Aeon Trespass Odyssey

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.

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…