AT:O is a ridiculously large miniatures board game that has hundreds of hours of content, across 3-5 different cycles, each with their own mechanics, characters, enemies, weapons, events, stories, miniatures, mysteries, pursuers, adventures, recreational activities, tokens, and a shitload of other things. The game is advertised to have over a novel worth of writing, much of which is given in choose your own adventure style numbered passages that you flip between as you explore the world. If you somehow played this massively expansive game with different groups, each playthrough would permanently alter the game’s landscape in complex ways. And, the miniatures have removable pieces to add vantage points that you can carve into them, giving your teammate an opportunity to leap onto the towering monstrosity. The game absolutely rocks, but it would take me pages and pages to even scratch the intricacies of this game, so I want to focus on a underexplored component of game design.
Experience Design
This game is so ridiculously complex, it’s really about 6 different games in a trenchcoat. While the transition mechanically between these parts are seamless, there are several pain points that exist outside of the gameplay that are what I want to talk about. As a part of our conversation about experience design, a board game experience begins the moment players sit down to play the game, unpacking the pieces, and ends when it is all packed up. Designers have begun to catch on to this, with many games offering learn to play videos instead of dozens of pages of incomprehensible rules. Another important innovation in this space has been inserts that are easy to organize pieces in, some of which can be used directly as piece storage during gameplay. (Wingspan was an early innovator in this space, giving players plastic storage containers that are easy to use during game, but also compactly store them.)
All of this is to say that AT:O is horrible in this regard. Yes, there’s a game insert with four removable parts, and it fits in the box? But, ease of storage doesn’t translate into ease of gameplay. The game shipped with three cycles, which you play one at a time, however, all the cards and pieces are organized by type, not cycle. It may be easy to find the Grave Trauma cards, however, getting a whole pile of Grave Trauma cards of which I only need specific ones is quite frustrating. The miniatures are arranged in a way that I need to go through each of the three different trays to get all the base character miniatures and the monster we’re fighting. On top of that, there’s very clearly a certain layout for the larger board components that exists, because of the shaped compartments in the lowest tray. BUT IT DOESN’T SAY HOW TO PUT THEM IN??!? This may be more frustrating than the parts that are poorly designed, because I feel that these pieces should slot together in the most tetris-like experience, but I don’t care to spend an hour figuring it out. If you’re asking players to sit down and play a game for 4+ hours at a time, adding another hour of setup and teardown on top of that is unacceptable.
This also disrupts the gameplay itself – when transitioning from the exploration phase to the battle phase, a whole new table is needed. If you are using the same space, you need to mark new map locations, pack together the map tiles, store them, pull out the board, get the monster’s associated cards and tiles, and set them up. Now, this could be somewhat seamless if these things were located near one another – the monster miniature and its cards will always be used together. Instead, I have to dig through thousands of cards and several trays to find all the parts, on top of all the aforementioned things. To me, this is the biggest blight on what is otherwise an incredibly well thought out, expansive campaign game.
Emergent Narrative AKA Alcibiadeez Nuts
Remember the novel length of writing? This game rocks. Although there’s only one book that you can read from, the communal nature of the game encourages dramatic reading, jokes, and telling our own story. While battle is an intense strategic experience with heavy mechanical interactions and complexity, the rest of the game opens up, providing us with diegetic motivations and connections for our actions. As players who are overwhelmed by the amount of rules, story, and lore that’s being thrown at us, we pick out and hone in on parts that resonate with our own experiences. There exists a world where our Minoan princess guide is just a thingy that gives us dialog options, with a counter ticking up towards 10 that will do something. Instead, to us she is Acacacalis, who talks like a valley girl. The game is rife with dialogue, enabling joyous moments of passing the storybook back and forth to act out a scene, giving different characters different voices. Another example is our player characters – I play Odys Zero, the character designed to appeal to fans of the generic white guy protagonist (sorry Joel,) and Ash, Isaac, and Eren play as women. We decided that this would be akin to a harem anime, (a common anime style where a male protagonist is surrounded by women who desire and compete for him) except that none of their women characters are interested in me.
The game separates the heavy mechanical sections from the heavy narrative sections, giving us the breathing room and creative space to come up with these stories. As a result, there are several different tiers of stories: there exists the procedural rhetoric of this game, which chronicles the power development of our characters. There’s the story the game is telling us: King Minos has gone missing, and we must explore Crete in this monstrous world to find out what’s happened. There’s the story we’ve embarked on within the bounds of the game: We are friends with the Minoans, enemies with the Labyrinthians, and have a Minoan princess as our guide. There’s the story we are telling: the harem anime, our city-ship being a colonial force bringing a police force to Minoan communities. And finally, there’s the story of why we’re playing this game, which is that we enjoy playing games with one another to avoid our work (like writing this blogpost.) There are clear connections between these different levels of stories, and the dynamism between them and when they are brought to the forefront through the game is very impressive.
Conclusion
Overall, Aeon Trespass: Odyssey does not disappoint in its large box and playtime. The different components are thoughtfully crafted, even if their location in the box isn’t. The gameplay is intense and enjoyable, with moments to breathe and unpack the challenges of combat, and the story is intriguing, with many puzzles found within that keep us on our toes. Although we say we play it because it’s “better than Magic: the Gathering,” it’s a compelling and exciting experience that keeps us coming back week after week.
