World's Most Complicated Board Game (is okay) | Aeon Trespass: Odyssey Review

to wound a monster in Iron trespass all you need to do is roll a number of d10s based on your weapon and then for each hit you roll a custom D6 and if those hits meet or exceed the Monster's armor value congrats you've wounded it and yet there are one or two more things to consider and trespass is a boss battle meaning each fight just killed the one thing before it pulverizes you and you roll those D tends to score a hit you don't just then roll the red d6s first you have to draw a body part card and obviously that tells you what body part you're trying to hit but it also tells you what the armor value is or to use the game's language the Aeon trespass value you might say okay still not complicated roll some dice draw card then roll some dice again right the body part card also has rules text for what happens if you don't roll enough hits on the red dice or do roll enough hits or rules text that happens whether you hit or miss and a special effect that only happens if you crit what's a crit glad you asked when you roll the d10s one of the dicey roll is white if you get a 10 specifically on this die you will get the chance of a crit then draw the body part card and then get the critical effect if you get past the Aeon trespass value with the red dice thing is you don't know what the crit effect will be when you roll the d10s because you haven't drawn the body part or BP card yet right this is the true scallion and on it are your free combat stats Sate rage and danger you start the fight with hopefully zero on each but each time you roll the d10s you can increase your fate by one to re-roll them so if I haven't got a crit on the white dice I could take another shot by increasing my fate and rolling again correct but remember you don't know what's on the BP card it might be rubbish or it might create a gap in the boss's armor permanently reducing its own trespass value or it might create an opening for you to climb on top of it and ride it like a giant triangle donkey stabbing it from above so you increased your fate for a re-roll what could possibly go wrong in addition to BP cards there are also AI cards which is what the Monster or as the game calls it the primordial draws on its turn and many of its attacks are augmented if you go past certain fate thresholds speaking of AI cards here's a question do you want to wound this thing at all obviously scoring a wound is great 10 wounds and you win and also there is that chance of quitting but every wound you score causes an escalation which yes is an A4 sheet of rules on its own but the gist is that both the BP deck and the AI deck lose a card and that gets replaced with a card from the next level which means now the BP deck has a card that makes it harder to hit and the aortic deck has a card that makes it hit you harder okay so you won the primordial you put worse things into the decks do you actually want to wound it because if you do you'll have to reshuffle these decks and there's a good chance you'll end up with something absolutely awful on top you do mostly because each attack also increases your rage after the attack you will put tokens into the Kratos pool these are not for you these are for your partner players who can spend them to either be more accurate on their d10s or convert symbols on the red dice into hits the number of tokens you put in there is based on your rage more rage more tokens so each time you attack the primordial you make it easier to wound even if you miss and also maybe you want to get hit hard each time a primordial attacks you you'll roll evasion dice once again the d10s and once again you can critically evade and get positive effect but for each miss you will take danger as instructed per the AI card then you will check your total danger against this chart and based on that you will draw cards from one of four decks bad worse really bad and death except are they bad because each trauma deck does have progressively worse effects but it also has progressively amazing effects you only have to look into the tier 2 damage deck to find an effect that outright kills you but before you die you also get to shake off any stuns and whack the primordial for all you've got on your way out you will also find effects that let you manipulate its decks give it negative penalties and attacks for free and so on the tier 4 deck the oboe deck has just two cards you live or you die meaning that no matter how much damage you take you always get a coin flip to just not die unless of course your Rage or your fate reaches 10 in which case you will have to draw either from the craters or the moira's deck respectively and I wish I could tell you what happens when you do but that literally never happened to me and yet those systems are here early on in the campaign that you die card gets replaced with a you die roll a d Tankard and then you roll the d10 and any result that is an attend means you do just die but if you do roll a 10 that you get transformed into Zeus or another Greek deity again not once did this happen to me because it is so unlikely but hey there are rules and even a mini for it I didn't even mention the various gear and weapon cards which completely want these rules and create a lot of exceptions with keyworded abilities interrupts and weird interactions but forget about all of that because combat is just one half of this game there's also a map composed from cards resources you gather to craft items diplomacy with the game's free factions that alter exploration events and story events based on how chummy you are with the faction that you are liaising with for which of course you will need a second table or a single table large enough to accommodate all of this did I mention that in fights you don't even play as your character you submerge into a vat of green liquid and then Junction with a Titan literally a 30-foot Titan that uses trees for clubs and half a warship for its Shield it's just so extra the rule book is so big it has a spine this is the size of the storybook there's three of those because there are three campaigns that come in the main game not many campaigns free full campaigns and they're sending two more to people who back the game on Kickstarter later and I think I think this might be a masterpiece generally the board game itself does a lot of work to help you figure out what kind of experience you are in for like the box which has a cover which sets the tone or at least tells you what to expect from it this is the box for an chest pass tell you one thing that the people who designed this game wanted you to know that they're making some bold choices and well that's definitely true and chest pass is a campaign style boss maddening game and the title of this video is not a lie in my nine years of reviewing board games I have never ever seen anything as complicated as this game not even close maybe for some of you that is review enough but I think many watching just want to figure out what the heck this thing is so this video will tell you but I will also dig deeper analyzing three distinct elements Combat Play experience and the campaign