Aeon Trespass: Odyssey (ATO) by Lawnor

I’ve just had a week off work and one of my missions was to get enough games in to know if I want to spend more money on the next KS in a few weeks.  I played through the tutorial early in the week, and here’s my thoughts.  I’ll be comparing this to Kingdom Death as the parallels are obvious, KDM is fairly well known of, and it’s my only similar experience.  It’s an acceptable benchmark.

There will likely be some spoilers below.  You have been warned.  I’ll keep story stuff out of it.

Day 1

Monday after lunch I got up from my painting desk and started setting up the game to play.  The tutorial teaches you how to play, without expecting you to read anything before hand.  That’s what I like.  It starts with reading a bit of story and then jumping straight in to a fight against the Hekaton.  Simple enough.  Let’s jump right in there.  That’s what we want.  Except it wasn’t that simple after all.  The game comes with 4 different sizes of cards, split over something like 20 cellophane wrapped bundles.  Typically card decks were packed together, but not always.  Some decks had a “Do Not Trespass – Secret Deck” card at one end, making me reluctant to open them.  Turns out that was just 5-10 cards at one end and the rest of the deck is safe, if not essential.

There was no “Start Here” bundle of cards.  the cards you need for that first fight are scattered randomly through all those bundles.  There’s no in-box guide to where they are, or what they look like, or what size cards you’re looking for.  No dividers were provided so there’s no guide as to how to organise the cards before play.  You have to figure this out over a few games.

I could not find all the cards I wanted.  It took ages.  It was really frustrating and gave me a headache.  I really could not find the Routine card for the Hekaton.  I’d seen one for another monster so I knew it said Routine in big letters on it’s back.  I’d been through every deck 3 times but no luck.  I asked on the discord and they pointed me towards an official 14 page Getting Started PDF they made after the game came out telling us where every card is and how to find them.  This should have been in the Tutorial. It is essential.  it turns out the reason I could not find a Hekaton card with Routine written in big letters on its back is because there isn’t one.  His card is double sided and I’d seen it plenty of times already.  This would go on to be a running theme throughout the tutorial, and in to the early game.  The game would tell me I get something, or I should put something in play, and give me no clue to if it has a physical component, and if so, what it looks like.

Some friends popped round briefly half way through all this to drop off some stuff.  by the time they had gone and I actually had the game set up it was nearly dinner time and I was frustrated with the game, and had the beginnings of a headache, so when I had finished setting up the first battle I went to cook and settled down to paint.

Day 2

I did some airbrushing in the morning, but after lunch it was back to learning the game.  Time for the first battle.  The first round or two is largely pre-written, with instruction like, ” We’d normally draw an AI card at random, but for now just draw Card X”.  That’s fine.  It helps teach clearly.  Once you have the basics it lets you complete the fight on your own.  Here’s where I ran in to another problem that keeps cropping up throughout play: The game uses a lot of symbols, but has no exhaustive symbol chart.  It doesn’t always tell you what the symbol means or is called so when you find one you don’t recognise and it isn’t on the partial chart at the back of the book you can’t even look it up in the index.  It’s frustrating and brings the game to a halt when it happens.  I’ll be going to BGG to see if someone has made a full symbol chart very soon.

My fight went well.  No one died.  It is very similar to Kingdom Death, but it handles damage to you and the monster quite differently and interestingly.

Monster Damage

Each monster has 3 AI decks and 3 Body part (BP) decks, levels 1, 2 and 3, with 6 cards in each deck.  The dame starts with Decks 2&3 put on one side.  When the monster activates he draws the top AI card.  Simple enough.  When you hit a monster you draw the top BP card and resolve it.  If you wound you claim the card and replace it with a card from the next level up deck.  You also remove an AI card of it’s level and replace it with a higher level AI card.  Both decks get shuffled.  This is called Escalation and is quite interesting.  Higher level cards are harder to hit, but can have better rewards.  Level 3 BP cards are worth double damage.  You can always see the level of the AI card that’s about to hit you and the level of the BP car you get to attack next.  This will affect the choices you make.  Do I wound him now knowing that AI 1 card is the last 1 in the deck, or do I let him attack me with it, instead of the lvl 2 or 3 beneath it?

