Wild Assent Review: Ten Seasons Fighting, Slaying, Capturing and Surviving in the Wilderness (Patreon)

The world of Complex AI Boss Battling games (CABBs) was first birthed from video games; in specific Monster Hunter; and since its inception it has slowly grown with its own flavour of card based AI powering the foes in the game. This complex AI system replaces the older style of AI moving to get in range and attacking with a more varied set of behaviours that express the personality of the AI creature.

The oldest of these CABB games features battles against a single foe, one that is designed to handle attacks from multiple player controlled pawns and typically features a single round for the AI vs. 4 rounds for the players. This is the system that Kingdom Death, Aeon Trespass: Odyssey, Oathsworn and Townsfolk Tussle (to mention a few) have adopted and it is well suited for such a style. Wild Assent takes a different route, not only is it at the lighter end of the genre – being a little longer and heavier than Townsfolk Tussle, while still also being possible to complete a campaign within 2-4 sessions – but it also tends to feature multiple entities for AI opponents rather than one single foe.

This is a welcome niche in the genre; it makes Wild Assent a unique experience for people who enjoy the CABB style of games while also making it an accessible entry point alongside Townsfolk Tussle. In particular, Wild Assent's visual aesthetic and Many vs. Many design means that it is a tempting transition point for players who enjoy PvE dungeon crawl board games like Descent & Sword & Sorcery.

In this review we'll be taking a look at the PvE game modes, there is a PvP arena mode for people who enjoy square/hex based competitive squad combat, but as that is not my preferred jam I will instead stick to looking at the two PvE modes that this game offers. These are the two scripted campaigns; which feed into each other and provide a lot of backstory for both the world in general and also the various Seekers that the players control during their hunts. There is a single player Prologue campaign which then feeds into a solo/multiplayer campaign and separately alongside that players can just jump into a ten season survival mode where they seek to hunt creatures out in the wilds in a semi-procedurally generated experience.

So, with that, we'll start this tour by looking at those very avatars we'll control. The Seekers.

What's in a Seeker?

Say hello to Zaxos, one of the lead seekers in the campaign mode and as close to a central protagonist as we get in this game. These oversized boards contain almost every single important piece of information about your seeker, with only a couple of items providing extra abilities. We'll walk through all of the information and later on discuss how this board could be improved during the upcoming kickstarter for the second edition.

2 is the seeker's speed, this is the number of fields (spaces) they can move on their activation, these movements have to be taken orthogonally unless you have a fast forward button in field 3 (more on this later). 4 is the seeker's starting/max health (the blood drop means nothing) 5, 6 and 7 represent your seeker's attack, with their range (5) (in fields, including diagonals) base damage (6) (amount of damage they always deal) and attack dice (7). Also the symbol between 5 and 6 matters because that determines if you are a physical attacker or a magical one. This is because all units in this game have two defense values, physical and magical.

However, as you can see from this image, it's not super clear due to the low contrast between the dark grey of the symbol and the slightly lighter grey of the backdrop. This creates a readability issue for the players in the game and it could be fixed with a different backdrop – the PvP arena backdrops are a blue-grey and the symbols are much clearer there.

8 represents physical defense and 9 represent magical defense. There are small symbols on each to help identify, though these symbols are not as helpful as the physical position on the cards (in truth they add nothing that colouring the two bubbles differently wouldn't already achieve, and instead they just clutter the seeker board unnecessarily).

10 is where your Seeker's starting abilities are located, and here we reach another accessibility issue which is consistent across all abilities in this game. The tiny symbol you see before each bolded name tells you what type of ability this is – be it passive, active, defensive or trigged by the special result on a dice attack. This symbol is tiny for no good reason at all – in fact if you look at 11, you'll see that we have a nice selection of large, but solely decorative, artwork taking up the space where the symbol could instead have been placed. For players with eyesight issues, or those who are looking across the table at their friends seeker(s), there could be quite a struggle.