stuff ending on a comparison to a few Alternatives there will be very very mild spoilers nothing that you wouldn't find in the rule book and there will also be don't worry a big spoiler for the first campaign but I will very clearly market and at the time provide instructions on how to skip it so if you want to avoid that you will be able to do it watching the video and here's a spoiler for this video I will be critical I will be harsh perhaps overly so but when something this complicated drops onto my lap my greatest desire is to interrogate it and from what I've gathered with my conversations with the publisher into the unknown when we were discussing me getting a review copy of this game which by the way this is that is what they wanted to so that's my Preamble done let's get to it [Music] into the unknown chose to Market their combat mechanisms as the inverted Paradigm system and label their game as hardcore which translated from ancient BGG means hard cringe but I have to say I kinda love it each campaign you will fight at most four different bosses but you will face them definitely more than once this is by design your campaign progression is tracked on the Argo sheet amongst various stats like your diplomatic standing number of Titans various resources is also your timeline each round is a day in the timeline and every six days you have a timeline battle meaning you pick one of the campaign's two standard primordials then check the next box on the leveling chart leveling one or sometimes even both of the primordials and then just do battle in the first campaign you can find either against the heckaton or the labyrinthoros the other other two campaign won primordials are for more special occasions and ominous voice we will talk about those later I'd say the overarching ethos of Aaron trespass is maximum everything and the combat system reflects that with maximum Randomness which is honestly a sight to behold in one of my earlier fights one of my Titans died before anyone even got to take a turn which I will grant you sounds bad but also I won that fight after a series of preposterous dice rolls and card draws fully submerged in the possibility space that this game creates I mean doesn't this just look drab they even went for brown board Gaming's most exciting color there's one body four Heroes some terrain tiles that in your earlier games won't even enter the conversation and that's it playing doesn't even begin to describe it and yet somehow just out of that blooms this giant Saucy meatball of spaghettifying events the key is in how Iron trespass plays with Randomness because the design manipulates probability in very interesting ways as I've mentioned a lot can happen if you create you're in for a treat but you don't even know what that treat is yet you could for example get a rare piece of gear that you just can't get in any other way and that piece of gear could be instrumental in you winning many future fights this isn't that piece of gear that's just your starting fists but the odds of you rolling a 10 on this specific die and then successfully wounding the primordial and then drawing the exact right card out of a deck of six cards which is itself composed out of a set of 18 possible ones that gives you that specific piece of gear means that it might not ever even happen and when I say never I don't mean like in a given fight I mean never it's entirely likely you'll play this game and you'll never get to find out what content in secret deck 2 is not for you go away you're not allowed in isolation this would be a terrible mechanism but giving you a church key is just the tip of the iceberg quitting could mean any number of things I mentioned in the intro you could create a spot where you literally sit on the monster you could also create weak points bonus attacks you could trigger a special event after the fight then there's terrain which by itself does nothing but you could be swatted into it or if you're lucky you could swap the primordial into it permanently creating a gap in its armor or you could get an advantage to attacks if you're standing on a city tile yes a city tile because remember the scale we are 30 feet tall and we're the tiny ones in this scenario point being you will get an advantage for standing on it if diplomatically you are Allied with the faction that this city belongs to which isn't even determined by this fight but by where you are on the world map which I haven't even gotten to yet some terrain tiles let you roll a die the result of which could injure you or could let you once again draw a special item you could never get otherwise you could die remember just from a random card draw or you could kill the primordial then and there without the requisite 10 wounds and did I mention you could turn into Zeus all of this creates an interesting effect which you're either Gonna Love or hate and if this sounds like hell 100 this is not a game for you because yeah this is pretty much gloomhaven flux it's not really anything like gloomhaven but you get my point though but on the other hand it sets up an environment where you're never really out because once again Anything could happen and the likelihood of something Preposterous happening increases every time you successfully wound or get wounded the more attrition happens the more exciting the game gets and trespass is a spectacle where you are simultaneously the hero and the audience you know this B movie horror shows where a campy character speaks directly to the viewer pray this does not happen to you is happening to you and yet you can't stop watching but here's the thing about spectacles when you are constantly bombarded with the improbable you then sort of just become numb to it about halfway through the first campaign you'll find a shift in your attitude and you'll come to expect and rely on that Randomness you've seen the primordials the campaign has to offer you know their tricks time to apply everything that you've learned towards tactics and strategy and here is where I'm torn the not gloomhaven part obviously lends itself well to that as you progress through the story you unlock Technologies those will let you craft much better gear plus you'll find special items and plus there's gear for your gear you'll increase your character's skills called nemoses which have their own leveling up system you'll even find special Titans there's a lot of tactical grit between the abilities all these things offer and since the mechanical systems are mostly unique to this game The Familiar Cadence of better gear is tantalizing in new ways and since all gear even Titans are three tradable between players in between fights you encouraged to customize and experiment with different loadouts your character is a blank canvas mostly separated only by those nemoses to differentiate what they are good at so each fight isn't just a fight it's a game of dress-up and I am so down for that but I don't think I need to explain that the flux pod isn't exactly how shall I put it not flux primordials don't just deal you danger and force you to draw trauma cards they can also through indirect ways impart you with conditions one of the most