Aeon Trespass Odyssey

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.