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A Review of The Last Tome an Accessory for Aeon Trespass: Odyssey | Cycles I to V

Added 2025-05-23 09:00:07 +0000 UTC

Preamble and Disclaimer: At the top of this year I decided that with Cycles IV and V coming out that 2025 was time for a full Aeon Trespass: Odyssey (ATO) run from start to finish. Before starting this journey I reached out to Marcin Welnicki from Into the Unknown (ITU) because I needed to pick up a few things that would allow me to do this. ITU sent me a copy of The Last Tome, a full set of the thick map tiles for every cycle and a copy of cycles IV and V. There are no conditions attached to sending these items to me and I have not been paid/compensated in any way beyond receiving the above items.

It was after completing the first cycle (ATO content continuing based on that First Cycle next month and every month after that for the near future) and experiencing how the Last Tome operated through that cycle and at the start of the transition to the next cycle that I decided I just had to review this accessory.

We start this review journey not with The Last Tome, but instead with a couple of other games. The first of which is Awaken Realm's ISS Vanguard. ISS Vanguard is a game I picked up for a potential review but after two attempts at getting through the first campaign story I once again hit an “off ramp” situation where I was simply too disengaged with the game and gave up. This happened with a previous game from Awaken Realms (Etherfields), except that Etherfields had revisions and updates that took away the main issues the game had (the grind) and allowed one to explore the environment and puzzles.

ISS Vanguard honestly needs that kind of attention, because the planetary missions in that game are slogs that can take hours to play through and are exhausting when playing solo or two player. The game claims that you can play through it with just two sectors (the player characters), but in truth this means that many missions end up requiring multiple runs except that some missions do not give you that option because they're one and done. It works out that the game is balanced for the max of 4 sectors being in the missions, but running four sectors was a massive cognitive, mechanical and time load for me.

The loop of the game is in essence:

Pick planet
Fly to planet and enjoy another KDM Hunt Phase level set of mechanics
Explore planet which has locations on it, some of which can change via card overlays to reveal other aspects of that location.
Roll dice and play cards during this exploration.
Repeat the step above for far too long.
Leave planet, hopefully never to return because that often resets large portions of the grind.
Manage ship.

It was exhausting, but I kept doing it not because of the mission structure, dice mechanics or section card play. However, that last bullet point on the list; manage ship, was the hook that kept me coming back over and over. So before we get into The Last Tome, I want to briefly explore that and explain why it was able to keep me playing ISS Vanguard when the main portion of the game's mechanics were just too over designed, clunky and cumbersome for my tastes.

This is the ship book, it's a folder that essentially abstracts the ISS Vanguard and breaks it down into a number of sections. You will follow the book from front to back and it will walk you through the entire process of setting up the ship phase, handling all the operations onboard and then setting you up for undertaking a mission, returning from said mission and organising all of the various discoveries and their relevant consequences.

The book breaks apart into three main types of page. There's the ship phase step pages, like these two pages that tell you what you need to do in order to handle the given phases. These two pages go through all the steps involved in launching to a mission and returning from it.

This page is a storage page, there are a few of these, this one has various Lander modules to pick and choose from in order to try and set up your lander as well as possible for the mission. There is also a page where you keep multiple different landers, various rare discoveries that are story related and even one for memorialising deceased crew members.

The other kind of page is probably the best kind, these are the “doing things” pages and include Research, Production and the Medical Bay. Here you don't just store the cards, but also you will perform various other actions, in the case of research above, if you have the right tech along with crewmembers with the correct skills then you can take these projects out of the pocket pages, read the backs and gain the relevant things, which can be lander modules, upgrades for the ISS Vanguard or new technology to produce.

The technology and medical bays (which I didn't take pictures of) are even more exciting because they have a row of card slots represent the production conveyor belt (or medical bay spots), with the productions gradually moving from left to right as they head towards completion and the medical bay slots being full if there is a crew card in there. This is all great 'mechanical design by action rather than just reading' and I absolutely loved it. In fact I loved it so much that when I heard about Space Kraken which is an entirely book based spaceship management/exploration game, I jumped on getting it (I am still waiting for this game, which should be shipping to me in November this year). I also chatted back in 2023 with Marcin about how good the ISS Vanguard ship book was and he mentioned that Space Kraken was the first place that he saw this kind of design.

All of this is a part of this review because I wanted to highlight how important a good form of base management, be that space ship, settlement or boat, can be transformative. Video Games like X-Com and the first Darkest Dungeon blazed a trail with this kind of engaging bureaucracy that takes place when your individual characters are in their down time and board games have just started to adapt this into a physical form.

That brings us to the actual review of The Last Tome, what it looks like, what it does and my thoughts on how useful this is for playing through ATO's cycles. Starting with a breakdown of its contents page by page.