common condition cards is knockdown its rules implementation is convoluted but the basic gist is that you're down skip a turn to get up and you'll get knocked down and then get up again when a primordial walks over you pushes you into terrain drops to rain on top of you but not underneath you or sometimes just when it wants to which sounds not fun but a true flux expert would say if you don't think that flux has a strategy then you just don't understand that five carat black holes can be collected by strutting the Space Coast cards which can be drawn with the cosine equations on the retail manager's cards after you fry your egg cards in butter in butter technically there is an answer to anything in this game you died just don't die do something else but that answer can be impossible to willingly engineer thankfully not so in the most egregious cases knockdown has a very specific answer after a few fights you'll get gear cards that just say get up and if you got knocked down again I should have spent half your turn resting to unexhaust all the things this is always a thread of some line of play that you could have pulled on and whereas other board games let you engineer strategic Solutions and trespass Ops to teach you via hindsight which can get a bit tiresome after a while video games do this a lot since the success of Dark Souls but the difference with video games is that they don't require ringing up free people and making plans to get together on a Saturday hoping that Colin doesn't cancel the last minute because he says he has to mot his car but what he's actually gonna do is watch reruns of Frasier in his house bands and then if Colin does turn up you have to teach the world's most complicated board game and when you start playing you have to be like I'm story calling that you got knocked down three turns in a row but you should have equipped the fried egg card ah and it kind of makes that dresser part more dull like what are my gear cards well the card that lets me get up nudge the game even knows this because first you get access to the get up card and then later it gives you a get up plus a bonus card because there's no way you're not having the get up card so it has to give you get up but better this is a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't give people answers and then they're gonna use them forever whereas if you don't give them answers then they're just gonna sit there confused but that's sort of what happens when you try to make flux strategic you can definitely learn more about the primordials and anticipate what they will do the hackathon for example is very good at swatting you away especially if you are in front of it and the labyrinthoros is very good at running you over especially if you are in front of it but that kind of makes the bow all a one-trick pony the more you fight these primordials the more they Evolve level up the hackathon will now swore you further and if you leave the edge of the board you're dead and the labyrinthaurus will run you over harder and if he ran you over when you were knocked down you're dead but these Evolutions aren't interesting enough to Warrant fighting the same primordial over and over again when the best tactical solution to a primordial attacking you is for everyone to just run away that's right run away is an intentionally implemented tactical strategy for beating up the big beef and unsurprisingly I have some beef with that I know this video has been a lot but strapping we're gonna dive a layer deeper I mentioned in the intro that what the primordial does is determined by an AI card that is drawn at the beginning of the turn this AI deck gets reshuffled every time you wound a primordial with an AI free card on top the most punishing one there's a good reason to to whack it to then reshuffle this deck and hopefully something better comes out on top but that is unpredictable especially if the BP card is also high level making the primordial harder to wound so run away well not that simple every AI card will offer a sequence of potential targets for example someone in front and in range meaning in front of the primordial and reachable by the primordial when it moves or a priority targeting range someone who's caused the most aggravation to it and also has the priority Target marker which is literally this miniature if the primordial cannot find a Target it will do its routine maneuver in this case just racking your ship which is all kinds of bad potentially worse than even just losing the fight but within all of this there is one more rule called The Out Of Reach evade and the important thing to understand here is that if the primordial will find the target it will lock onto it and then won't damage the [ __ ] but after that there is an opportunity window to activate any interrupt abilities such as say moving one square let's imagine this scenario you are six spaces away from the hackathon and in front of it all your friends have run away even further just to be on the safe side you flip the top card and that says voila priority Target in range that means you six spaces Away reachable by the primordial so it would move towards to you but aha you have that interrupt moment during which the hackathon already locked on to you and you're just gonna go one space over here and then the hackathon will move the very sad six spaces towards you can't reach you and then the card probably mostly does nothing so you can discard it and try your luck again if you don't like the other card on top by resting and running away even further you could do that all over again sounds exciting now imagine actually playing that if this part sounded tedious to listen to imagine what it feels like to actually play to convince your friends to take part in this Grand operatic strategy to do nothing with like a 10 chance of failing even that look I respect that strategically This is complicated intricate crunchy but on an experiential level is this fun tactics is this fun to do I'll note that you are not required to play this way you can just brute force it embracing higher variance and enjoying the spectacle and if you lose a fight thankfully most of the time the penalties are not severe enough for you to ache too much over it you can even be Reckless starting the fight already half chewed up by story events and you bring your best gear and Titans along knowing full well and you might lose them and then if you do just push a very rare reset resource button and try again if that's what you feel like doing in fact this if anything is a strength this isn't a game that will let you crunch tactics and what I mean by that isn't that you can't do it I'm sure some people do it's just not particularly rewarding in that way but it's remarkably good at letting you push coins into the slot machine and then pull on the believer the tension that creates is like no game of this kind that I've played [Music] no matter how many players you play with one two four you always have to deploy four Titans if you're playing by yourself that's four characters you need to control so I would not fault you for thinking that this game is designed to be played by a group but actually a