11 is where all future abilities your Seeker can gain are located, on the right is the building requirement to unlock them, and this brings one of the other areas where there are delicious decisions to be made. Having every seeker unlock abilities based on how you improve your encampment buildings adds a wonderful decision space to the game, not only do you gain additional options/power during the encampment phase, but you also progress the seekers. This gives interesting choices during selection of seekers – do I pick a group of seekers with similar unlock goals so I can power them up faster? While also helping focus the development of buildings across the campaign. It also gives individual seekers varied power progression, Zaxos gets abilities online a lot faster than say, Fjola who needs a level 2 building before she can unlock even a single ability.

I do have more comments to make in respect of the design of these seeker board however, and we'll circle back to this when we get to the 'What can the Second Edition do better?' section at the end.

The Flow of the Wilds

Now we're familiar with our Seekers, let us take a look at the flow of the game; it is a relatively simple two phase cycle, alternating between an encounter, where the seekers will slay or capture a selection of wild creatures (or get knocked out in the process) and the encampment, where they will lick their wounds, construct new items, visit the city of Silvestrem in order to sell creatures, hire workers, purchase things from the city market and construct/upgrade buildings in the encampment. Then, if they remember, they will scout out the land for a new place to hunt and the cycle repeats. Gradually, as the seasons pass, the wilds become stronger, with the easier to hunt locations gradually phasing out of the deck and being replaced with higher and higher threat level encounters.

This cycle will continue until you complete ten seasons, with each season typically taking between 1 and 2 hours to complete you can reasonably expect to be done with a survival campaign within 16-20 hours depending on the players. This puts it in a good place where it could be the focus for a group's play sessions for a month before being popped back on the shelf for a while.

The Encampment

The Encampment phase is in essence a simple “worker placement” game, each player has 5 actions (or 2 actions if you are Phelt, cause he's busy sleeping) and they can spend them in a variety of different ways. You can visit the temple for some healing, go to the workshop for some crafting, take a long trip to Silvestrem to gain workers/items/sell captured creatures/upgrade buildings, go out hunting for extra resources to help craft items or scout for the next encounter (which will end the Encampment Phase).

The Encampment can be upgraded either by spending gold gained from selling creatures (and a little gained naturally as the campaign progresses) which is used to purchase new buildings or upgrade them to higher levels, or it can be improved by getting more workers. Workers are characters represented by a single card, who hang around your encampment, initially you are allowed three of these cards, but upgrading your barracks will increase that to 4 and then 6.

Each worker will come with some ability that helps your Seekers in some fashion, this aid can vary a great deal, it can be as simple as a free activation at the start of the encounter, all the way to additional resources, creature breeding or music to sooth the savage beasts. Workers also sometimes  provide additional crafting recipes to add to the ones you have available from the workshop.

Crafting gear requires the requisite unlock (be it Workshop level or Worker) and it requires a single action plus the spending of the correct resources. Each seeker can take 1 item with them to an encounter (one seeker can take two) and this number can be upgraded by improving the workshop. The items vary in power, the basic ones from the workshop are healing potions and a horn that allows you to spend your activation in order to get everyone to move around, dancing to that sick honk honk like Boromir did with the Horn of Gondor. Though hopefully without dying right afterwards.

If you are not interested in slaughtering creatures for their parts, you can capture them and sell them in Silvestrem as, I dunno, lets call them pets. Yes, I'm sure that's what happens to them. Initially your encampment can hold one creature, but this can be improved by upgrading the creature pen, and at highest capacity you can instead hold three creatures and sell them for one extra gold. Building nice places to keep creatures makes them worth more because they're happier in captivity, which makes them better pets. Who's a good Bogseeker? Why yes you are Mr. Pinchietto.

The Seeker's Den provides an additional way to gain resources during this phase, with a player able to spend two actions on their turn to go and hunt for more resources. This is a bit of a gamble, but pays out at the basic level two thirds of the time. However, there is a hard limit to how many seekers can hunt per year, so this isn't an endless source of eyeballs, horns and feathers for your sweet mask making business. It also improves the Scouting capability of your seekers, which is something you will need to do every year; costing two seekers two actions each, otherwise you will not have an encounter and the camp will become derelict. Naughty, lazy seekers, shame on you.

