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.
Part of the fun of engaging with a system built around different characters, classes, species, or any other mode of substantive differentiation, is finding the build that’s right for you. Everyone who likes Root has a favorite faction, everyone who plays Magic has a favorite color, and the wonderful thing is that these preferences are almost always deeper than mechanics. If you’re lucky, if everything clicks, your chosen avatar feels like an extension of yourself. There is something about playing as the Lizard Cult that elicits a deeper joy for me. Am I going to win? Probably not, but boy I’m going to have a great time. Blue may leave me with no friends, but I’m enjoying myself.
Leviathan Wilds has been my favorite cooperative game for a while now, and while I was equally fulsome in my praise of the first expansion, it is only now with second expansion Shattered Peak that I can say I have found the Class for me. The Geomancer, one of three new Classes that join three new Climbers and eleven new Leviathans in this box, feels like home. All the builds in Leviathan Wilds are about running around and smashing infectious crystals, but the Geomancer is the first to mess with those troublesome fungal blooms. He can manipulate their values and move them. If you’ve never played Leviathan Wilds, that may not sound like much, but it’s a huge deal.
This is a joy for me because I love feeling clever. Many’s the time in a game that I have done something clever rather than something more obvious that would have won me the game—I lost my first game of Feya’s Swamp on the last move because I did something satisfying rather than something that would have scored me more points—and the Geomancer’s board manipulations, his pellucid shenanigans, appeal to that part of my personality. I love the Lizard Cult in Root because they are rich with opportunities to inconvenience people, and I love inconveniencing people. Leviathan Wilds has the good fortune of being cooperative, so I can turn those impulses to the common good, inconveniencing the system against which we all mightily struggle.
The Geomancer is also great game design. A Class that can interact more directly with the crystals themselves is inspired, and the most difficult kind of creative choice there is; one that feels obvious in retrospect. Designer Justin Kemppainen found a gap, an absence in the sandbox of this game, and he filled it beautifully. What new Leviathans I saw—the pre-production copy I was sent for review only included two or three—suggest that Kemppainen continues to know what he’s doing. One Leviathan, a wyrm, includes flapping wings, and another makes use of a new type of crystal, one that teleports Climbers away randomly when they hit it. This, to me, is Good Quality Fun.
Much of Shattered Peak remains unknown to me, and will stay that way until I can get my hands on a full production copy some time next year. From what I can see, though, publisher Moon Crab Games and Mr. Kemppainen remain on a roll. They know Leviathan Wilds’s strengths, and they’re finding all sorts of fun ways to make it even stronger. The best cooperative game on the market has climbed plenty high, but it would appear there are still new heights to reach.