lot of the criticisms for how combat feels as a group experience melt away if there's no group to experience it with which led me to wonder how many people who own this game do actually play it with the group and the answer to that is about one in four according to a Twitter poll I ran so not exactly empirical evidence but if anything I bet that our followers leaned heavier towards group plays so this probably inflates the number of people who don't play it by themselves one in four is outrageously low especially considering that the poll does not further elaborate on how many people who do play it in a group play it with just one other person which I suspect is once again a large majority of that 25 of owners so let's explore why I think a big reason for this is that high variance nature if frequent Skipper turn mechanisms plague this game then it stings a lot less if you're forced to do nothing with just one of your characters if your character dies at the beginning of combat before having done anything yet how does that work imagine being Colin skipping on Frasier they learning all of these rules and just watching everyone else have on that's rubbish thankfully I mostly played this game on my own although I think it works fine at two as well especially if the other person is highly tolerant to all of that I wouldn't even know where to begin organizing a four-player game first of all consider the two tables you kinda need them where does everyone sit this might look fine in video but this medium size for England living room barely holds me with the camera gear and all of it set up people take up more space they need to put the drink somewhere they need to go to the toilet there just isn't room for any of it in real life this sprawls even bigger theoretically you could set this up on one table and I'd like to invite you to imagine how that would work the game has two distinct Parts the world exploration which I know we haven't gotten to yet and the combat but those distinct Parts use mostly individual components your character sheet Argo shield and triskellion are used in both but this board Miniatures AI cards BP cards trauma decks primordial sheet masses of tokens are utterly unnecessary during World exploration and this map technology Tech's exploration text story sheets clue cards Doom sheets are pointless in combat so if you played on one table as soon as combat started you would have to tear all of this down and this this is not the map you have in the real game this is tutorial Island the real map is way bigger and then afterwards when you're done you would have to rebuild it card by card and you could sort of like bear with it if the game had any structure or pacing that made sense for an evening get-together but imagine this totally plausible scenario I mentioned that timeline battles happen every six rounds so you'd think that you Poodle around for five rounds crafting some gear traveling on the map enjoying some stories and then you could punctuate your get-together with a fight against a big Beastie no no no no no no no no no mines happened just whenever I once finished about pack the battle up set up the map then did a little bit of crafting read a little bit of story which triggered another battle so I packed the map up set up the battle finished that pack the bottle up set up the map and then spend a grand total of five minutes moving my ship one tile and drawing some cards from the exploration deck which immediately triggered another battle at which point I didn't even do the battle I just got up went into the office and said I'm sorry Elaine I am taking your desk away in a non-absurd world how is any of that reasonable and look like I said this is not a valid criticism for anyone who does only want to play it by themselves and does have two tables or a preposterously large one or maybe you don't mind spending inordinate amounts of time on continuous teardown and set them or maybe you are playing this before in which case I salute you you are braver than the rest of us but why why design a game that is incongruous to be played with multiple people and then design it inside such a way where you have to control all four characters in isolation if I had to control just one character I don't think I'd call this the world's most complicated board game but when you have to micromanage all of this it's just too much there's too many [Music] rules we hate them we can't play board games without them sometimes we can't even play board games with them strangely this isn't one of those cases because the core systems of combat are pretty understandable rolls and dice check a number roll some dice again that's not hard there are a lot of them though I did say the rulebook has a spine but that's not even the Only Rule Book each campaign book has more rules making it harder to look things up and there's also a learn to play manual which guides you through a fight and then the adventure slash exploration phase telling you what God to draw what dice draw and even what the dice lands on that takes about three hours and is mandatory not only does it set up the story but the rules are too dense to internalize otherwise again you might have friends that'll take you up on it but the rules grid doesn't stop there it's not that you won't know how to play it's that the flow of the game is constantly interrupted I've had to stop to look things up a lot and that's pretty common for these Campaign games but it tends to go away once you grow accustomed to it you never grow accustomed to and trespass because it never stops introducing new rules you can tell that the designers thought a lot about how and when each rule gets introduced building on the foundations of what you already understand on the other hand because there is no good structure for what a session is it doesn't do it at the start or the end of the session where all the rules can be internalized in advance or in preparation for the next game night it just goes no stop rules time so you gotta pause and learn and that is messy and disruptive that's not the only time you'll pause to look things up many complicated board games use mnemonics to help you get used to the fiddly parts easier whether it's useful iconography on the board or handy reference sheets there isn't a single reference sheet in the Box no iconography shortcuts the rule book itself is laid out poorly for referencing its chunky and unwieldy Naturally by now there are fan made reference fences on BGG but there are so many keywords they take up free A4 Pages which are now littering my table which was already running out of space and those don't include the keywords found in campaign books so you need separate printouts for them what's weird is how much empty space some components have like these Titan sheets which are just half filled with gray mist and then you realize this reference for some rules underneath them so you can't store cards on the empty space if you want to use them as reference material this is pretty typical for first time Publishers especially when they go outrageous and the sad thing about kickstarter-based publishing is that going big is the only guaranteed success