Aeon Trespass Odyssey

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.

My first game session took another five hours! This time it was an hour to read the opening story for the campaign and make suitable changes to the game setups, followed by four hours for the first battle as I painstakingly had to look up every single special rule again to remember what stuff did. And those rules are now spread across four rulebooks (each cycle after the first added a new set of rules).

It was fun though, and I’m sure after a couple more game sessions I’ll be remembering the rules much better and it will go a lot smoother.

So the box with cycles four and five in it arrived in the middle of last year. I was busy with other games in 2025, so all I did was paint up the models. Links to those posts in my other project are here:

Aeon Trespass: Odyssey – Cycle Four Primordials

Aeon Trespass: Odyssey – Cycle Four Titans

Aeon Trespass: Odyssey – Cycle Five Primordials

Aeon Trespass: Odyssey – Cycle Five Titans

After Christmas I started getting ready to play cycle four. Would you believe it took about five hours just to get ready! Each of the steps below took about an hour each:

• Punching out all the new card components and opening the packs of cards.
• Taking the small number of cards with errors from the first box and replacing them with the new corrected cards from this box.
• Getting all the components from the first box out and laying them out in the correct places on my table.
• Setting everything up ready to play.
• Brushing up on the rules, given I’ve not played in over a year and it’s a VERY complex game.

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.