Clank! Catacombs

This is the third version in the Clank! series, and each iteration grows stronger as they smooth out the flaws and refine the experience. A lot of board game sequels start to lose creativity and struggle to feel fresh. Clank! Catacombs goes the other way and changes the style altogether.

The basic principles are the same. You start with the same 10 cards and flip 5 over to reveal your move set for the turn. As you collect more cards with unique abilities, your card engine gets more powerful, and the number of actions you can take each turn grows with it. This gives the game a gradual crescendo of excitement. Every turn can unveil a new challenge, a new experience, or a move you simply couldn't make before.

That brings us to the major changes in this version, starting with the board itself. Instead of a predetermined board laid out from the start, each player flips the tiles over piece by piece as they explore new rooms. This amplifies the feeling of crawling through the depths in search of treasure. It also adds a real variability that makes it near impossible to plan your whole route ahead of time. You end up slowing down, working with the moves you have on hand and planning your path one tile at a time.

Prisoners are an interesting addition. They give players end-of-round bonuses for completing certain tasks. These small bonuses add up, and they make it hard to predict who has actually won. This fixes a problem with the original Clank!. Before the final tally, you could usually foresee the winner based on their mastery token, artifact points, leftover coins, and general play. In Catacombs, the prisoner bonuses combine with the unique cards to muddle the standings. The result is a true surprise at the end of the game.

Wayshrines add a new way to gain coins while also reducing your future clank. In Catacombs, you can still die from too much clank, but you also get the option to discard available clank altogether. I think this adds more incentive to get comfortable with clank, and it rewards riskier players, since that available clank is permanently moved away from your personal stash.

Overall, Clank! Catacombs does a great job of solving the problems of the earlier versions while bringing fresh energy and new strategies to the table. It keeps everything that already worked and smooths out the rough edges. The tile-by-tile exploration, the prisoner bonuses, and the wayshrines all push toward the same goal. They keep the game tense and unpredictable right up to the final count. This has become my favorite version of Clank, and one of the games I reach for most. No two runs feel quite the same, and that's exactly what keeps pulling me back.

Setup and rules reference

There are plenty of other changes that add to the overall experience, so I've compiled a setup and rules reference below.

Each player gets:

• 6 Burgles
• 2 Stumbles
• 1 Sidestep
• 1 Scramble
• 3 Lockpicks

Board setup:

• Choose side A or B of the starting tile.
• Randomly select 4 non-depth tiles (purple) and place them on top of the depth (dark blue) tiles.
• Create 4 piles of Mercenary, Explore, Secret Tome, and Goblin cards.
• Flip over 6 cards to create the dungeon row.
• Create a pile of Prisoners, Major Secrets, and Minor Secrets.
• Create the market with 2 Backpacks, 2 Blood Amulets, 3 Burglar Kits, and 3 Crowns (in descending order).
• Player 1 adds 3 clank, Player 2 adds 2 clank, and so on.

Differences from the original game:

1. Start at the starting tile and flip over new tiles as players choose an unexplored path. If a path forks, have the player choose left or right before exploring.
2. Lockpicks let players unlock Secret Tomes, Prisoners, locked paths, and Major Secrets.
3. Artifacts are stacked in order from lowest to highest. As tiles are revealed, so are the artifacts, and players now have the option to grab them. A plus on the artifact icon means you place a higher victory point artifact on that slot.
4. Haunted tiles are marked with a ghost icon. When one appears, place a white cube on the clank space on the board. The next time the dragon attacks, that white cube is added to the bag. Each time the ghost is pulled, all players take damage. Once a ghost cube is pulled, it returns to the clank space on the board.
5. Once you enter a wayshrine, you can put a cube from your personal stash onto the shrine. Gain 1 coin for each cube you have on a wayshrine anywhere on the board. One cube of each color per wayshrine.
6. Once a player exits the dungeon with an artifact, that player no longer performs regular actions and instead pulls 4 cubes from the clank bag each turn.
7. Prisoners offer either immediate abilities, such as health, or end-of-game bonuses. All prisoner abilities are laid out in the instructions.