strategy but we've already had big we've had Kingdom Death monster then Gloom Haven then over sworn then Frost Haven and trespass to compete in this market of visionary masterpieces had to not just go big they had to be bigger than all of those and I think the problem with air and trespass isn't that it's unplayable because hey I have played it and so have many of the fans who are watching were probably a bit peeved about me bringing all this up it's that it went past the death of stuff that needs rules were a normal human brain just can't retain it and the publisher didn't have the experience necessary to create guides and tools to help retain it you can play this game but many won't want to foreign [Music] board games have the most fascinating ability to Transporters just make us forget it for a brief second that we live in a world where the people in power try to convince us that not being a racist is a mind virus a bleak world we inhabit and a little escapism can remind us that we're not helpless but it can also only do that when the world we're escaping to feels true not in a sense of transporting your Consciousness into a Titan and then fighting a giant composed entirely out of arms that will never feel real I mean look at how many fingers it has that's at least eight hours every week just trimming your nails and it's what like 60 feet tall where does it get its nail clippers from also its hands are all different sizes does it have like a collection of manicures tools for different size and shape of finger is there like a hackathon nail salon we don't question the Fantastical because it's the relatable the grounds us we want the characters to feel real and the world to share our problems because by escaping all we're doing is making the real and present feel surmountable I'd like to share an email where publisher into the unknown approached us about reviewing their game those stories might be of particular interest to you as they don't shy from politics and contemporary issues taking a critical look at various topics like discrimination propaganda nihilism or toxic masculinity we wish to speak about these things through our games as we are convinced that our medium is capable of becoming so much more than what it is right now I did not immediately buy them at their web but what intrigued me about the game wasn't the giant box full of minis nor the free campaigns no it's very obvious riffing on Kingdom Death monster a game who's the static I can only describe as breasts and murder it was that one paragraph from the publisher a very lofty promise I wanted to see if aeon trespass could deliver you've probably heard the phrase in media res before as in starting the story with no explanation right in the middle this was invented by ancient Greeks so it's no surprise that Aaron chespa starts by going surprise you're in ancient Greece or are you who knows you woke up with no memory and the Hand monster is attacking quickly quickly can join your Consciousness with the 30-foot Titan also you are on a city-sized ship and all the gods have died if that did not make your head spin the narrative that all this is delivered in is sprinkled with nouns and adjectives like Alia pile the escaton hermesian and so on you're not so much thrust into this world as you're swatted like a home run ball permanently leaving the stadium of Earth's Circa 2023 to be stranded in a setting that a less careful designer would have labeled Greek Punk anyone familiar with even the basic elements of ancient Greek myths will recognize the names and the places you're sailing around Crete this talk of King minus your ship is literally the Argo but you also recognize that none of these names and places work how you remember there's no Jason inside and last time you Chuck Diago wasn't city-sized there was a flying ship called the Argo in Percy Jackson so maybe this is Percy Jackson Punk the key phrase in all of this being the gods have died and trespass takes this idea of Greek copper lips and just tramples with it reshaping familiar myths with the delicate Touch of an enraged bull the escaton which is basically the end of the world serves like a springboard to continue the story right where those myths ended the gods dying then becomes a playground it doesn't matter that the Argo is city-sized or that the Titans sound nothing like they should it's an event so cataclysmic that it warps everything familiar into strange opening up a perfect setup for a mystery box if you're not familiar with this phrase that's become very popular with the people who like to complain about the rings of power on the Internet it's basically a device in constructing modern TV shows where you're spending most of the time as if you're going why is there a polar bear what is happening with Walden what's up with bad hatch it bombards you with weird stuff and questions right from the get-go and whilst you're waiting for answers it distracts you with more questions rationing Revelations for when you really deserve it the setup of the first campaign is that King Minos is missing and it's split Crete into warring factions the Minoans who wish to restore order the hornsworn which are a substitute for the working class or a rebellion or whatever is convenient and the labyrinthians uh self-made extract of people who maybe like mazes a bit too much um I bleeped that part out but actually there's a few more things about the labyrinthians you should probably have a warning for but I can't warn you because I can't even say those things on youtube.com anyway as you sell the Argo from tile to tile in search of King Minos who you're told conveniently holds all the answers you'll encounter story events rolling on an adventure table and then rolling on a second Adventure table which will lead you to a semi-random story thread that will examine the relationship between these factions which are always in conflict and neither is ever truly evil and neither is ever truly good it's a complicated moral choice and it's complicated moral choices all the way down surprisingly a mystery box structure serves Campaign games well which kind of makes sense if you think about it they thrive in episodic narratives and Campaign games are episodic by Nature each session you find out a few more answers and a heck of a ton more questions inviting you to get together and play again and whilst the pros is very heavy-handed and the plot doesn't really offer anything out of the ordinary the setting is tantalizing enough to be a strong Plus in the game's favor especially paired with often excellent artwork there isn't one consistent Motif there's just too many game pieces for one artist to establish a dominant aesthetic without running themselves into the ground and while some of it leans a bit too heavy into the modern Photoshop fantasy art style the more traditional illustrations on the BP and AI cards more than make up for it my only consternation is the very obvious cultural mining of myths that's become so common in contemporary video and board games but even companies like Ubisoft who seem to care about nothing have the common sense to hire cultural Consultants to at least create a veneer of seeming