Aeon Trespass Odyssey is a gargantuan game, in every aspect. Its story is gargantuan: you play as adventurers on a ship the size of a city, piloting titans like mechs to fight primordial monsters the size of mountains, traveling throughout Greece over the course of months. Its experience is gargantuan, boasting hundreds of hours of content over 5 different campaigns (referred to as cycles in this game), thousands of cards, hundreds of tokens and trinkets, and dozens of minis, all in the largest box for a board game I have ever seen. Its ruleset is also gargantuan – the core rulebook is 81 dense pages of interlocking systems, complex interacting mechanics, and multi-layered lists of round order and turn progression, not to mention the even longer cycle books that accompany each cycle, mostly full of narrative, but each also bringing its own custom rules, modifications, puzzles, and mysteries.
This game is, unsurprisingly, pretty overwhelming to start out with. I am currently about 20 days into the first cycle (after having played the 8 day tutorial – I should clarify, these are in-game days, not real life days, though they may as well be with how long this game takes to play) with my fellow Argonauts, Isaac, Ash, and Bruno, and I only barely feel like I’m getting a complete grasp on the rules for this game. In the tutorial section – which I have to admit was pretty well designed in retrospect, though a bit frustrating at the time – we were often faced with moments where new rules and systems were presented, and the tutorial book (yes, there is whole other book for the tutorial) told us what to do, and we simply could not figure out why. We would scratch our heads and postulate, or even begin to resist against this demanding book’s wishes, but eventually things would become more clear, and we would retroactively understand why the book was making us do the things we were doing. We had to learn pretty quickly to just blindly trust the book, and understand that all would be explained in due time, which for the most part was true. By the end of the tutorial, we ended up jokingly referring to the whole experience as “the opening cutscene” – we had little to no agency, and were pretty much just along for the ride, watching our characters move through the world with our hands all but off the controls. This was our first inkling of the videogameyness of ATO – much like many AAA titles, we were being shepherded through some necessary exposition, but we didn’t really have agency over how our story manifested.
As we began to dive deeper into the game, however, these rule challenges began to manifest in a different way. Instead of being railroaded down a very particular path, pre-dictated by the game designers, the possibility space of our play opened up expansively, especially in the battle phase of the game. With so many mechanics at our disposal, and so many keywords on each of the seemingly endless cards spread before us, we were very quickly lost. Luckily, the rulebook for ATO has a pretty extensive glossary, so we were for the most part able to find the information we needed, but diving in and out of rulebooks is often not the most fun way to play a game that you really just want to get lost in.
Now, at first blush, this overwhelming amount of rules and systems may just seem like bad game design, something that should have been cut or simplified or restructured. I don’t see it that way, though. First of all, if you are about to crack open a game with a box as big as ATO’s, I think you have to expect a certain level of rules insanity and complexity creep. To me, whoever, it feels apparent that there is actually a fairly justified reason for all of this complexity: this game is actually just a TTRPG in a board game shaped trenchcoat. But, crucially, this game does not have a GM. Instead, the game itself serves as the GM, building systems and rulesets to guide the players and create a continuous narrative without making any one player prepare an entire story (or follow a campaign guide). So, of course the rules are going to be insane and exhaustive – they are trying to create a simulacrum of a living breathing game master with a few books and a handful of cards!
Even so, these intricate rule systems are still a bit exhausting at times. Very frequently while we play, Bruno and I both have our noses deep in different rulebooks (while Isaac and Ash gleefully banter and devour Trader Joe’s Ginger Snap cookies), combing for the specific paragraph that explains the specific use case of the specific mechanic we are now, 25+ hours into this game, only just running into for the very first time. The core rulebook explicitly says in the beginning not to read it, to use it just as a reference guide, that we will learn what we need as we go (I have now realized that this is just untrue – some of the rules interactions are so spread through the book that it is impossible to understand some edge cases without outright reading it, which I now have done, and was probably going to do anyway – I’m one of those crazies who reads the Player’s Handbook for fun…). We will frequently read a paragraph of story, only for Bruno to suddenly need to pop up and go rummaging through the game box for 5 minutes for a secret card essential to our progression, return, read another paragraph, only to have to pop up and repeat the process again (read Bruno’s post on experience design in ATO for more on the monstrosity that is ATO’s box). Additionally, on top of playing our own characters and making our own tactical decisions, we must also pilot our enemy, following a carrying out a complex system that automatically pilots the Primordials we battle, having to mentally juggle carrying out the enemy’s attacks and how we will defend ourselves with whatever equipment we have on hand. Very often, playing ATO feels like we are part player, part computer, constantly calculating, logicizing, and cross checking our actions against the expansive rule systems to see if we are still on the right track. So why isn’t a computer doing this rules calculus for us?
