Aeon Trespass Odyssey

This particular battle started a little crazy. Normal procedure is that the Primordial goes first, then the Titan’s get their turn, and so on. One of my Titan’s has an item that allows them to go before the Primordial’s first turn, instead of taking their normal first turn. It usually allows me to just get a first wound in and feel good about it.

This time, that first attack triggered a Primordial attack, which triggered a Titan interrupt attack, which triggered another Primordial attack, etc. In total I ended up with 45 minutes of battle before the battle was actually supposes to start. The photo above was taken after those 45 minutes. The Primordial had taken two wounds, moved to three different location, and I’d attacked it three or four times.

The next few turns were largely uneventful as I struggled to be in the right place at the right time to attack it. Ultimately I lost, although I’d managed to do seven of the required nine wounds to win.

It was then time to unlock some new technologies, and I was able to access the first of the cycle four Titans. Hopefully they perform well in my next battle.

Three things of note from this session:

• I’m playing cycle 4, not 5! I titled my first project entry correctly, and then labelled every following one wrong. After posting this I’ll have to go back and re-name them all.
• The battle with the Demijinn went fine. I was remembering the rules, playing with each Titan to the best of their ability, and handling everything fine. One Titan did die because I was unlucky and drew a “Disembowled” card, but otherwise I beat the Primordial in about three turns. Then as I was packing up I realised I’d completely forgotten about the Demijinn’s curse trait, where I should have been drawing a card and applying a penalty each turn. Oh well. Hopefully I’ll remember next time.
• During the exploration stage one of my Argonauts was supposed to get cursed. I have no curse cards. It took me ages to find the rules for curses. There are four curses and no real way to track them (i.e. no cards to put near your character sheets). This was one mechanic too many, so I decided to assume these curses just turn my Argonaut’s skin purple or something similar which has no game effect.

While going through the story and tech advancement part of this session, I noticed I was running out of technologies I could develop. This felt suspicious – so I did some rummaging around and realised that the starting technology cards have two names. The side of the card with the game effects (i.e. the side I’d always look at) give the card one name, but the name used to determine if a follow up technology can be researched uses the name on the other side of the card. I’ve no idea why the game designers would do that (every other card type uses the same name on each side). Still, I spotted it early enough in the cycle that there was no harm done.

For this sessions battle, I had a fight against a level 2 Midascore. This introduces the rule that we’re all fighting on the tops of towers, every other game tile is a lethal drop. Walking around is no longer an option – only zipping around on grapplehooks is possible. Get knocked off and you die. Most battles from now on will be like this.

The very first action of the Midascore was to buffet it’s wings, knocking everyone back off their tower to their deaths. That felt like too much, even for this game, so I was carefully reviewing all my equipment and rules to see if I could avoid a total wipe out turn one. It turns out three of my Titan’s were wearing some gear from late in cycle 3 that makes you immune from being knocked back if you’re stood on one of these towers. My fourth Titan is naturally immune from being knocked back. The gear was clearly planted by the game designers for this very situation, but the fact my other Titan is naturally immune is very lucky. They’re an old Titan from a much earlier cycle and by rights I shouldn’t still be using him. I quickly redistributed the gear so everyone was immune, and was then able to keep playing (I reasoned my Titan’s would have known to wear the boots before climbing the towers).

While I was at it, I checked my four selected Argo Abilities and realised two were now totally useless, so I swapped them out for more useful ones given the new movement and falling to your death rules.

The fight was then actually quite fun. It was still a challenge, but I think I’ve got to the point where I’m back into the swing of playing and I’ve just unlocked enough new abilities and gear to start fighting the new Primordials effectively.

In the picture above you can see how one of my Titan’s ended the game. Those little yellow tokens indicate that the card under them has been turned to gold by the Midas touch. One more token and the Titan would have also turned to gold and died. As it was, all their gear had lost their special rules by being turned to gold. Bare in mind, earlier in the battle I’d used an ability to remove Midas tokens from this Titan already. Other Titans weren’t in quite as bad a shape, but they’d all taken a beating.

The Midascore hit this Titan with a level 3 attack (i.e. the most powerful) applying all these Midas tokens and severely injuring them. The resulting injury card allowed the infuriated Titan to strike back for free. They took their gold spear and promptly beat the Midascore to death with it. That felt very satisfying.

Another battle with the pursuer for this cycle – the Dahaka. Pursuer battles don’t occur at regular intervals or due to story events (usually). Instead the Pursuer follows you across the map and random events move it closer. When it catches you, you have a battle. They don’t get stronger after each battle, they start off tough and you have to get good enough to beat them later in the cycle.