respectful no such consultant is listed in this rulebook so my guess is that even that minimal due diligence does not exist you can't achieve escapism on the tangible alone if you're promising as a world you have to let us floor it and fill it with interesting locales where encounters cool fights treasures and trinkets bits of lore all of that technically exists in this game but I want to show you how Ann trespass presented to you you begin each day by moving your little ship miniature onto a map Tower and then you mark off the next day on your campaign calendar you can either move on to an existing map tile or into adjacent unexplored territory revealing more remnants of this collapsing World these map tiles feature a lot of positive effects like finding one of the story threads or a bit of a Side Story via RNR Adventures or finding some Titans that let you replenish the ones you've lost in battle or gaining one of these tokens which lets you advance the main plot in a positive direction or uncover some secrets of the Argo giving you new abilities but these things only trigger if the tile you've just sailed into is unexplored meaning you have just revealed it whereas negative things like these Doom tokens which Advanced the main plot in a negative Direction always trigger meaning the game constantly encourages you to explore new locations find new things sail into the unknown oh my God that's their name I see what they're doing what is befuddling to me is that the literal next thing that happens is a massive abstraction so you've just sailed across the seas of ancient Greece in a city ship naturally you want to immediately draw from a deck of random events each turn you'll draw some cards from it and most of them are like here's some birds here's some trees here's some rocks use them for crafting it feels almost like an afterthought designed to interrupt gameplay for you to write down some numbers on your ship's character sheet but then occasionally it will do something like oops have a fight now now why it's a surprise Ambush but why what narrative purpose does it serve does it matter do the fighting okay I guess fighting is the good part so I shouldn't complain also you know how you get rewards at the end of the fight yeah you won't be getting any of those right let's rewind the sequence imagine you've sailed onto a new tile what exciting things oh wait ah I drew an adventure symbol means I get to read a bit of story but first I'll draw some random cards and they'll trigger a two-hour comment session I shall be enjoying the spoils but at least I'll get to reset all the stats on the triskelion to zero end wait is that why I certainly can't think of any other logical reason why random fights would happen because they don't Advance the story they don't level up the primordials faster they don't give you any resources but sometimes a lot of story happens in between fights and sometimes story penalties make you increase Rage or fate or danger so if you have a random fight sprinkled in between the story it resets those back to zero did they just waste hours and hours of my life stuck in random fights because they wanted me to twiddle with some dials just put in a card that says reset your scallion and that isn't even the only way that the exploration phase can trigger a fight and I'll tell you all about it in a special mini segment I'm calling did we not learn anything from tainted Grail board game designers all specifically board games released on Kickstarter with a lot of Minis and also have an epic campaign designers love cribbing from video games time and time I find ideas where you can easily imagine someone sitting on account with a Gamepad playing Dark Souls and going yeah I love this invincible boss thing gonna put it straight in my board game right but did you did you think about how that works in the board your first campaign you will be introduced to the adversary somewhere between Mothman and Slenderman moth Slenderman someone get me Dave filoni on the line anyway the hermesan pursuer its actual name is a thing that gets placed on the map and anytime you draw a card with this symbol it moves closer to you if it ever catches up it's Invincible boss time much like in the grand tradition of Dark Souls the Invincible boss isn't really Invincible from a combination of luck and skill it is feasible for you to win have fun with that also when I say win I mean win-win you could also just win it gets convoluted I'm talking about it in abstract Invincible boss is just a design term I don't mean that literally I absolutely loved this mechanism in tainted Grail we had a pretty scathing review of that game a couple of years ago not everyone agrees with it but even fans of the game just did not like being chased by a big stupid thing to just inevitably lose to it and then reset the whole thing and start again a little later down the line here I'd argue it's even worse fighting it at least does Net you some rare resources which you can then use to craft better gear but then you have to spend two hours on a fight that leans hard into the worst aspects of the combat system and then when you finish it later it's just gonna respawn again it's like grief as a board game mechanism you can Stave it off but then it just rears its ugly head again imagine a version of this game where there are three regular primordials instead that way you have a lot more variety in Timeline battles also there's already another Invincible boss that's right in campaign one there are four primordials two of them follow the Invincible bostro think how that works in video games in Elden ring you get one at the start it matches you in like five seconds you reload took a minute of your life then there's another one immediately afterwards you can just literally walk around it and then there's a whole world of invincible bosses whereas here it just goes on and on and on and I think I'd be more tolerant of that if it wasn't already done in a different game and shown that people just don't enjoy that but here we are again and all I can say is did we not learn anything from tainted Grail so now we've had two fights because they can and have triggered one after another and four hours later we realized that we moved onto a tile that gave us a story Adventure remember that remember how we talked about it me neither anytime you have an adventure you'll roll on the adventure table and that will determine the chain that your adventure is in then based on where you are at with that chain you might have to roll again to determine which part of that Adventure you're doing in isolation I think this part is okay they're board game stories you know they have plot it's fine sometimes surprising sometimes overwritten sometimes falling into cliches sometimes offering the unexpected it's fine I didn't love it I didn't hate it but I once again don't like the structure of it because each chain has a start and an end and some random odd bits in between you're poised to get an entirely different narrative each time you encounter one of these I expected at least the starts and ends to have narrative progression but instead they were sort of a riffs on a motif