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Leviathan Wilds Review – Shadow of the Colossus in an Evening
🕑 Added 2024-05-10 08:00:05 +0000 UTC
Leviathan Wilds is a 1 to 4 player Boss Battler where players take the role of climbers scaling around gigantic creatures, avoiding attacks while seeking to destroy the crystals that have infected and frenzied the leviathans.
The new and unique elements that this game brings to the genre are the card and deck mechanics, where players will spend cards either for action points or special abilities, while having to manage their grip which is represented by their deck. If their deck is empty, their grip fails and they will fall down until they reach a ledge space. The other major unique element are the leviathans themselves, who are the very board that players navigate around, each one featuring a different combination of ledges, difficult terrain, harmful spots and many other varied spaces.
Components
Leviathan Wilds is close to a perfect home run on the component front; the box is perfectly sized with no spared space, and it has a smooth opening and closing action which is so satisfying that I felt the need to write about it here.
Inside the insert is very well engineered, with spaces for all components including card wells that take into account sleeved card dimensions. I am not a big fan of plastic inserts, but when they are designed this well I can accept it because the insert will last the lifespan of the game due to having no reason to dispose of it.
Player boards are double layer with some clever design that allows for useful cut outs on the front and back of the board and they are great at keeping your player area organised and on top of that it has some wonderful user interface design that explains the flow of cards with arrows.
The Cimber Meeples (Climeeples), so much character expressed in the screen printing.
Tokens are thick and chunky meaning they are easy to pick up, and the screen printed meeples that represent the cast of climbers are gorgeous. Just as gorgeous is the Book of Leviathans, a spiral bound book that has all 17 leviathans inside it, this is the game's board and it is well sized, big enough to be legible when playing but no larger than it needs to be.
There is one area where the quality is not up to the same standard as the rest and that is the cards, while the design of the cards is clear and the artwork is great – the thickness of these cards is behind what would be expected for most game cards. This means that they will wear quickly due to the amount of shuffling and handling these cards will be subject to per game. As such players who are going to play this game often, or who play with younger gamers, will need to invest in some sleeves. I've played card games all my life and can identify by touch very quickly when cards are durable or not, and sadly Leviathan Wild's cards are not at the same high standard everything else that comes in the box is at. Fortunately the box card wells have sufficient dimensions for sleeved cards, so it is not a large deal, just an extra expense to consider.
I would have also like to see a reference sheet or cards for the various abilities, something that can be handed around, or each player can have, so they can quickly look up the various other keyword abilities that are on the cards like Anchor. This is something that likely will be solved with a fan created reference though.
Gameplay
A Game in progress, this is Magus/Hazard and Cheer/Roughneck against the easiest leviathan The Sage.
At the start of the game, players will select a leviathan they wish to play against, along with choosing a climber and class. All of these have varying levels of complexity and the game does a good job of signalling how complex and challenging various elements will be. This process also ensures that there are a massive amount of different set up options and climbers/classes for all skill levels of player.
The leviathan's pages in the book have some spaces where mushrooms and dice will be placed, and it is a node based map with printed points of interest. These points represent things like ledges where climbers can rest, yellow areas of difficult terrain, red areas of harmful terrain, mushroom spaces where face down mushroom tokens are placed and most importantly of all, teal and purple crystal nodes where matching coloured dice will be put to represent the crystal located there and how durable it is. These are the targets for the players and the goal is to navigate this board and break all those crystals before a climber succumbs to a loss of health, too much blight or a combination of these two elements. If one climber is defeated, the others will have a last chance to complete their goals or the game is a loss for the players.
The Leviathan also gets a set of cards which are dealt beneath the turn tracker, these cards are double sided, with one half representing the normal threats and the other being the enraged threats. At the start of the game these will be on their normal side, but at higher difficulties some of them will start off enraged (cards enrage from the left to right in order, but the ordering is randomised each turn).
The Climbers themselves have a player board, a climber card, a class card, a health tracker, a focused token and most importantly a deck of cards that also represents their grip (think climbing stamina in video game terms). This deck is constructed from the cards that come with the climber and with the class that has been selected. So one game you could play Brick/Freeclimber, next time it could be Brick/Magus or Hornet/Freeclimber or Cheer Mender. The information about how each combination will play is well signalled for newer players and while all combination are not completely equal, which ones are good can vary depending not just on the climber/class combo but also the leviathan you are navigating around. Each player will place their climeeple will be placed on a starting row ledge, shuffle up their deck, draw a hand of three cards and they are ready to go.
The Turn
Flow of a turn is as follows; first step has the current threat card revealed, if it is an attack that has physical impact on the board and an area of effect then red plastic ring markers will be placed around the targets to indicate the originating space for the attack. These can also be effects that do not use the board and instead impact a specific category of climber directly (such as active, next, highest and so on).
The attack marker in action. In combination with the card this lets the players clearly see where the attack is centred and work out all the spaces impacted by the area of effect damage.
Now that the player has seen 'the signal' for the attack that is going to happen at step three, they now play a card into their action points slot and get the corresponding number of action points to spend on various actions. Also the card may have symbols that protect against certain hazards (damage, difficult terrain, blight). This is the most complicated portion of the game as there are six different actions here on top of the amount of AP and the kind of node protection you get.
Climb X is the basic one, for 1 Action Point (AP) a climber can move one node orthogonally (horizontal or vertical). Jump costs 3AP and moves a climber two nodes, ignoring the intervening terrain, also Jumps can allow climbers to cross gaps where there are no nodes to climb on and can allow climbers to jump diagonally.
Glide X represents a controlled fall and it has the climber moving left or right to a space below the climber. The amount spent is based on the spaces down or down/diagonal. Rest costs 2AP and allows a climber to reshuffle their discard pile onto the bottom of their deck, but can only be performed when on a ledge node. This is how a climber maintains their ability to grip while also getting back cards spent on AP or special actions. Mend costs 1AP, can be done anywhere and regains 1 health.
Last of all we have Strike X, this is used when in the space as a binding crystal and it will reduce the die there by the amount spent – if it is reduced to zero the die is removed as the crystal has been broken, otherwise it stays for future turns. In the case of purple crystals this has no additional impact, but teal crystals are “blighted” and each strike against them will increase the Climber's blight by one (this is one blight per strike regardless of how many AP is spent on the individual strike). This system here encourages climbers to arrive at a blighted crystal and wait until they can break it in a single swing or have a card that negates blight; blight is in essence a permanent reduction to your health and as such limiting gains or negating them entirely is a key thing players should keep in mind.
Climbers also have some “Anytime Actions” that they can use in between actions of their turn, during other climber's turns and even just before a leviathan threat effect. This are spending a card to use the skill on it. Using your climber's character card skill if the right conditions have been met. Foraging a mushroom or using a mushroom's effect. Last of all there is the ability to “let go” where a climber will fall downwards until they reach a ledge, the risk here is if they pass through any hazardous (red) nodes they will suffer a point of damage for each.
After the climber's turn the threat card will resolve and if climber(s) are in the target area/resolution then they will suffer the consequences. This can include other climbers, not just the one who has taken their turn. Which is where anytime actions come into their own, not only can climbers “let go” to drop, but they could play anytime actions to avoid consequences of an attack for themselves or even sometimes for other climbers. The anytime actions add a lot of extra depth and opportunities for cooperative play.
Finally at the end of the turn, a player can choose to discard cards from hand will draw back up to three cards. This is one of the ways that climbers can lose grip, if you haven't managed your deck size well enough you will fall at this stage.
In addition to this turn cycle, there is also a round cycle which is set by the Leviathan's cards. Once all five cards have been turned face up and resolved, the round marker will advance, possibly enraging a card for the rest of the game, and the leviathan cards will be randomised and replaced on the track in their new orientation. This is the game's timer, the longer things take, the more dangerous the leviathan will become.
There is so much to love about all of these systems, the AP and Grip mechanics are intuitive and easy to understand, likewise the way that the leviathan signals its attack in advance allows for smart play and gives agency to the players. All of this is great and it is just the basic framework for the game; classes, climbers and leviathans can mix this all up in a wide range of different ways, for example one leviathan is located underwater and “falling” now happens upwards and climbers now have to manage oxygen levels. That's just one wrinkle this game has to throw at you, there are many more. I've not even scratched the surface of the mutations expansion where the existing leviathans get new abilities inspired by other leviathan in the game for example.
Summary
The Hunger Leviathan.
Leviathan Wilds is a game that fits right into a gap in the board game space, its combination of climbing and boss battling is fresh and unique. The game is a high quality production with an amazing aesthetic, I especially love the twist that the players are healing the leviathans rather than killing them, it brings the genre to players who might be turned off by the idea of killing these titans.
This game is intuitive and easy to learn the basics for, but it is very challenging to master and even includes multiple ways of adjusting the difficulty, different leviathans offer different challenges, the various classes and characters have variable complexity and one can even move the round marker back further at the start of the game to give newer or younger players more time to get to grips with things before the leviathan starts to become more threatening. It really is a game designed with re-playability and accessibility in mind. I've not even gotten to highlight how diverse and inclusive the cast of climbers are, with Kestral being non-binary and Brick being disabled via the loss of one arm. The character of these climbers is varied and a delight to see how they are expressed through the card art, climeeples (as I've ended up calling the climber meeples) and snippets of text.
Leviathan Wilds is one of the freshest takes on the still emerging boss battling genre and it is a breath of fresh air in how unique and engaging this small box can be. I cannot recommend this one enough for fans of games like Shadow of the Colossus, experienced boss battlers, people looking for a game to introduce younger gamers to the genre and gamers in general. Leviathan Wilds is every bit as good a game as you would expect from a team with people like the pedigree of designer Justin Kemppainen and in my opinion it is a solid contender for the type of game that should be recommended for every gamer's collection.
There will be a reprint campaign along with an expansion for this game later this year, I'll post an announcement here and on the discord when the follow page or launch page is up.
Comments
Jake Crowe
Sounds like an awesome game! Thanks for the heads up.
