Just one more trip down a side corridor and you’ll have enough to win. You could take the portal right now… but there’s some good loot around that next corner. Then you stumble onto the tile you’ve been looking for! The dragon is getting closer. That last one is the board game equivalent of trying to lose weight by eating your way through to the other side. You can slip down a one-way corridor and get stuck, find yourself facing three monsters when you’d only anticipated one, continue plumbing deeper and deeper in search of a portal. When you’re pawing around in the dark, nothing’s so easy. 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. There are rooms that terminate your movement, markets for purchasing goods, portals for hopping around-Īnd the effect is stunning. Mixed in among the empty chambers are treasures of many varieties: little ones that offer minor perks, big ones that need to be lockpicked free of their chests, prisoners who are similarly trapped but offer new ways of earning loot. There are monsters who’ll gnaw on your shins if you don’t give ’em a whack. There are locked paths, which you can open with lockpicks, this edition’s new resource for getting around. Every tile includes eight routes, but they wend around one another, curving in unexpected directions or leading down unidirectional corridors. And let me tell you, it’s a health code violation down there. Rather than plumbing a fixed map, you uncover the layout of the tomb one section at a time. The map is the “catacombs” portion of Clank! Catacombs, and it really deserves an exclamation mark of its own. It’s Clank! All its smoothness and all its flaws are preserved intact. That can be something of a nuisance, especially in the early going when a bad pull might see you dropping a bucket into Moria’s depths because you held still with so much intensity. ![]() There are precious few opportunities to prune the deadwood, so the trash you began with will likely accompany you through the entire adventure. 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. It’s 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. And some “die” within crawling distance of the exit, which is nearly as good as escaping in healthy condition. Some thieves escape with their loot, others die. ![]() Little by little, these injuries compound with the scrapes of regular adventuring. Every so often, you draw from that bag to determine whether anybody has been injured. Certain actions, usually those with some veneer of loudness like breaking apart a skeleton or flouncing around the catacombs accompanied by a lute-playing bard, result in cubes being added to the dragon’s bag. You’re a thief breaking into a tomb to steal as much treasure as your bag of infinite holding can infinitely hold before the resident dragon turns you into the burnt ends of a döner loaf. If you’ve played Clank!, the core of Clank! Catacombs is pretty much the Clank! you know and remember. Five minutes into this reunion, it’s apparent that my old friend is still carrying around some of what made him such an oddball half a decade ago. Then again, maybe it’s that I’ve changed, too.
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