Heart of Leviathans Will Steel Your Heart

Many of you have seen our previous on a game called and a lot of you have asked when the game will be available. Your wait is over and HoL is now taking pre-sale orders (as of July 5, 2019). If you order, in a short amount of time, you will be slugging it out with some of the biggest weapons of war ever created.

What is Heart of Leviathan
Created by Walter and Davis Vail, HoL is an easy to play yet hard to master game that simulates naval combat in the age of dreadnoughts. While I hate comparing the game to others on the market, the game brings you battleship combat with the mechanics you usually find in air and space combat games.

The game moves quickly and a player has to make some key decisions during each step of their game turn. The starter kit features a brawl between two German and two British battleships that the players can equip with all types of upgrades and choose a unique captain with particular skills to command it. This makes each game play out a bit differently, do you want to make your ship shoot better or maybe you want to make it withstand more damage, it’s all up to you.

More important is what his game isn’t. HOL is not a system of spreadsheets with dice. I play a lot of naval games and the big problem I have with most rulesets is that they take a simple process and make it more complicated than it should. Looking at my previous article on naval games I think you can understand my point here. Ships do very simple things; they move, shoot and take damage and few games make this process easy and tend to make games that play more like a simulation.

At times I love the very deep mechanics, but when I have to teach another to play a naval game with the hope they grow to love ship to ship combat I had no game that I could use accomplish this let alone play a game in under an hour with just a few models.

HOL breaks the mold and gives die-hard naval grogs a detailed game they can quickly play and gives the landlubber a game where they can enjoy naval combat without having to go to Naval War College.

The Starter Kit
The starter kit comes with the HMS Iron Duke, HMS Benbow, SMS Konig, and the SMS Markgraf. The thing to keep in mind that additional ships of different classes will be available in the future as ship packs and the follow on kit will include smaller ships such as Armored and Light Cruisers that will add mines and torpedoes to the mix.

The starter will come with everything you need to play the game (except for a table) and includes all of the tokens, movement templates, cards, dice, shoals, and minefields that the game requires.

The best thing the game comes with is the ship command placard. Each placard gives the captain all they need to know to in order to track the status of their ship and to plot their orders each turn. When you see the placard you will think why doesn’t every game have a tool like this. The placard takes what is most cumbersome about naval games (status tracking) and makes it easy which enhances gameplay.

The tokens and markers are thick cardboard and are full of detail and color. When I first spoke with Walter about the game he asked me if I knew where he could get the crests of these ships. I didn’t and I also didn’t think he could find them, however, he did and they are included in the game which makes both the aesthetics and play of the game so much better.

Mechanics
I won’t go in-depth here because you can see the rules and an example of gameplay I will tell you that the game plays smoothly and the mechanics are very intuitive and easy to pick up. Having been a playtester who has played the game (or parts of it) well over 200 times, I can assure you that the game is free of bugs and the rules have gotten better with each successive draft. The final product is one that you will find impressive and you will see the rigor contained “under the hood” of what seems like a straightforward and easy to learn rules.

When you play that you need to have good situational awareness and think two to three moves ahead in order to be successful. This is much like the mindset the captains of these ships needed to have. Ship combat with dreadnoughts happened slowly in real life. The ships moved slowly and training the guns on the target took time. So a commander had to consider and plan their speed, bearing, and target choice. In addition, they had to anticipate the enemy intentions for the same.

Another great thing about this game is that it does not take long to play. I am sure when more ships are available and gamers use HOL to re-create the Battle of Jutland the game will take more time. Even a game with a ton of ships (I have played games of four battleships and two light cruisers per side) the game plays quickly once gamers know the rules. I have also brought this game to a few conventions and found that new players picked the game up very quickly, and most of all enjoyed the game.

The bottom line the game is a great recreation of a dogfight between some of the most deadly ships to ever put to sea.

The Future

Even with the game’s initial release going on, the designers are hard at work to expand the line. Cards and token will be made for the other two ships in the Konig and Iron Duke class. The next box set is scheduled to feature some of the smaller but important ships that saw action at this time. Light Cruisers will make an appearance.

My own experience playtesting shows torpedoes are very deadly, and they have the speed to change the close in and create havoc. Other ships such as Armored Cruisers, Battlecruisers, and perhaps even Destroyers will make an appearance in the game. I suspect we’ll also see more of the great battleships of the period.

I hope you are excited about this game, we had a blast playtesting it and as an act of thanks, the developers put the names of the core playtesters in the game as ship captains. In my opinion, these guys earned it and the hard work resulted in a great game that will be a prized possession for your gaming collection. Even if you do not want to paint the ships the full-color counters can be used to play the game minutes after it arrives.

So where can you get your hands on this game? That is easy just go and order a copy.

Check out the interview we did with the dev’s here