LogFAQs > #985834918

#08 - Leviathan Wilds
My Score: 7.5
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/358737/leviathan-wilds

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This is the first game on my list that we actually went and checked out from the library. The library is the Dice Tower's collection of games that I believe they bring to all their conventions. You can check out anything in the library, first come first served. They have over 2000 games in the library, a lot of the games are upgraded with better components. It's a pretty impressive collection and they had a decent sized room that was dedicated to it. Checking a game out is pretty simple, they scan the board games barcode, they scan your badge barcode, and then you can't check out another game until you return it. They also have catalogs to help you find games.

Anyway we checked this game out and this was also the only game I played without any strangers the entire time I was there. I basically read through the rules while my friends grabbed some coffee first thing in the morning on the last day.

So Leviathan Wilds is a co-op game where you are working together to climb and heal these giant leviathans. Each leviathan has its own page in a booklet, similar to the maps in jaws of the lion if you are familiar with that. There are 17 different leviathans in the book and each game seems to take around 45 minutes to an hour. There's also different difficulties to improve replayability.

So each leviathan has its own unique set of 5 cards, you will randomly shuffle them and lay them down left to right with the purple side pointing up. You then flip over the first x cards to the teal side pointing up (to clarify the cards are still face down, there's just colors on the the top and bottom). The x here depends on how enraged the leviathan is, with higher difficulties raising the starting enrage meter.

There's also various spots on each leviathan to put either a teal or purple die with a number on it. These represent the crystals that are corrupting the leviathan that you are trying to heal. So you set these dice on the appropriate spots with the appropriate starting values. You also put some mushrooms on the appropriate spots and the board is setup.

Each player will pick a combination of a character and a class, take the cards for both and shuffle them together to form their deck that is around 10 cards. You do any setup specific to the character or class, set your starting health to the max and starting blight to 0 and draw three cards. Each player will also pick a place to start their climber out of the starting spaces (on the one we did it was just the bottom row. After this the game can begin.

So you win the game by healing (removing) all of the dice off the leviathan. A climber dies when their health meets or crosses their blight and at that point the other climbers have one turn each to try to win otherwise you lose the game. There's no time limit per se, but as the game goes on the leviathan gets more and more enraged meaning you get more and more teal sided cards which are more dangerous and damaging.

So a turn is made up of 4 steps. The first step is to reveal the threat, which means flipping over the leftmost facedown leviathan card keeping the appropriate color on the top. (It doesn't resolve yet). This will let you know what the monster is going to do so you can prepare for it on your turn. There's a couple of different things it can do but typical is an attack focusing on one or more of the climbers (usually the active player).

Do note that an attack has a pattern depending on the card, but its center is where the climber is when the card is flipped, not when its resolved. So you will put a little red circle around the targets spot so you know where the attack is originating even after you move. This means you have a chance to move out of the area it's going to affect. It also seems to discourage grouping so you don't accidentally get another player hit by an attack targeting you.

The second part of a turn is to activate the climber. You will typically have three cards in hand, and each card has an effect on the bottom and a number on the top left. You start your turn by playing one of the cards for it's number on the top left which gives you ap for the turn. You can then spend AP on climbing (moving one space orthogonal), jumping (moving 2 spaces orthogonal or one space diagonal), gliding (moving downwards efficiently), resting, healing or striking a crystal. You can also use your cards in your hand or your characters skills at any relevant time

On the topic of resting, by default you do not get the cards you've played into your discard back into your hand. The only way to get them back is by resting, which requires 2 ap and that you are on a ledge. A ledge is a space with a white line beneath it and are scattered through the map, with the entire bottom seeming to be ledges (so you can't fall off the map). The other important thing about ledges is if you ever start falling for any reason you will stop once you reach a ledge.

Falling is interesting in this game, because it doesn't actually hurt you in any way (you are still effected by the spaces you traveled through while falling however) and can actually be desirable in some cases if you need to get down or need to rest. You can end up falling in three ways: voluntarily letting go, entering an "empty" space where there isn't anything to grab onto, or if your deck is ever completely empty. So it might make sense to try and accomplish whatever you are doing and then just get over a ledge and let yourself fall so you can refill your deck and keep going.

The last action to go over is striking a crystal. Striking a crystal takes AP equal to the amount of damage you want to do it. If a dice has a 4 face you can spend 4 ap on a strike to completely remove it, or if you spend 3 it will just flip to the 1 side. You don't have to do it in one go (and sometimes can't for the higher numbers depending on your class. But if you remember I said there are two different dice colors. Purple dice are just normal, damage them until you remove them. But teal dice are blighted and each time you strike them (regardless of the damage you do) you take one point of blight so it encourages bigger fewer attacks on them.

After the climber has finished their turn, the threat now resolves. Attacks resolve based on the red circle, and other types of effects (such as an event that says the highest climber loses 1 health) resolve taking the current state of the game. You typically want to spread the damage around, or have it go to someone with defensive abilities so there's some strategy in tweaking who will be the person targeted during your turn. Once the fifth card is resolved you advance the enrage meter by 1 and shuffle the 5 cards and place them again, flipping the new appropriate number of cards to the teal side.

The final step is the climber draws back to 3 cards, immediately falling if their deck becomes empty.

Overall I enjoyed this a good bit for what it was. We just played the first leviathan on hard difficulty (the third of four difficulties, the enrage started at one card being enraged from the get go). It was still fairly easy but I think that's just the nature of the first leviathan (It was a giant turtle, I actually think they call it the tutorial). I glanced at a few of the later leviathans and they seemed to be harder to move around on and a lot more empty space so I definitely think the game will be challenging on the highest difficulty on some of the leviathans.