Clank! is a competitive dungeon-crawling board game. The basic premise is that a set of adventurers are raiding a dragon’s lair to steal its stuff. They are to find an artifact and other valuables before escaping. If they make too much noise, the dragon attacks. Get attacked too many times, the adventurer gets knocked out and loses. After all the adventures either escape or die, the surviving adventurers add up the value of all their loot. The adventurer with the most valuable loot wins.
In addition to press-your-luck, the game’s basic mechanism is deck building. Each adventurer starts with an identical deck. This deck contains cards that allow movement within the dungeon by providing boots. Other cards provide currency for buying other cards - gems. Cards that can be purchased provide the other basic resource - swords. Some cards in the basic deck only create noise - clanks.
Gameplay follows the basic, Dominion-style deck building rules. On an adventurer’s turn, they play the cards in their hand in any order they want. They can use their gems to buy cards in the store and add them to their deck. Many of these cards provide additional gems, boots, or swords. Some provide victory points if the adventurer manages to escape. Some are companions that provide a benefit when played such as adding swords or drawing cards. Cards with particularly good benefits may also create noise - add clank - when played.
Some of the cards are monsters and cannot be bought. They can be fought. If an adventurer has some swords handy, they can fight a monster and get a reward. The reward is usually coins that can be used to purchase cards the same turn.
Adventurers use boots to move between rooms in the dungeon. Many passages between rooms only require the adventurer to spend a single boot. Others require two. Some require keys. Yet others have a monster guarding them. The adventurer needs a sword to pass the monster safely. Without one, they lose a life.
Most rooms are empty. Some contain secrets, which are things like potions that an adventurer can use at any time to add things like swords or boots. Others contain the artifacts needed to escape the dungeon. Several are crystal caves that stop the adventurer’s movement. Some are special rooms, like the market. Pretty much, the most important things about rooms and passages are how much they will delay the adventurer. The game is a race, after all.
It’s a race because of that darn dragon with the unpronounceable name (call her Nicki). When the card store is replenished, some of the cards being added might have a dragon symbol on them. If so, Nicki attacks. First, all of the cubes representing clank the adventures have generated since the last attack are added to a bag. Nicki draws cubes from the bag. She deals one damage to an adventurer for each cube of their color she drew. Each time an adventurer grabs an artifact, she gets more enraged and draws more cubes. These attacks are not much of a problem in the early game, as the bag starts with twenty black cubes. These cubes represent misses. Towards the end of the game, as the black cubes are used up and Nicki starts drawing more cubes, things start to get deadly. Adventurers start hoping to avoid getting attacked for the one more turn necessary to escape.
The games goes quick, maybe a half-hour per game. The options available to adventurers on their turn are not complex. New players might take a while to read all the cards in the store. There are not a huge variety of cards in the base game. Players will learn them pretty quickly. After a few games, a player will have developed their basic strategy - buy cards with feet to get through the dungeon quickly, buy cards that will allow them to buy more cards later, buy cards that give them victory points at the end of the game, and so forth. Once a player has developed a strategy they like, the card buying decisions are almost automatic.
Many players may not like the randomness of the game. A deck builder is inherently random - the player draws cards from a shuffled deck. The player mitigates this randomness by buying new cards and trashing low-value cards. (Clank! does not seem to have as many trashing opportunities as many similar deck builders.) The other major sources of randomness are how often the dragon attacks and who she attacks. The frequency of attacks cannot be mitigated except by not buying cards. No cards bought, no new cards with dragon heads in the store. That might be a valid late game strategy. But there’s that card worth victory points just sitting there…. The possibility that an adventurer is attacked is proportional to the amount of noise they’ve made. The sneaky rogue will make less noise than the barbarian charging through the dungeon hell-for-leather. (The base game adventures do not have classes. That’s in the legacy game!)
If you play Clank!, you have to welcome all of this randomness. That is the foundation of Clank!. All of the tension is built around escaping the dungeon before the dragon toasts the adventurer. How far into the dungeon do they venture? Will they make more noise to get that extra boot to get closer to the exit? If the dragon’s attacks were more than approximately predictable, the game would be no fun.
The digital game is well designed. All of the information a player needs is readily available. Unlike many digital board games, many of the elements are animated. The cute animation makes it look more like a mobile game than a PC game. There is not a mobile version at the time of this writing, at least on iOS. Clank! does not suffer from the problem of many other digital board games in that not all of the board can be seen at once or not and make it readable. Not that Clank! shows the whole board. By the nature of the game, a player usually only needs to see two or three rooms away from their adventurer. That amount of the board can easily be shown.
The AIs seem good. There is no player interaction worth mentioning. The only reason to pay attention to the AIs is to see how close they are to escaping. The medium AIs do a pretty good job of playing the press-your-luck game. Some escape with one or two lives left. Others do not make it. Worthy competition, at least for newbie players.
Den of the Red Wolf 