I wrote this to try and explain to some of my non-board game playing friends just where I've been for the past week and how a really good board game can just devour your life.

Aeon Trespass: Odyssey is a bit of a weird game. It's part boss battler, part choose-your-own-adventure, all with a post-apocalyptic Greek mythology theme.

An event known as the Eschaton leveled Mount Olympus and killed all of the Olympian gods dwelling there in an instant. Now,giant beasts known as Titans and Primordials roam the land, sowing chaos and unrest all across Ancient Greece.

In Aeon Trespass: Odyssey, 1 to 4 players take control of characters called Argonauts, amnesiac men and women woken from cold storage on an ancient ship the size of a city called the Argo, all with the ability to psychically link with and control the giant Titans to battle the even more colossal monsters known as Primordials.

There are five different stories or campaigns in the game that link together to form one giant adventure or odyssey, and in each one the Argo and her crew get themselves involved in a particular conflict in a new region.

In Cycle I: Truth of the Labyrinth (which I spent most of the past week playing through solo), the Argo has come to Crete in search of a repsitory of machina and other resources known as Daedalus' Vault in order to make the newly resurrected Argo ship-shape and able to sail the high seas again. In the course of their travles, the Argonauts wind up also trying to find the missing King Minos, who is the only one who can guide them to the vault's location, while also trying to manage their diplomacy levels with the three factions currently vying for control of Crete: the Minoans, the dying embers of a tyrannical civilazation long in its twilight years; the Hornsworn, rebels of the empire who have banded together under the banner of Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur; and the Labyrinthians, the marginalized common people of Crete who have fallen into the teachings and preachings of a prophet known only as the Punished who preaches the truth of the Labyrinth, that of life having no meaning or purpose.

Occasionally you'll also be having your Argonauts junctions with their Titans in order to do battle against colossal Primordials, which takes the form of intense tactical battles of four Titans battling against a giant boss which dwarves them (it's always 4v1 regardless of the player count). Every Primordial has its own unique deck of cards controlling how its AI functions. Between these regularly scheduled battles you'll be voyaging on a unique map for each story and going on adventures choose-your-own-adventure book style, managing the Argo's hull, crew, and fate values along with the diplomacy tracks of all three factions and making choices that are marked and referenced in a giant choice matrix, so yes, your decisions here do matter and can have a drastic effect on how the story proceeds.

Truth of the Labyrinth is all about fighting despair and finding meaning even in a world that seems purposeless and devoid of hope, and IMO was an absolute joy to experience. I've just started Cycle II: Abysswatchers, and the story has changed gears completely as the Argo gets embroiled in a civil war in Sparta while also trying to stop the apothesios of a man known as the Nietzschean who is trying to become the literal god emperor of mankind. And Cycle III: Pitiless of the Sun is supposed to be about Icarus having trapped Delphi in a time loop while in the course of trying to correct his past mistakes. Needless to say, there is plenty of imagination on display here while at the same time ensuring that the story never gets stale.

I've loved the week I've spend with this board game so much, and I'm going to write up some more thoughts on it once I've completed the next campaign, but it's honestly not something I can easily recommend. For one thing, it's an expensive game, and for another due to its cost it's something that is only produced in limited print runs as it's not something that can be easily - or cheaply - mass produced for a retail release. Still, there is a mod for the game available to play on Tabletop Simulator if you know where to look, and if you ever have the opportunity to play Aeon Trespass: Odyssey then it's absolutely a once-in-a-lifetime experience if you can do so.