Leviathan Wilds was on Kickstarter first in July 2022, but then they pulled it down and re-tooled it: they were on again on May 2023 (see Kickstarter link here) and ended funding at a pretty good level at about $208K. This cooperative boss-battler game was on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024 and finally delivered to me in early May 2024 (about 2 weeks ago).

This game has a very interesting theme: it’s basically the old PS2 game Shadow Of The Colossus!

The board game plays 1-4 players, but the original PS2 game was a solo game! In the original PS2 game, players have to take down very large creatures by climbing their huge bodies and attacking certain points, all the while with the Colossus attacking them! It’s a very interesting theme!

In this board game (see sample above), you fight one of 17 Leviathans (you can’t call them Colossus … you wanna get sued?) and win if you can free the Leviathan of its constraints! Leviathan Wilds has a friendlier theme than the original Shadows Of the Colossus: rather than attacking the Leviathan, you are healing the Leviathan by taking out the Binding Crystals. So, when you and your friends cooperatively win … you have freed the Leviathan, rather than killing it!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

Players choose a Leviathan to help from the Book of Leviathans. 

Each Leviathan is a massive 2-page spread from the book! Sage, above, is the suggested first Leviathan to help.

Each Leviathan has its own small deck of Threat cards (5) and some story cards.  See the Introduction above.

The 5 Threat Cards (just below the Leviathan) control what the Leviathan does at the end of the turn(s).   

Some Threat Cards attack the current player with an area of effect!  

See above as the area of effect above on the Threat Card (it’s just the orthogonally adjacent to the original site).  If your climber can get out of the area by the time your activation is complete, you can avoid the attack completely!

At the end of 5 turns, the Threat deck is reshuffled and comes out again.  To escalate the game’s difficulty, each Threat Card has two rotations:  blue and purple, with the blue rotation being the “harder” challenge!  See above!! As the game progresses, more and more of the blue sides are revealed, making the game harder!  

To win, players cooperatively must take out all the Binding Crystals (represented by dice) at various points around the Leviathan.   See one such Binding Crystal above.  You spend Action Points (or cards) to reduce the value of the die, until it is zero, at which point you remove it!

There are quite a number of Binding Crystals set-up at the start of the game (purple and blue: purple Binding Points are straight-forward, blue Binding Points have side-effects). See above.

Each player takes control of one of eight Climbers! These Climbers climb (duh) the Leviathan to take out the Binding Crystals! See the eight different Climbers above and below.

Each climber has a personality and special unique ability: see above.  Each climber also has a small hand of cards.

Climbers then choose a Class (one of eight) to play:  See above.  Each class also adds a number of cards to your deck.

Combined together, the Climber and Class form your personality and your deck! See above as Kestrel the Breaker takes form and becomes a character in the game!

The deck is what powers your character!  You have three multi-use cards (in hand) every turn that you can use for Actions Points or their Special Abilities!  See above and below.

Players have a certain number of Action Points per turn, depending on which card they play to start their turn.  Like we said, the cards are all multi-use cards: you can either play them to get Action Points (upper left corner), or as-is to get its effect (bottom of the card).  

There are basic Actions (see above for a list of actions on your character board) that each cost a number of Action Points.  Some Climbers (like Kestrel) have special Actions only they can perform with their Action Points.

Every turn, a Threat card comes out, specifying what the Leviathan does.  You may/will take that effect after you activate … sometimes you can avoid the effect completely if you play smartly (by either blocking or moving out of the way).  The player takes his full activation and DOES STUFF: moving around, playing cards, and trying to take out the Binding Points.  Threat cards take effect after the activation, and play moves to the next Climber.  

Repeat until players take out all Binding Crystals or lose (by dying)!  See above for a winning game with two Climbers!

Cool Things

The number of cards in your deck represents your grip: if your deck (left) is ever empty, you immediately fall until you hit a platform!  This deck sort of reminds of Gloomhaven, but rather than the deck being your hit points, the deck represents how “well” you are holding on!  It’s a cool ballet in the game, knowing when to rest (to recoup your grip) and when to push ahead (to get stuff done).

The multi-use cards are quite clever: you HAVE to choose a card to play for its Action Points at the start of your turn, but that means you can’t use the special ability on it!  It’s a very clever way to make players really think about what they want to do with the cards they have!

The components are pretty top notch in this game.  