Here is the tome and tuck box as they look fresh out of the box. I will not be reviewing the tuck box here because I already had a complete solution for Cycles I to III via the Fancy But Functional insert (Review in the ATO Collection), so until I reach Cycle IV I can't give it a good thorough test, but I will say that the visual design of it is beautiful, it is sturdy and it has a lot of flexibility in how you use the dividers. All of these are very promising points for its future.

Our first page is the instructions for how to use the binder and tuck box, they are very comprehensive and also stress that players should feel free to move pages around and customise the binder to suit their needs. I do think that letting players know that customisation is an option is always a good thing because it can free up anyone who feels the need to be a 'purist'. Board games are activities constructed around following rules, having the creators of a game expressly tell players when it is intended for the player to have freedom of choice to alter things in a way that suits their preferences is an important addition and I appreciate it here.

Our next pages are the beginning of the tome itself, we have here a pocket page for storing your cycle campaign sheet and the breakdown of the first steps of a round. This part of the design of this folder works in the same way as ISS Vanguard did, everything is set up to walk you through all the steps in the correct order and it is a great help in ensuring that you do not miss any vital parts of what is a complicated set of operations at times. It is honestly such a help to have a physical process with the steps written out because then you don't need to learn it all, allowing focus to instead be on the story, the various advancement tech trees/equipment and the battles against the Primordials.

Here you can see that we not only have the steps in notation form, but we also have those gorgeous Ancient Greek style illustrations decorating the page in a fun manner and a QR code that'll take you to the sound track for the game if you want that further enhancement (You scan them in using the ATO Story App and it will play them, honestly every track I've listened to so far is a banger). Note there does seem to be a typo on the top of the second page, it refers to the Pursuer icon rather than the Adventure one. Not a big deal, but you might want to cover it with a replacement sticker if possible.

We have the tail end of the Expedition Step rules explanation followed by the start of the encounter step rules, again with access to a different sound track via a QR code.

The folder dividers for this step can, when the individual Argonaut pages are removed, operate as a dashboard for the Primordial. I didn't use this because I could not fit it underneath my battle mat and also I felt that the mat covered the various spaces sufficiently, but having this is a nice option. In particular it is great for players who do not want to keep the primordial and other tokens around the battle mat because of space considerations. Again it is nice to have options that take up no space even if you don't use them and in particular I really like the design of the wound stack if you choose to use this board.

The next pages have mosaic spoiler obscuring for elements that were unlocked during the first cycle, I've spoiler protected most things in order to help preserve the mysteries that you may encounter during play, ATO is so much more heavily bent towards its story and the gradual revelations that are uncovered by players, as such it can be hard to cover outside of the Primordial Battles because not only are there really cool secrets and surprises that have amazing moments in them, but also the adventure system makes everyone's experience unique in so many ways.

Here is the post battle section and it is where the Argonauts and Titans are stored between sessions. There is room for the Argonaut portrait, plus their mnemos cards.

One thing to note here is that we have four spaces for mnemos and similar, but the four slots are not all the same size, the one that is adjacent to the argonaut portrait is narrower than the rest. I checked with ITU to make sure that it wasn't a manufacturing error, and they confirmed that it was the same for all printings and wasn't an error to be corrected. This is the first issue that I found with the Tome. Not only does it mean that we have a slightly displeasing look due to three of the pockets matching completely and the fourth one looking noticeably different, but if you sleeve the mnemos and similar cards that would go in these slots, you will probably have to remove the sleeve if you want to use that particular pocket as you can see with these two pictures.

Fits without Sleeve.

Does not fit with sleeve (GameGenic Ultra Matt Standard size).

This is not a major issue, and it is nowhere near a deal breaker, but it could have been avoided if the portrait was just a few mm nearer to the outside long edge. There's no mechanical or layout reason for the smaller pocket, but it does exist and I did partially split one of those small pockets before I realised that it wasn't the same as the other three.

The other issue here is that these pages are double sided, so you always have to take everything out when playing because there are Argonauts on both the front and back. This is a shame because if we had four individual pages for the Argonauts then those pages could be handed out and kept on the table because elements only need to be removed and updated on the occasional moment. We have the same situation with the Titan pages, four pages, double-sided, so two pairs of titans back to back which means they cannot be used as Titan dashboards during the battle. You can see that in the above pictures.

These Titan Dashboards have a large pocket at the bottom for the titan card and then eight pockets above for equipment and any other unique modifiers a given titan might have. In all honesty I wish I had at least 10 of these pages, because not only do you get extra unique titans, but also some of the standard Dreamwalker titans can get unique elements that mark them out from the rest. Having storage for additional titans would have been really welcome and I do think that we should have got at least four pages for the Argonauts and the option to get extra for the titans in order to allow those pages to be taken out of the binder, organising play and speeding up battle set up because you can leave your titans mostly preset for the next upcoming timeline battle and only swap out the relevant gear where appropriate.