Scouting

Scouting is the process by which Seekers will determine their next encounter during the encampment phase, two hunters will spend two actions each and they will draw 2 (+X depending on the Seeker's den level) cards from the Scouting deck and deciding which one they want to resolve. More cards = more options! Failing to scout (either by choice or accident) will first cause the camp to fall derelict for a season and then result in a forced encounter. You want to avoid this if you can and hunt every season, but the option is there!

The scouting cards you are picking from are relatively simple, they show you a lovely picture of the environ you choose might head to, the threat level of the encounter (number of pips), any special modifiers for that encounter and the creatures which will be present. Typically there will be one fixed creature in the encounter, and then a selection of random ones. In the case of the Gilliath card, the encounter will have the following:

• 1x Threat Level 2 Phoenix
• 2x Randomly drawn threat Level 2 creature
• 1x Randomly drawn threat Level 1 creature

These creatures will all be unique (no duplicates).

This is determined by the 2/2/1 – each number there represents the threat level of the randomly drawn creature. So 1/1 means two threat level 1 creatures, while 3/2/1 means one from each threat level.

There are also two threat level 4 scouting cards, which represent an optional ending to your survival mode game. One of these is the only way you will encounter the Twin Dragon, this creature has the largest AI deck in the game and is the closest the game gets to a traditional boss monster in the vein of other CABB entries.

The Encounter

The encounter itself always takes place on the encounter board, the layout is selected by randomly drawing a card from encounter deck (a glorified six sided dice); this shows where the seekers, creatures and terrain will go, along with also telling you who starts the encounter. The creatures start in 3 of the encounters, the seekers start in 2 of them, and one result from the encounter deck gives the players choice over which encounter they want to use. So it ends up being pretty even split between who goes first.

Health for every participant is tracked via the numbered score scales on either side of the board, you typically only need one of these, but if players are sitting on the opposite sides of the board, it is convenient and helpful that they have access to their own tracker without reaching across everything. This is one of the areas where Wild Assent has scored a goal in layout design.

Terrain is randomly determined, with a maximum of two of the same terrain per encounter. This terrain varies from giving defensive bonuses, to blocking line of sight, being something to knock other miniatures into or even providing a pit to knock things down. It adds a little tactical texture to the fight and can sometimes be more relevant that you'd first think. These encounters are tighter than they look and the way that terrain blocks spaces or line of sight will catch you off guard occasionally.

Encounters run in a back and forth design, with one seeker activating and then a card being drawn from the AI deck. A seeker cannot be activated a second time until all seekers on the board have had a go.

On a seeker's turn they will move and then perform an activation, typically this will be some form of attack, but it can also be a support or defensive ability depending on the situation. In these games there is always a LOT of value to be had through using non-attacking activations, support abilities can make or break the tide of battle!

The Creatures

Now the way that the seekers activate is pretty standard, we've seen this 'move and do something' design in various forms for years now, pretty much since people started putting little pewter people onto imaginary cardboard worlds. So the texture and excitement in these kind of games comes from how the creatures behave.

In the case of Wild Assent, the creatures have a shared AI deck, each creature has 5 individual AI cards which are shuffled in with the rest. This makes the creatures behave like a single entity with multiple heads, each one with its own personality. Initially this may feel chaotic, but as you become familiar with how each creature behaves you'll come to understand who needs to be targeted first and where focus should be aimed.

You'll also come to learn the beats of the encounter. What creatures have activated already during a round of the deck is open information, so you can come to know what creatures are left to activate and when you are very experienced you can even know roughly what they are going to do. This rewards player skill/experience quite nicely without ever putting the creatures into a 'solved' state.

There is also a rather interesting wrinkle to this system, because there is a shared AI deck, if you eliminate a creature, its AI cards become 'dead draws' which results in the creatures doing nothing for the turn. That's interesting and encourages players to cooperate to eliminate one target at a time, but it can also make the game a little too easy for more experienced CABB players, for them I'd recommend looking into the games hard modes.