worse yet is the whole roll on a table to see which Adventure chain you get even in map based Campaign games I did not like I at least felt like the world I was inhabiting was cohesive this on the other hand is almost entirely abstract each map tile also has a fraction marker indicating which faction is present narrative wise on that tile but then you roll on the adventure table and get an adventure that says that the town you're visiting is a stronghold to an entirely different faction once for a set of unlikely circumstances on the same rounds I triggered two separate story events that that both told me I am in a town however those towns were completely different from one another and both of them did not relate to the tile I was visiting visually or mechanically you just adrift in the metaphysical sea each space a potential for anything mechanically convenient the rules of World building are thrown out the window in favor of a dice roll and it might seem like a petty criticism but when a board game promises me a setting to explore I want a setting I want to go to a place in this world and it feel like a distinct location like who lives there what are they like why are they the way they are do you know why in olden times settlements used to be 40 miles apart because that's the furthest emergent with a horse could travel in a span of a day do you know why Nottingham has a history of coal mining because there's Rich deposits of coal here in the ground a place has a reason to be the way it is based on history culture and geography these things shape it and color it there is nothing in the world of air and trespass that makes it feel tangible just mechanisms and Vibes leading you from one tidbit to another inconsistently you can't even pick what Adventure chain you'll encounter you can't even guarantee that you'll finish any of them so there's a lot of repetition of motif same ideas repeated over and over for something with so much text at times it's gonna think with a procedural generation not because it's written by an AI but because it feels like it's delivered by one mechanically out of all of the map-based narrative exploration games we've reviewed on this channel I like the campaign and story elements of air and trespass the least yes less than tainted Grail yes less than stars of a carriers because for all of the many faults of that game it at least understood how to make each Locale feel distinct which is why it isn't very good at speaking about these issues that it wants to speak about like authoritarianism or toxic masculinity its message is lost in the model of endless story encounters that keep re-establishing information that you've heard five times already I kept waiting for it to delve into these subjects and somewhere 40 hours in the one clear message I got was that an old Greek play wasn't very nice about women and I mean like yeah who could have guessed to its credit it does have a thing or two to say about cults and this is going to be weird I've spent some time studying why people join Cults and this is way off the mark but I think the message behind it is sincere and very transparently imposed by the designers world view don't worry gonna drop a campaign one spoiler now but don't worry after I tell you to if you want to skip the spoiler just very calmly pause the video and Skip to this time stamp okay you can pause now I'll wait still waiting we are spoilers on now on the other hand the big reveal in campaign one is that the grief of a woman was oh so strong it tore a hole in reality and now the monsters are coming out of it and making the world bad and look that's not overtly terrible grief is a powerful emotion like we've explored in this video but women's emotions accidentally destroying the world is not a Trope that exactly Sparks joy in me we've been advised by the publisher that it's campaign two that really goes into these subjects and it does your adversary is Sparta and the main villain who leads the Spartans is named the nietzschian I hope I don't have to explain what they represent you witness them to a heck of a lot of bad things to reinforce the idea that authoritarianism and disrespect to women is bad maybe be and look I don't know maybe I'm suffering from being the choir here but the preaching doesn't feel particularly inspired I feel a bit exhausted when a portrayal is constructed in a way that puts the perpetrators center stage they are the Agents of force and action we learn about how horrible they are because we continuously witness all the bad things that they do I find that shallow and not particularly nuanced the Marley and Me of it all look at this feel things thanks I rather wouldn't I don't find it productive but also why does it take you an entire Campaign which most people aren't even gonna play through because most people don't finish a campaign board game to get to the point where you start to speak about these things if they're important to you why not make that your mission statement put it on your website speak openly about it reinforce it don't launch a separate Kickstarter to sell some Minis that are very obviously exploitative but diverse the whole thing is confused exploitation of women is bad here's some exploitative artwork this is in the game I have to blur it because that's not gonna fly on the website the YouTube but there's also another read a more cynical read of this entire situation a lot of this game is derived from the boobs and murder game a game whose fan base it would be good to tap into so how do you speak about authoritarianism and toxic masculinity and simultaneously appeal to the boobs and murder crowd just do both and reinforce either whenever it's convenient I think that angle is too cynical even for me but I also couldn't willfully dismiss it I just couldn't Square why everything was so disjointed and haphazard where I was once again playing a board game where tearing down statues of bad people was bad but also the bad people are bad I almost gave up and then I think I got it look this is just a game written by a dude who really wants to share his worldview and so that's what you get one dude's super theory of super everything told through story vignette said in ancient Greece which I can tell he really cares about and that's nice but I don't really feel like I'm being transported to a place I just feel like I'm at a pub listening to some guy talk about how he feels about things things have skewed pretty negative and I know that the very many fans that this game has are probably not very happy right now so I want to take a second in this very final chapter of the video to explain my position I think it's entirely okay if none of my critique resonates with you maybe we just don't care about the same things maybe you're totally cool with a game that is mostly Geared for one person they'll make you Wade through rules because in a way that is also enjoyable and has a narrative that is formed with disjointed vignettes where it'll pivot from one face to another faster than a politician on Election Day I don't think it's unreasonable to find fun in that and hey more power to you but what I think a lot of people want is for me to be