Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
An expansion to a great game is not always cause for celebration. It’s easy for designers and publishers to get out over their skis, to add too much and disrupt the balance of whatever made the game great to begin with. For every Terraforming Mars: Prelude or Spirit Island: Branch and Claw, expansions that make a game a better version of what it already was, there are a thousand Beyond the Sun: Leaders of the New Dawns, expansions that only distract from and dilute the experience. If I was all about expansions when I entered The Hobby™, experience has abused me of that enthusiasm.
It brings me no small amount of pleasure, then, to tell you that Leviathan Wilds: Deepvale is an excellent expansion, the kind for which you can immediately throw away the box. Deepvale feels so at home with the base game that, within a few plays, you’ll forget it ever wasn’t there. That’s helped by the fact that there isn’t a ton of content here, but that’s a big part of why it works so well. The smartest thing designer Justin Kemppainen did here was keep the expansion focused.
Inside you’ll find one additional Climber, one additional Class, and seven new Leviathans. That’s it. Nice and clean. Play the hits, and play them with feeling.
Focus
The new Climber, Edge, makes full use of Focus, a brilliant mechanism that was too ancillary in the base game. If you haven’t played the base game, it’s a bit odd that you’re reading this review, but you can read my review of Leviathan Wilds to get a better idea of what’s going on. Focus allows you to modify the value of any number printed in the text of one of your cards. Using it judiciously allows for some inspired moments, but it wasn’t too prominent a feature of the base game. It was, in fact, so ancillary that there is now an update pack for Leviathan Wilds that replaces cards in order to make Focus more present. This is inarguably for the greater good.
The new Class, Harvester, takes the energy from damaged crystals and wields it to unleash astonishingly powerful actions. It is a fun addition both for the ways in which it plays with the meta of Leviathan Wilds—it is so fun to have a Climber earn immediate benefit from damaging crystals—and, more importantly, for the fact that it is a blast to play. This is a great character for the aggro player at your table.
And as for the Leviathans? Not that Leviathan Wilds cares about spoilers, but I do think I’ll leave them for you to discover. It’s a great set, as robust and challenging as anything included in the base game. They’re gnarlier, both in their aesthetics and in their mechanics, a welcome boost to difficulty for players who may have felt like they’d run out of juice to squeeze.
I don’t know what the upgrade pack for Leviathan Wilds costs, but you should prioritize getting that before you get Deepvale. The whole of Leviathan Wilds is all the richer for having Focus be a bigger part of things. It’s wonderful when a designer recognizes a weakness in their design and fixes it. But, really, you might as well get them both. Deepvale is tremendous.