The creature AI cards are, unfortunately, not well laid out for an easy processing of information. A large mount of the card space is devoted to not one, but two separate illustrations and that means you end up with the text all jammed at the bottom in a rather messy fashion. Kingdom Death gave us very clear, crisp AI cards with well defined steps, and this is something that Wild Assent would have benefited from mimicking to some extent. There is certainly room for improvement with the AI cards, both on the text and iconography front.

Likewise the creature cards also show room for design improvement, around half of the card space is taken up by a lovely illustration and name. With the actual mechanical text jammed in the bottom in a serviceable, but ugly fashion. Of particular issue are the creatures with summons, the statline and attack for those summons is jammed into a very small space – Wild Assent could learn from Deep Madness here, it provided separate statistic cards for the summons and that improves the play experience immensely.

Outside of these graphical design issues; the creatures themselves are very well expressed, there is a clear difference in behaviour between each species and they all fit a different style or role on the board. Some operate as healers, some as nasty high damage glass cannons, some as summon carriers, there's so much variation between each species and even the increase in threat level for the creatures allows for textual changes to the creatures through new abilities (in addition to more health).

When it comes to dealing with creatures, you have a choice, you can either kill them and gain resources; with each creature dropping a specific type of resource in the number equal to their threat level; or you can capture them. This is a lengthy and dangerous process that requires multiple seekers and multiple activations – but it is one of the few ways you will get more gold, so you are going to need to engage with it. Once a creature is at half health (or lower) you can start to try and capture it, this will require one activation to begin and a second activation to complete – plus it will take a number of seekers equal to the creature's threat level +1. So a threat level 2 creature takes three survivors to subdue. You'll get hurt during this process and if you get knocked away or knocked out then that'll mess up what you're doing. Typically you'll leave this for the last creature in the scenario, but you might do a cheeky two seeker capture on a level 1 early if you feel fruity.

The Campaign

The solo/coop campaign is an alternative way to play the game instead of the 'rogue-lite' experience that the Survival game offers. It is a series of pre-set encounters that start off in a prologue solo campaign and gradually introduce each of the seekers, the world and expands the experience over time. The writing here is adequate; it is not on the level of something like Deep Madness, but it gets the story and characters across well enough.

It's the rules section for this that causes a lot of issues, oh the rules again... There's a bunch of things omitted, outright printing/naming errors and unclear instructions. You can muddle your way through everything and you will get there in the end, but it is a frustrating experience.

The balance of the scenarios themselves felt pretty reasonable, the story does a good job of giving you access to a few extra bits and pieces as you go along and it was an enjoyable experience. It was very good for learning the rules solo, but the cooperative campaign is not as much fun as the full survival experience. If I was going to suggest an order I'd recommend that players go Prologue Campaign → Cooperative Campaign → Survival Mode. Because that sets up all the groundwork for the game and really immerses you in who these characters and how they relate to the world.

I thought the campaign was simply fine for a single play through; but the survival mode really brought the game to life and it is where the long term prospects for the game lay for a cooperative gaming group.

The Components

Outside of layout issues I want to really stress how good Wild Assent looks, the art style pops in a way that is reminiscent of the older Descent/Terrinoth artwork and sells this setting as a real place. One almost feels a bit sad that the encounter board has fixed artwork on it because the other locations depicted on the scouting cards look amazing. This is a world that grips and intrigues you with its characters, species and locations despite the slightly generic high fantasy aesthetic.

The cards are linen finish, my boards were smashed up in shipping, but the parts that are not damaged are thick and good to touch, the tokens are close to the perfect size (and have text on one side in case you're not sure what they represent) and the miniatures are wonderful.

