellent with both. The main difference is that in KDM all the models require assembly, and once built will no longer fit in the box. In ATO all the models are pre-assembled (some of the bigger ones need putting together for use but then de-assemble again). This means everything packs back into the box again.