Beschrijving
Clank! Catacombs
Find your fortune (and escape the dragon!) in Clank! Catacombs. The catacombs of the skeletal dragon Umbrok Vessna are mysterious and dangerous. Portals transport you all around the dungeon depths. Wayshrines offer vast riches to intrepid explorers. Prisoners are counting on you to free them. Ghosts, once disturbed, may haunt you to death. Despite all that, it’s time to leave the board behind with this standalone deck-building adventure.
Gameplay
Catacombs is all about filling your pockets with all manner of gold, treasures and golden Artifacts. When it’s your turn you play out your five cards from your hand and then make use of all the elements on your cards. Catacombs allows its players to total the various icons up and they can be spent however a player sees fit, including the order that those cards are executed. Catacombs makes use of four key ‘economies’ for it to work.
All cards must be played and they are then discarded before drawing a new 5-card hand. If a player’s draw deck does not contain 5 cards, the discard pile needs to be shuffled up and the required cards taken from the new draw deck. When a player buys cards from the Dungeon Row, they are placed in their discard pile and won’t be available to draw until the draw deck has become exhausted and requires a shuffle.
Each trip into the catacombs is unique since you lay tiles to create the dungeon. You can play using only the all-new dungeon deck, or you can include cards from previous expansions.
Summarised
Clank! a solid formula, a mix of press-your-luck and deck-building that’s deeply capricious but leans into it and somehow comes out all the more engaging. Unlike most deck-builders, your deck sprawls into a flabby mess, filled with companions and loot and magical tomes and some junk you nicked from the market because you had a free purchase and nothing else looked interesting. All the original’s game smoothness and all its flaws are preserved intact. With one exception: the map. That glorious map.
The idea is remarkably simple. Rather than plumbing a fixed map, you uncover the layout of the tomb one section at a time. And let me tell you, it’s a health code violation down there. Every tile includes eight routes, but they wend around one another, curving in unexpected directions or leading down unidirectional corridors. There are locked paths, which you can open with lockpicks, this edition’s new resource for getting around. There are rooms that terminate your movement, markets for purchasing goods, portals for hopping around—
And the effect is stunning. The original Clank!’s map offered many of the same beats, but their fixed appearance soon led to preferred routes, safer passageways, drops you knew well to avoid. When you’re pawing around in the dark, nothing’s so easy.