honest and what I can promise you is that with the video this long I had to dig very deep down inside of me and be as true to myself as possible and ultimately this is where I land I have to be so critical because frankly as much as I admire the bravado of something so audacious I just seen it done better not as big not as complicated but better if you're watching this video out of sheer curiosity as to what this is I have two recommendations for you one that's pretty left field and one that's very similar to this but both of them touching on many of the same beats and they're just better games sleeping Gods will definitely scratch that Explorer's itch it's nowhere near as voluptuous but it's got a ship a crew you need to manage it repair it whilst you sell from one story vignette to another if what you want out of aeon trespass is crunchy combat then sleeping Gods is not for you but if it is that sensation of a world you're exploring that you're after then look nowhere else it's tremendous at translating geography and culture into narrative with Ryan lockett's lighthearted endearing touch also barely but it just about fits on one table and that's a big bonus and the vignettes don't feel so Random because the way the game tracks what you've done is just so much more clever in earn trespass the game will remember your story choices by making you color in a number letter code then if a story Choice matters at a future Point It'll ask whether you've colored it in and depending on your answer leads you to different outcomes this is a fine system if your narrative is self-contained and consistent and spans no more than three or four hours but on a much larger campaign scale it poses a big problem you're not gonna remember what G4 or A5 or B7 means they're just letters and numbers they don't mean anything to you anymore so when the game asks you whether you've done something you can give the game the answer but you can't tell what it represents all you can say is yes I have or no I haven't but you have no idea what it is that you've actually done sleeping Gods deals with this in a simpler way instead of making you mark a box although it does that too it makes you take a card with a keyword on it the card is a physical representation of your choices and the past is sorely lacking another game that also does this even better than sleeping gods and frankly does many things better than air and trespass is osworn where your story choices are remembered by Ally cards these are companions that represent your decisions and they're more than just cards they shape and pivot the story with their presence and become a natural element of the narrative it is frankly astounding how much effort must have gone into designing these systems but it pays off so well I've only realized that it was allies that track your choices for the overall campaign plot once I've played through a third of the entire game us one is also a boss battling game one that has its own unique combat system and whilst it has its flaws overall I prefer it much more in the grand tradition of fighting bosses here you'll also Target body parts and things will escalate the more damage you deal but it's also a system that gives you a lot more agency in your Tactical this decisions like actually choosing which body part you target fights rarely repeat and yet it's carefully crafted 20 or so scenarios have an incredible way of teaching you what to anticipate from a future fight How To Be Clever about it and how to survive increasing challenges so you mostly don't fight the same boss but you feel like things are escalating and like you're learning things that will be useful in the next fight there is a tangible sense of progression but its biggest strength over air and trespass is how much work went into taming their wild idea into something that is a playable and enjoyable experience like in air and trespass four characters have to be played but each character has a simplified version or the full version if you're playing by yourself that's a lot of load that you can shed and still have a really crunchy time the rules are also a bit Arcane but the pacing is so much better there is a a clear sense of structure where each episode is story time and then combat time the length of each of those is predictable so you can plan your game evenings and the advancement is much more streamlined there's no gargantuan Tech tree that eventually turns out not to matter because slowly but surely you'll Advance through most of it anyway and the story my word talk about geography and culture mattering you get such a clear sense of where you are and what the people are like and why they are like that each moment advances the plot and does not Meander in the nuisance and when big things happen tell me if you play those one there's that bit at the end of a very early chapter will you ever forget that because I never will that is stuck with me permanently there is nothing in Aaron trespass that will resonate with me in that same way I finished playing a on trespass at the point where I realized I just don't want to do this anymore not because this game is good or bad but because I wanted to play those two other games instead I wanted a more contained and cohesive Vision this video is being published just on the very tale end of the iron trespass reprint campaign and I'm glad I got to see it before I finish the script because my what a mess there's the reprint but also expansions for the Rebrand but also a standalone expansion with its own expansions it's just more more gargantuan volumes expanding ever outward and if there was ever an indicator that the makers of this game have no interest in containing this into something cohesive that should be it you didn't even need to watch this video to reach that conclusion but if you did I am glad you are here with me at the end thank you for watching that was the longest video we've ever done it was incredibly tiring and consuming but I hope that it was useful or that you were at least entertained if you found value in this I'm not going to tell you to go to our patreon which is by the way patreon.com included if you want to but I will ask you to subscribe to our Channel because um we've only put out like no videos last month because we spend so much time working on this and sometimes that is punished by the algorithm so if you enjoy us delving deeper into big meteor games hit the Subscribe thing and you know I've literally never asked for this but but do the Bell thing like do the building where you get notified that a video comes out because we could really use numbers and I would really appreciate that so thanks very much bye bye

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 86,392

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, susd, watch it played, dice tower, shut up and sit down, solo game, single player, solo, bad, heavy, complicated, hard, co-op, dungeon crawler, boss battler, aeon trespass, odyssey, sins of herakles, reprint, into the unknown, preview, tutorial, explanation, story, minis, miniatures, campaign

Id: REoB9xZVVC8

Length: 62min 2sec (3722 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2023