I have checked with ITU and while there is currently no way to order additional pages at the moment, they have confirmed that if there is sufficient interest this may change. They have also confirmed that if you damage your pages there is a replacement service, so any “undoing” of the seams between pockets cause by tearing can get replacements. Also all of the pockets in this folder except for the four mnemos pockets I mentioned above are large enough for sleeved cards.

So if you feel that your campaign would benefit from more pages the same way I do, this is something that could be addressed with perhaps a “Argonaut and Titan” additional pages pack for sale on the ITU online store. We just need to let them know that we're willing to purchase them.

Our next few pages are where we keep the various technology cards, the backs of these pages have been colour coded with this teal which is a neat visual aid to help categorise the differences between these cards and the various equipment cards. It wasn't needed, but it looks good and I appreciate it.

These pages have a few different layouts depending on how many larger cards may be needed. It is worth noting that you need to be very diligent with your tracking of potential new technologies because the unlock requirements for those technologies tend to reference the text that is on the backs of these completed technologies, I had a couple of moments where I had to remove cards in order to check the backs before I switched to using a printed out tech tree in order to keep track of my progress.

The various equipment technologies are kept in the teal pockets and we have the black small pocket pages for which are used for storing cycle clues or equipment we have constructed. I did tear a couple of the seams for these smaller pockets halfway because I'm clumsy, but again if that happens and you want to get replacements ITU has a support replacement policy for that.

I don't have too many specific comments for the remaining pages, so we'll walk through them so you can see how everything is and laid out and all aspects of the game's rounds are covered.

Excursion Propylon plus Argo Abilities

Story Step with spaces for the cycle story cards and the aforementioned page for clues.

Nymphs

Spark of the Dead Gods

Mausoleum rules and the Mnemos Vault.

Doom and End Step where you will thematically loop back to the start of the folder

Icon references, which are so useful. This double-sided page is such a time and space saver!

Final Thoughts

The Last Tome is an absolutely transformative addition to the game, one that makes everything so smooth to operate that I really feel that this kind of 'base folder' is as important and as transformative an addition to to the dungeon crawling and boss battling subgenre as the Gear Grid and AI/BP card deck systems have been – this binder is my third favourite boss battling mechanic after those two previous ones (Gear Grid, Behaviour decks).

This is so good that if ITU had integrated a version of this into the game from the very beginning I think that every single review would have given the highest praise to the experience of using such a system and mechanisms. I cannot see myself going back and playing a game like this without such an element because it not only helps in making sure all the rules are followed, it also allows for less remembering of various steps because you are moving through the individual steps physically, you always have them to hand and you are able to move segments of this binder about if it makes more sense for you to say have equipment options in the battle section alongside the titans who are using them.

The quality of this product is also excellent, but even if something is misprinted or gets damaged knowing that ITU have post purchase support for players is great and my experiences with ITU's customer support have always been top notch. That matters when we have custom pockets like the ones in this product. I

've also not mentioned the tactile feel of this binder, it's nice, the cover is soft and textured and everything turns cleanly without snagging. It feels like it is built to last multiple runs through the entire set of cycles and beyond. Luxurious and practical.

I hope that ITU continue this direction with their upcoming releases, we'll see if Kingdoms Forlorn warrants such a thing with maybe small individual folders for the knights, but that might be too far into production if it has not already been designed. I could see Enormity absolutely benefiting from some similar 'base folder' being baked into a central part of the game the way that ISS Vanguard uses pages not just as storage spaces, but as elements of manufacturing or bays for healing.

It's an exciting time and ITU is a company that is eyes open when it comes to innovations in board games and that is such a good philosophy to have. Boss Battlers exist because of innovations upon the dungeon crawler genre, roleplaying games and video games like Monster Hunter, taking inspiration from other games and then putting a fresh new spin on them is the way that we move forward with all kinds of games, iterating, reiterating and streamlining.

That's what The Last Tome is for me, a reiteration of ATO's game round that condenses everything together while also streamlining the mental load into being something that I do not have to hold in my head or grab reference sheets for. I turn the page, read the next section, take the actions and then move forward to the next moment. It's left me with more space to enjoy the writing in the adventure books and dwell upon the narrative and themes. For me it has been transformative in both mechanical experience and enjoyment and I cannot recommend it enough.

Additional Mini Review - The Hardback Versions of Aeon Trespass: Odyssey's books

I was also sent these two sleeves holding hardback versions of the various rule and story books that have paperback versions in the boxes. I looked at these and they are gorgeous, too gorgeous for me to bring myself to use them during play. Here's the Learn to Play and Rulebook

The print quality is high, as you can see we have a ribbon for bookmarking a key page so they have practical additions. I've flipped through them all and been highly impressed, but I've decided to save them for reading through the excellent writing or as a second copy for when my partner joins the games so they have a seperate book to read from. They have also managed to free me up from feeling guilty about writing in the paper back story books (marking off story events as they happen) because there are still these pristine copies to keep around.