Tabletop
The Complete Clank! Buyer's Guide
With a decade of spin-offs, modular boards, and legacy campaigns on the market, figuring out which Clank! game to buy can feel like navigating a dragon's lair blindfolded. We break down the entire deck-building franchise to help you find the perfect starting box for your group - and tell you exactly which expansions are safe to skip.
As a big fan of deck-building games, I fell in love with Clank! right after our first playthrough, and it’s crazy to think that the game has been around for 10 years already. With a special anniversary Kickstarter running for a few more days (as of the time of this article), it feels like the perfect time to go through the different iterations of the game and help people figure out where to start in this rather significant franchise.
At the core of the franchise is Clank! A Deck-Building Adventure is dungeon crawler deck-building game for 2-4 players (with the base game alone) created by Paul Dennen (who went on to create the amazing Dune: Imperium) and published by Dire Wolf and Renegade Game Studios. Players are adventurers (or thieves, really) braving the depths in order to secure treasure before the dragon gets mad enough to stop them in their tracks. The titular clank refers to the noise that the players make while in the dungeon that attracts the dragon to attack them.
This is the classic adventure that continues to have the broadest appeal. The dungeon-crawling scenario is probably even more popular now that liking TRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons is a “cool” thing again. But beyond the theme, it’s a really good game, and I will rarely say no to playing it. The base game alone provides a lot of good replay value given the number of cards in the deck, a double-sided player board, and the push-your-luck thrill of trying to survive the dragon. I think the only caveat is the fact that it has a hard limit of 4 players, as it’s the kind of game that draws people to the table.
More than any other expansion released for Clank!, I’ll always advocate that Adventuring Party is the ONE expansion you absolutely need to get that will have the greatest impact on the game. Taking a page from their Legacy adventure, this expansion increased the maximum player count to 6, and it adds characters with unique abilities that add some much-needed asymmetry to the game. It also adds a fair number of cards on top of the character-specific starting decks to keep the game interesting.
Since its release, Clank! has earned 4 main expansions for Clank! that primarily add a new double-sided board that adds some new mechanics specific to the board or the boss related to the board and maybe some cards. They’re all good in their own way, but none of them feel truly essential. They’re really meant for completionists or for people who play enough Clank! to have gotten bored with the board that comes with the base game. I still feel Adventuring Party does more to address that sort of fatigue, but I’m not saying they’re bad. Plus, you can get all of the updated Master Thief versions of these expansions with the Cube of Holding Kickstarter campaign.
It’s a science fiction version of Clank! The biggest innovation of this version is adding a modular ship board that really adds to the replayability of the game. But this also makes the game harder, combined with the need for players to hack their way into the command center, where all the Artifacts are, before they can escape. This one feels a little harder to get to the table because of the greater difficulty level, but it’s overflowing with geeky references that make science fiction nerds like me extra happy.
Note: This is NOT part of the 10th anniversary Kickstarter campaign as it’s its own line.
Similar to the main line of Clank!, the expansions for Clank! In Space mainly add new modules to make your board set up even more variable. Sure, there are more cards as well and different antagonists that get even harder than in the base game, but I’ve yet to encounter anything mechanically interesting in any of the expansions. Base Clank! needs alternate boards more since it starts with a fixed dungeon. But this version of the game already had a modular board, so over time it gets somewhat fluffy. I think your appreciation of the different expansions may come down to which geek references you like more, and then go with that.
This one feels a bit superfluous coming from the base Clank! experience, but I can see how this can be an interesting alternate starting point in the franchise. Earlier I cited that one of the base game’s constraints was the fixed dungeon board; hence all the new boards as expansion content to help keep the game feeling fresh. In Catacombs, the dungeon is explored slowly using tiles that are drawn from a stack, making it a roguelike dungeon crawler. All other rules are pretty much the same; most cards from the main Clank! game are still compatible with this expansion. The tradeoff is that this game is a major table hog as the tiles are of significant size.
The base Catacombs game already gives you a lot of variety, so the expansions still feel a bit superfluous. If you start with Catacombs and don’t bother with the other lines, then these may have some value for you.
Disclosure: This legacy version of Clank! including the second Darkest Magic game, remains unplayed in our collection.
These boxes are HUGE and are a bit of a commitment, as is the case with any legacy-style game. We keep teaching people the base game before we can even think about introducing them to this game, so it remains a little stuck. It’s highly rated on BGG, and this is where the asymmetric player abilities later incorporated into Adventuring Party game from, so you know it’s good. Plus, this game actually has expansions in the form of additional players, so that adds a bit of confusion for me.
The two Legacy editions of Clank! are closer to something like Charterstone, where you’ll make permanent changes to the board during the campaign, and then you have the option of using your modified board as an alternate Clank! board instead. This means your Legacy board still has utility and replayability together with the rest of your core Clank! content including expansions.
Did you skip to the end of this article for a TL;DR? Here you go:
