The second I saw Leviathan Wilds on Kickstarter I knew I had to back it. The concept is simple, players work together to cure Leviathan's of a blight that's causing them to go crazy. You scale the monster, cure the blight, and then call it a day. We played two of the Leviathan's, and had a wildly different experience each time, but we had fun both times as well. Moon Crab games really made a solid game. Here's why.
I mean just look at this map. The game contains several leviathans to cure (a little less than 20 I believe), and the concept is so easy yet can become so complex. The dice you see on the poor turtle are it's blight counters, you need to climb to each one, and hack it away until the dice becomes a zero, then you remove it. Each turn you climb, you remove, and then the turtle tries to buck you. Then your teammate goes, cures, then turtle attacks. It's a quick gameplay loop with some beautiful artwork as a board, genius. If you look closely at the map you can see yellow and red dots on some of the climb spots. The red spots do one damage to you, and the yellow cards make you discard a card, which weakens your grip (your deck). Once your deck is empty, your grip slips, and you fall to the bottom of the map, hitting all yellow and reds on the way. There's a bit more to it than that, but that's all you really to know about how the traversal works. I don't want to spoil the other leviathans so I'll keep this review to the two we fought, but the art for each is awesome, and climbing each one is very different. The climbing is easily the best part of the game, and the makers of this game knew that. Most of the cards help you climb, jump, glide; whatever it takes to move around like it's Shadow of the Colossus. But Moon Crab Games went a step further, and created a card system and a deck building system that really makes this game a delight and gives it more replay value.
This is a general overview of the player set up. You get a nicely made player sheet, with a space for health cubes and blight cubes, and the concept is you have to avoid losing health and getting blight. If both cubes meet, you lose. The player mat is perfect, neat, concise, and has all the info you need on what to do on your turn. You generally have three cards in your hand, so I displayed them on top of my player mat. I was very impressed with the quality of everything. The cards, the cubes, the player mat, THE CUBES, really all of it was made with care and attention to detail. The cards themselves were interesting too, they let you either play them to get that many actions on the top left of the card, OR you can do the action on the bottom of the card. Because I'm a degenerate, I picked the gambler class, so all my cards were about flipping coins to get better effects.
A blurry shot of a card but still a card! The concept of each card is simple, the art is cute, and the rules of each are simple. Basically you get two cards based on which character you pick, then another set of cards for which class you pick. So the deck mostly consists of your class cards, and a couple powerful character cards, all shuffled together to make one deck. So you can mix or match as you see fit. For example, the second leviathan we fought was a giant tree with hornets, and we did NOT do well. But after playing it the first time we were better equipped with the knowledge of which techniques/abilities we needed to bring along with us for the next attempt. The replay value is also greatly improved by having different classes and characters to pick from for each playthrough.
And finally just a quick look at the game in action. You can see our pieces climbing it, and a red AOE marker for where the turtle is going to attack next, which was a little odd to place on the spaces near the binding but still a pretty cool feature/piece. Also love that the player pieces can face either way, so looking at your back as you climb the turtle is just so perfect.
Summary
Leviathan Wilds is a simple, quick, and fun cooperative game that really does feel unique. You can tell the creators of this game put their love into it, and it makes for a fun game with plenty of replay value and challenge. Worthy of a buy, so get scaling!
Score
9/10
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