Leviathan Wilds

Leviathan Wilds arrived in 2024 from designer Justin Kemppainen and publisher Moon Crab Games, a studio founded by veterans of Fantasy Flight Games and Z-Man Games. Players take on the roles of climbers scaling enormous creatures called leviathans, working together to shatter binding crystals that have driven these once-gentle giants into madness. It’s a cooperative boss-battling game for one to four players that plays in about an hour, and community reception has been overwhelmingly positive since release.

What stands out immediately in player discussion is how different this game feels from other co-ops on the market. Instead of managing a crisis from above or building an engine toward a goal, players are physically navigating the body of a massive creature, dodging attacks, leaping across gaps, and carefully managing their stamina to avoid falling. A spiral-bound book serves as the game board, with each of its seventeen leviathans occupying a two-page spread featuring unique artwork, a distinct tactical map, and its own behavior deck. Community sentiment places Leviathan Wilds among the strongest cooperative designs in years, with praise coming from solo players and groups alike.

What Makes Leviathan Wilds Click

Every card in your hand pulls triple duty, and that tension drives the whole experience. Each card can be spent for action points to fuel movement, strikes, and other basic actions. It can also be played for its printed skill ability, offering powerful effects at key moments. And it provides terrain protection symbols that matter when threats target your position. Choosing between these three uses on every single card means that even a hand of three cards generates meaningful decisions. Players across the community consistently point to this system as the mechanical heart of the game, and the enthusiasm around it is nearly universal.

Variety keeps the game alive well past the first handful of sessions. Seventeen leviathans ship in the base game, each with its own layout, special rules, and threat deck. Some feature gravity manipulation. Others involve swarms, cyclopean eyes, or teleportation. On top of that, eight climber characters and eight classes combine into sixty-four possible pairings, each producing a different eight-card deck with distinct strengths and combos. Players who have worked through the full roster of creatures report that the difficulty and inventiveness ramp steadily, with later leviathans introducing mechanics that reshape how the core systems interact.

Cooperation here avoids the pitfalls that plague the genre. Cards can be played on any player’s turn, not just your own, which keeps everyone invested during every moment of the game. Private hands prevent the alpha-player problem from taking over, since no one can see exactly what options you’re holding. Players describe moments where a well-timed assist from a teammate saved a run, and those emergent stories of sacrifice and coordination are a big part of why the game generates so much enthusiasm.

Accessibility deserves real credit too. Rules are lean enough to teach quickly, setup involves opening the book to the right page and shuffling a few small decks, and games wrap up in roughly sixty minutes. But that approachability doesn’t come at the cost of depth. Later leviathans are punishing, demanding tight coordination and smart resource management to survive. Winning against a difficult creature after several failed attempts generates the kind of satisfaction that keeps co-op players coming back.

Leviathan Wilds’ Rough Edges

Solo mode is where the design shows its only real seams. Playing alone requires controlling two climbers simultaneously, which is fine conceptually, but the official solo rules introduce several exceptions to the standard game. Restrictions on how many cards you draw when resting and special falling rules for grip depletion add cognitive overhead that feels unnecessary. Multiple players have noted they prefer ignoring the official solo variant and simply running two characters under standard multiplayer rules, which works but signals that the official approach could have been cleaner.

How cooperative the game feels can shift depending on which climbers you pick and which leviathan you’re facing. Some combinations create natural moments of teamwork where players need to coordinate positioning and share resources. Others, particularly on leviathans with spread-out crystal placements, can leave each player working their own section of the map with minimal interaction. It doesn’t ruin the game, but players who value constant coordination may find certain matchups feel more like parallel problem-solving than true collaboration.

Card stock has drawn some concern from players who intend to play heavily. Cards see a lot of shuffling and handling every session, and the thickness sits below what many hobbyists expect from a game at this price point. Sleeving is a common recommendation in community discussions, and the insert accommodates sleeved cards, which suggests the publisher anticipated the issue. Still, it’s a knock against the otherwise strong production values.

Visual readability on the leviathan maps occasionally causes friction. Tokens, dice, and mushroom markers can blend into the illustrated backgrounds on certain spreads, making it harder to track the board state at a glance. It’s a minor issue that doesn’t come up on every leviathan, but when it does, it slows things down.

Why Movement Matters

Most cooperative board games treat movement as a means to an end. You move to get somewhere, and the interesting decisions happen once you arrive. Leviathan Wilds inverts that. Movement is the interesting decision. Every space you climb costs resources from a finite pool. Your deck represents your grip on the creature, and when it runs empty, you fall. Resting to recover cards is only possible on certain ledge spaces, so plotting a route that balances progress toward crystals against access to safe resting points becomes the central puzzle.

Threat cards compound this by telegraphing attacks before they resolve. You see what’s coming at the start of your turn and have until the end to react, which means positioning decisions carry immediate tactical weight. Do you push forward and risk getting caught in a blast zone, or retreat to safety and lose a turn of progress? That interplay between movement, resource management, and threat response is what gives the game its identity. It makes traversal feel dangerous and deliberate in a way that few tabletop designs have managed.

Should You Play Leviathan Wilds?

Two players hits the sweet spot for most groups, offering tight cooperation without downtime. Solo works well if you’re comfortable running two characters, though the official solo rules are worth house-ruling. Three and four players remain engaging because of the any-turn card play, but coordination becomes harder to manage as the table grows. Skip this if you want direct conflict between players, if purely abstract puzzle games appeal more than thematic adventures, or if you need a co-op where every session feels dramatically different from the last. The core loop of climbing, managing grip, and breaking crystals stays consistent even as the leviathans change around it.

The Verdict on Leviathan Wilds

Leviathan Wilds delivers one of the best cooperative experiences in recent memory by doing something deceptively simple: making movement the entire game. Climbing massive creatures, managing your grip, and choosing how to spend every card in your hand creates a decision space that stays fresh across dozens of sessions. Minor issues with solo mode rules and occasional visual clutter on the maps don’t come close to undermining what works here. For co-op fans looking for a game that plays in an hour but thinks like something twice its size, this belongs at the top of the list.