Clank! Deck Building Dungeon Crawl

After several rounds of the Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle deck building game I found myself wanting more in a similar vein, but with more variability. Clank!, a deck builder by Dire Wolf  Digital and Renegade Game Studios, is a delightful iteration on deck builders that has familiar mechanics for veteran players, but is also streamlined enough for newer players to quickly pick up the flow. The game also has a bit of a video game feel in the map. The layout looks like it could be a mobile game (it has some of the aesthetic sensibilities), though it of course is an analog game.

The premise of Clank! involves explorers entering a dungeon to bring back artifacts to the surface. However, exploring is not done without consequence. A dragon lurks in the depths and as cards are drawn and bought some cards cause the dragon to lash out. The louder players are (or the more “clank” a player generates) the greater chance a player has for their color cube to be drawn, thereby losing health.

Players start with an identical starting hand. This makes sense as Clank! is not a cooperative game. It also isn’t directly player versus player. Players cannot damage each other directly. PvP in this game amounts to at most inconveniencing each other by buying highly desirable cards to getting Major/Minor Secrets and Market items before one another.

The cards in a players deck help them move around the board, fight monsters, and buy more cards. In our play through different cards seemed to matter more at various stages of the game. Early on we all wanted Skill cards so we could expand our desks. Once we reached an ‘end game’ situation (all of us had at least one Artifact) we tried to grab more movement to get back out. For me, an invaluable card was the “Wand of Wind”. This called allowed teleportation to an adjacent room, skipping locks or the movement requirement. I primarily used it to take Secrets from adjacent rooms, giving me much needed healing and points to reach the surface before the dragon consumed both my opponents.

There are functionally two decks from which cards are purchased. The first is a set of four cards, each pile with multiples of the same card. For players of Aeon’s End this idea will be familiar. Players can buy multiples of these cards without fear of incurring the dragon’s wrath. The second deck is the dungeon deck. We did not come close to going through all of the cards, so I imagine this game has solid replay-ability.

An interesting mechanic the designers added was what our table dubbed a ‘kill switch’. Once a player died (by losing all their health) or a player makes it back up to the surface from the depths, there are a limited number of rounds available to make it back to the surface. The dragon draws progressively more cubes and players left in the Depths are at a greater risk of taking more damage. This accomplishes two things. One, players that dive deeper have a greater chance of getting high value items, but they are also at a higher risk of losing those items or not getting the 20 point completion bonus for making it out again. Two, this means the player(s) who are out do not have to wait long before the game ends (unlike Monopoly, which destroys all it touches).

Overall, I would recommend this game to a group of people who appreciate deck builders and want some competitive play. It’s more involved and variable than Battle for Hogwarts (I thoroughly enjoy that game, too, just for different reasons, so this should not be read as a slight) but nowhere near the level of pain Dragonfire tends to rain.  There are also a number of expansions for Clank! on the market now, with the newest being Clank! In! Space! Apocalypse! It’s an expansion for Clank! In! Space!

Ross Blythe is a Chicago based gamer interested in all things tabletop. He enjoys reading history as well as fiction, and so has a soft spot for historical wargames like Pike & Shotte. For the campaigns he runs as a DM he often looks to history for inspiration, for the lessons of the past to challenge the players at his table.

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