This one has the Fearful Hospitality rule. My Titan’s basically gain a +1 to hit bonus if they can run around “tagging” each other to pass on the bonus. It seems like a lot of work for a very small bonus to me. I’ve basically given up on it. I get the bonus for one Titan at the start of round one, then let it expire.

Since I moaned about how hard it is to ascend in the last game, of course in this game I got that 10% chance and ascended when my first Titan was killed. I had to look up the rules because it had not happened in such a long time. I then spent a while figuring out which God Form to take, and in the end just went with the most recently unlocked one, Dionysus.

But ascending usually only triggers when your Titan is mortally wounded, and it doesn’t heal you. So I used my free bonus attack to hit the Primordial, it retaliated and instantly killed my ascended Titan. About 15 minutes of looking up rules and making a decision came to absolutely nothing.

In this session I had another battle with the Midascore. It went reasonably well up until the end. I’d done nine out of the required ten wounds and not lost a Titan, but then it drew a level 3 AI card which proceeded to kill two of my Titans. I’d used up all of my tricks for keeping Titan’s alive by that point, so there was not much I could do.

I’ve had to re-arrange the Titan stands that I’d prepared as they were running out of room (see image above). I know have space to glue another row of match sticks and therefore put more cards there. I need all of them visible all the time to keep on top of all my Titan abilities during combat. That means that the space required to play a battle is an entire dining table plus about 18″ of wall space too.

I’ve also adopted some house rules to make the game less frustrating and/or a bit more streamlined.

• When spending fate to get a re-roll, the re-roll automatically succeeds. Given the fact I’m spending a resource to get that re-roll, it irritates me a lot when it doesn’t pay off.
• All Titans from previous cycles are always available, as long as Titans are available. I.e. I’m not keeping track of resources from previous cycles, and those technologies, to breed Titans 10 to 20 turns before I need them. I just assume that’s handled for me in the background. It also means I’m not forced to swap Titans after suffering losses and I don’t have to keep learning the new Titan abilities.
• A titan may spend their move or attack action to try and roll equal or under their current rage. If they do, they ascend. This is my idea for putting the ascension mechanic in the game more. I didn’t try it out yet as this game only lasted three turns and rage was still relatively low for all my Titans. It should play a role in the more epic battles though where rage climbs higher.

This time it was my first battle against this cycle’s pursuer, the Dahaka. It had killed two Titans and thus defeated me in two turns. As reward for finishing my first battle with this Primordial, I was given the ability to replay any battle I choose, followed by a 30 campaign turn cool down.

It may be that today I’m in a bit of a grumpy mood, but why is this game full of so many near useless mechanics? If I want to replay a battle, I’ll replay it. Or, more likely, I’ll fudge the results a bit so I don’t spend another 2-3 hours of my life replaying a battle. I’ll admit hardcore players might want to stick to the letter of the rules, and in this case that’s fair enough.

Another rule introduced for this Primordial is a mechanic where the Titans need to run to each other to pass on a state, giving them +1 to hit token. But once they all have the token, or if you don’t pass it on, all the tokens disappear. Why did I spend my first turn worrying about how to implement this rule, only for it to do practically nothing?

The real long-running gripe I have is the ascending mechanic. When you die due to damage (not some other effect) you can turn into a God for one or two rounds, if you roll 10 on a d10. In three full cycles I can recall it only happening twice, and the first time I believe it was scripted to automatically happen when the mechanic was first introduced.

I may need to start introducing some house rules for the sake of my sanity.

This was the first “normal” session, i.e. several exploration turns culminating in a battle. The Demidjinn is another very fast Primordial. It doesn’t turn me into gold as much as the previous Primordial, but it can wish me away a significant distance, and if that takes me off the board edge my Titan instantly dies.

This early in the cycle, every Primordial turn has a good chance of outright killing the targeted Titan. I managed to inflict seven of the ten required wounds and was down to my last Titan, then I succeeded in the critical shown below. It was very satisfying – and now the wounding Titan can Wish Away in my chosen direction, making it much more survivable.

That’s the Primordial killing my last Titan. The first two Titans died to me following a rule wrong – they were supposed to draw from one wound deck and I drew from the wrong one. That particular deck has a 1/20 chance of killing them, and I drew that card twice in a row. The other two died to the new Midas mechanic, where their equipment is slowly turned to gold. Once all their gear is gone, they turn to gold too. I’m sure there will be technology I can unlock to counter that, but this early in the cycle it’s a problem I can’t do much about. I’d managed to do six out of ten wounds to the Primordial. Had I not made my mistake with the first two Titan deaths I might have won the battle, but I noticed too late to go back and undo them.

At least my new crib sheets drastically cut down on time wasted looking up rules.