About the only issue I have with the miniatures is their size, every seeker is about 50% too small and the monsters could do with being at least twice the size they are, if not more. This is being addressed in the Second Edition, so I look forward to seeing these new, larger, more imposing reprints of the wonderful sculpts. About the only real complaint I have as a hobbyist is the fixed bases, having sculpted bases is great, but having the model sculpted onto the base is not great for miniature painting. It is likely that this will not change in the second edition, but separately cast  bases with attached miniatures would be incredible.I also hope to see 2x2 field sized monsters.

I would also like to quickly praise the storage solution for this game, every single miniature has its own place in the foam inserts and there are pictures of that miniature at the bottom, packing miniatures away is a breeze. I also adore the plastic trays used to hold all the other components. I do not advocate plastic in board games if it can be avoided, but if you are going to do a plastic tray, something the standard of these trays is the bar you should be aiming for.

What can the Second Edition do Better?

The core issues that need to be improved in my eyes are the following:

The rulebooks need a major set of overhauls from an outside professional, they are holding back a really great game with their mixture of omissions, difficult to find rules, lack of reference sheets and weak structure. I would hope that this is already on the radar for Lazy Squire Games and in the same vein I would also recommend that they fully flesh out all of the rules in the campaign – also it would be good if they could consider a branching narrative which would allow for additional re-playability.

I would also recommend a full contents page with individual pictures for each token type and ALL the miniatures; an index, a glossary and a back page with a full phase breakdown for Encampments and Encounters. There are also a few seekers who need balancing or further explanation of how they work. Lestia and Vareclea spring to mind here.

The Seeker boards are another area that needs a lot of work, the movement “play button” (3 in the artwork above) is completely superfluous, the only Seeker with Swift (diagonal) movement and Flying (a Wing) doesn't even have an updated icon there. In essence there's no need for it. Likewise there is no need for the health blood drop, the physical/magical defense shields are also superfluous (though they are at least clear iconography) and the icons next to the three blue attack bubbles need to be turned white or black (or the backdrop changed in colour/contrast severely).

The other thing I would like to see done is the removal of the unlockable abilities from the right hand side. I would like to instead have a double layer Seeker Board, with spaces where the abilities are placed when they are unlocked. This would make the character boards cleaner and clearer, while also tightening up the system they are using. We currently have these lock/cooldown tokens which are being used. I would instead like to see the abilities turned into separate tokens – that makes the seeker less overwhelming when first used and also makes getting a new ability REALLY exciting as you get to physically slot that new ability into your seeker board. It would make levelling up buildings feel better.

Finally, given that we are getting larger miniatures and more creatures/seekers in the second edition, what I want to see is a full redesign of the creature AI cards, I like the artwork, but it is too large and the readability/usability of these cards is being impacted as a consequence.

Summary

Sleek, fast and smooth with a good amount of crunch and decision making to be had; Wild Assent is an easy recommend for players who enjoy the CABB genre of games; however, this first edition demonstrates a lot of room for improvement – there are multiple areas where balance is a bit off or the design is too crowded and one would hope that the second edition addresses these by taking on board further feedback and evolving the game further. The seeker and encampment boards in particular need further revision and redesigning with new player experience plus accessibility for those with different needs.

The single largest area that needs work however is the rulebooks, they are not the worst I've read, but they are pretty heinous at times, both in layout and clarity and this is a relatively straightforward fix. The large amount of examples is helpful, but there are numerous omissions from these rules – including a good clear breakdown of each phase step, each round step and so on. Plus, the game really could do with reference sheets and a fine pass through by a technical game editor who can help identify where things have been omitted or assumptions have been made by players who are more familiar with the game.

Wild Assent is a fantastic game under the hood, it is just held back by some poor user interface design choices and a weak rulebook. With these addressed I believe that the second edition will be a must have for every CABB gamer or dungeon crawler's collection because of how it fills in that sweet spot between crunchy decisions and ease of operation.

You can follow the upcoming Game Found second edition of Wild Assent at: <https://gamefound.com/projects/draft/hxw0v9sewixu3vyewrs57wdxoga#/section/project-story> Follow right now and you will get a free miniature IF you back. (Which you should).