Character Damage

When you get hit you don’t exactly take damage.  Your Danger goes up from 0-9.  Every time you take damage from an attack you increase your Danger and then draw a Trauma card from one of 4 decks based on your Danger level.  The worst deck has 2 cards in (You live and You Die).  Quite a few of these cards are beneficial, granting you interrupt attacks, or some healing etc, but some will kill you outright, or knock you over, or apply Fear, etc.  It’s a great mechanic.  I’ve won fights when the monster is doing scary attacks on me because I’ve been hit and got a surprise reaction attack and killed him.  Likewise, I’ve had Titans die when their Danger wasn’t all that high.  As the game progresses you will find ways to mitigate the randomness of these decks.  A few games later I found an item that lets me redraw once per battle.

With the battle over, it was back to the voyage.  Again, there were issues with symbols  and not knowing what I was looking for in the box, but I’m getting used to it now, and more experienced and knowledgeable.  Again, everything was predefined and there wasn’t any real choices to be made in this part of the tutorial.

The timeline for ATO is different from Kingdom Death.  One Turn/Lantern year is not Settlement and Fight.  One Turn/Day is a cycle through the voyage phase.  You can move your ship one tile.  You interact with what’s on the tile, and get a little basic loot from exploration.  The timeline has defined points on it where you just get to perform a research action (KDM equivalent would be innovation, or building a new location).  It also has fixed points when fights occur.  You will experience story as you move about and that can trigger extra fights at unexpected times.

I’m not sure how I feel about the timeline.  It feels like its taking away a lot of my interaction by telling me when to do things.  I’m not choosing them or earning them.  However, in theory, this means everything should be easier for them to balance.  When I backed the game I figured everything would be triggered by my choices or by exploring and experiencing story.  Some of that holds true, but not as much as I’d expected.  Maybe that’s on me, or maybe it wasn’t made clear in the KS.

The tutorial’s Voyage phase lasts for 7 days and has no real choices in it.  the map get’s replaced once you move to the full game.

By this stage I sorta knew how to do things well enough to know what it was I needed to look up every time I did anything.  I wasn’t hooked yet.  That’s fine.  With KDM it took until I was going in to the second fight and seeing the consequences of my choices that the game got it’s hooks deep in me.  I haven’t really made any choices here yet, and I’ve only had one fight.  I’ll come back tomorrow and play some more.

Day 6

I played at least 1 fight and did some voyage every day for the rest of the week.  it took a few more fights for the game to grab me.  I’m not as hooked as I was with KDM, but this is a good game, with a slow, badly organised painful learn.  If/when I teach this to other people I’ll smooth all that over by having everything ready before anyone arrives.  I like the monster damage mechanic.  It forces choices about whether or not I want to attack.  It might be nice to have something else to do with my action though.  I guess options will present themselves later.  The trauma cards are exciting.  You never know what’s going to happen and you can never count a Titan out, until they’re actually dead.  Anything can happen.

The voyage phase can go really quick, or take forever, depending on what you trigger, which can make it hard to plan your time.  I think I have accidentally gotten really lucky on the central plot quests and gotten much further ahead than they expected me to at this stage.  I just had an encounter that expects me to have reach and ranged weapons.  I haven’t discovered reach weapons yet and I’ve not built any ranged as the basic ones didn’t look that good.  There was no option for what to do if I don’t have any.  I think I had the option not to trigger that story just yet so I’ve rewound a smidge and I’ll restart it once I’m a little further up the development tree.

I am definitely enjoying the game.  It took a lot longer for ATO to get me than KDM did (3-4 fights, or about 10 days in to the Cycle 1 timeline), but it is a good game and I’m keen to see what treats it has in store for me.  Right now I’d say KDM is the better experience, but I may change my mind by the time I’m done, and even then it would be a personal choice based on what you want from a game.  There are lots of times when ATO becomes a choose your own adventure style game.  I’m not convinced that’d work well when one person is reading to three others.  I don’t think I’d be able to keep up.  I’m already having to reread a lot of stuff to keep it straight in my head.  Maybe that’s just me though?

My plan was to play 2-3 games and then switch back to KDM until Wave 2 dispatches.  That’s not happening.  I’m at least playing out Cycle 1 now.  KDM can wait.  That’s go to say something about the game.