There’s a lot of variety in this game: there are 64 combinations of Climber/Class, each with their own unique deck!  There’s also 17 Leviathans, each with a very different Threat Deck!   Some of the fun in this game is exploring the best combos for the different Leviathans!  I expect to lose many games as I learn some of the later Leviathans … but with loss comes knowledge on how to win!

It’s also clever that the Threats don’t take effect until AFTER you have activated your turn: this sort of represents the interplay in a Video Game! You see what the Leviathan is about to do, and you can react! Sometimes you can mitigate the effect and sometimes you can’t, but it’s a clever way to that Video Game interplay.

One other multi-use card thing that’s cool is some cards that you play as Action Points have a “blocking” icon underneath the Action Points!  If you play Hidden Paths above for 4 Actions Points, that also means you can’t lose any “grip” (cards from your deck) during your activation!

So that means you can using the cards for Action Points as well as possible blocking!  That makes the choices even more delicious!   The multi-use cards are just fantastic in this game.

Solo Play: Two Modes

So, Congratulations on offering an official solo mode!  (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!)  The official solo mode has the solo player operate two characters with a combined deck.

The Solo Play is described on page 11 of the rulebook (see above).  

The solo player chooses two Climber and one Class deck, and  then combines them to form “the solo deck”: both characters use this same deck for their play.  Play alternates between the two Climbers, using that same deck for both characters.  The idea, I think, is to reduce management overhead by only having one deck.

This is the official solo mode (above).  It is fine. I played and was able to win with the second Leviathan.

However, I think the better solo mode is simply to take complete control of two Climbers, each with their own deck!  (Like above)! I like the “solo player takes control of two Climbers with separate decks” rule better than the official solo mode.  Why?

1. The official solo mode has “exceptional” rules you have to remember (only get 7 cards when you rest, both chars fall when the grip runs out, etc).
2. The solo player with two characters with separate decks is more like the cooperative game; I have to teach my friends this game, so I’d rather just learn the cooperative game as it is!

Basically, the official solo mode has exceptions to the base rules which I have to remember.  I’d much rather just play the game in “normal” mode without any exceptions: it makes it that much easier to teach!

Both solo modes are very fine and very fun and very playable.  The official solo mode has less management and takes up less space (see above).  The unofficial solo mode with two Climbers and two decks requires operating more cards and takes up more space, but it feels more like the normal game (see below). I personally prefer the latter: play as if it were a 2-Player game, just alternating between the characters.  Decide for yourself! They both work!

Cooperative Mode

Cooperative mode works great!  Sara had a chance to watch a rules playthrough earlier, so we were able to jump right in!

We tended to mostly play our own characters, with a little bit of coordination about which Binding Crystals to go after.   I think each player felt very different: my Climber/Class had a lot of blocking power, and Sara’s never saw a single blocking card!

Sara also reminded of a rule that tends to evoke more cooperation … you can throw Mushrooms to each other!  The maps have some Mushrooms (see above) scattered about!  And Mushrooms all do good things! You can throw a mushroom to help your compatriot … if you are close enough!  

Generally, this game went over very well ! The theme really impressed by friends, they loved the art, and they loved the quick 60-minute game!

I think the amount of cooperation depends a little on the Climber/Class pairs you choose. The “Saavy” Climber (see above) tends to be very useful at helping everyone in the game at some point, so playing “Saavy” will elicit more cooperation! “Fix” (above), on the other hand, is just focused on “Hit It Harder”, so he will tend to just do his own thing.

The amount of cooperation will depend on a lot of things: the Climbers, the Classes, the Mushrooms, and the topology of the Leviathan! The game may feel multi-player solitaire in some games, and incredibly cooperative in other games!

Conclusion

Leviathan Wilds was, luckily, a good game! I was a little nervous about it, because frankly I hadn’t heard too much about it from any other source.  But I think this game is great! It has some really unique ideas that make it feel almost like a video game: deferring Threat activation until after the player finishes, player cards that can be played instantly, multi-use cards, Threat Cards that rotate to get harder (levelling up!), and a Leviathan topology to maneuver!  

I am a big fan of this game: the official solo mode works well enough (although I prefer the unofficial solo mode), but the cooperative mode works even better.  There’s not too many rules, the game is a short 60 minutes, and yet it feels like this is a deep game with lots of replayability!  The Climber/Class combination system works great for keeping the game interesting! The 17 Leviathans give the players lost of creatures to help!

This is a fun, fun game.  Right now it sits at an 8.5/10 for me, but this could easily go up to a 9 or 9.5. This totally deserved to be on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024! It’s a blast!