Lastly, though ATO makes great effort to achieve the feeling of true choice so essential to TTRGPs, 2,000 cards and 200 pages of rules can only do so much. While the narrative of the game is interesting, and we are enjoying the narrative lives our characters are taking on (and the emergent narratives we are creating with and about them), the actual choices we get to make a very limited – either random, as determined by a dice roll, or binary, when we pick between two (or occasionally more) options of what to do. As a result, I feel like I have never really had a chance to embody my character (a naive, doe-eyed woman who just wants to make the world a better place, but has also brutally murdered a child and has some repressed trauma from her past that she is only beginning to uncover – none of these narrative beats were chosen by me, to be clear), and I have honestly never felt like I’ve wanted to. We’ve had much more fun embodying the cast of NPCs that re-appear throughout the game’s narrative, giving them silly accents or vocal affects, or creating our own alternate theories as to why they are acting the way they are. The only places where we really have any choice is in the battles – we choose what equipment we craft, what we bring, how we attack, and when – but none of these choices have narrative drive or implications; after all, we are not even fighting directly as our characters, but as the disposable, mostly nondescript, and mechanically identical (so far) Titans that we pilot. It really feels like we are being guided through an already existing story, playing through battles that do require skill and will change our outcome, but are never really able to make a significant narrative impact or truly control our characters.
So where does this leave us? ATO is not quite a TTRPG – it mirrors some of the epic scale, collaborative gameplay, and aesthetic elements or popular TTRPGs, but fails to offer real narrative freedom and ends up offloading the rules-lawyer burden onto the players, rather than a GM. It feels almost too expansive to be a board game – it lasts hundreds of hours, is nearly impossible to teach new players, leans way farther into narrative than most analog games, and you honestly need two and a half tables and a roommate willing to let it stay set up permanently for an ideal experience. The game has ‘cutscenes,’ demands computer-like logic and rules knowledge, and guides you along an exciting but fairly pre-set narrative throughout its long playtime… sounds like an ideal candidate for a video game to me!
I think there definitely is a version of this experience that would work as a video game. It would certainly simplify and streamline the battle phase, allowing us to make more tactical decisions and stay focused on the task at hand without getting lost in rules hell. It would make it much easier to keep track of all of the tokens and items we’ve accumulated over our odyssey – there would never be lost cards, misplaced tokens, shifted minis that we can’t quite remember where they were supposed to be. It would probably make the game much more accessible – online play would be possible, it would allow for shorter play sessions, less space taken up, and would preclude the rules deep diving that I find exciting but many find experience-ruining. But…
Something would be missing. There is a magical moment that happens when the four of us are standing over the battle board, each of our Titans just barely cheating death, one of us having landed a critical attack, when the attack dice tumble from our hands, clattering around in our dice tray, and we all hold our breath, desperately hoping we’ve scored enough hits symbols to deal this Labyrinthosaurus its final blow. There is a sense of connection we get from sitting around a table with each other, passing cards, squinting at keywords, uncontrollably laughing at the latest absurd voice of the new NPC or the latest revelation about our token Minoan party-member. There is a super satisfying tactile experience of picking up minis and moving them around the board, rolling dice with all of the oomph or reckless abandon of the given attack, picking between the tiny Obol cards held by my devilishly grinning friends, two of which are certain to kill me, and one of which will allow me to defy the gods yet again and ascend to a whole new level of danger. The communal, tactile, physical, experience of this game, though overwhelming and frustrating at times, is essential to its fun.
Stories and games like these are meant to be told around a table, snacks in hand, laughing, chatting, delighting in the absurdity of the experience before us, and the company of friends to suffer through it with. The insane rules shenanigans are just as much a part of it – much like D&D parties are brought together by the hardship of their adventure, I feel like my group and I have been brought closer by the hardship of cracking the shell of this crazy nut of a game. As a video game, we may never have had Beepus and Aieepus cards, we never would have had Acacacalis and Alcibiadeez Nutz, we never would have sent fleets of cops to Minoan communities and established our party as a harem of a generic white man jumpscare and a bunch of women who are simply not interested in him. Many parts of this game could have been made simpler and more manageable as a video game, but I’m honestly not sure I’d ever play that video game, and I certainly wouldn’t pass up my experience of ATO with my friends for that little bit of simplicity.
