Enter the dragon

It’s a typical fantasy scenario — there’s a dragon, who inevitably has amassed quite a hoard of treasure in her lair, which is also chock-full of magical artifacts, wandering monsters and...a very enterprising merchant? Okay, apart from that last bit, that’s as standard a set-up as you could find. That’s where Clank starts to show its hand, however, because you don’t play as mighty heroes on a quest to slay the dragon — no, you’re a bunch of ambitious thieves who are each trying to get into the dungeon, get as much loot as possible and get back out again while getting in each other’s way as much as possible. Remember the (slightly paraphrased) old saying — you don’t have to outrun the dragon, you just have to outrun your ‘friends’.

Clank is a deckbuilding game, which means that your personal decks of cards will get more and more powerful over time. And you’ll sorely need every bit of that power, because the dungeon is absolutely crammed with obstacles — locked doors, crystal caverns that slow you down, skulking monsters that keep chipping away at your health the deeper you go, and the dragon herself. In the beginning, the dragon doesn’t realise that she’s being robbed; however, as the game goes on, she gets progressively angrier and more dangerous — all down to Clank’s best mechanism, and the one that gave the game its name.

You see, robbing a dungeon isn’t easy. You’re bound to make some noise while you do so. Some ‘clank’, if you will. And, every time you do — maybe because of a ‘Stumble’ card that everybody starts off with, or a ‘Dead Run’ card that you can buy later, or others — you have to add a cube of your colour to the ‘Clank area’ on the side of the board. Make too much noise and you’ll build up a lot of clank there; which will come back to bite you when the dragon attacks. When a dragon attack is triggered, all the clank cubes will go into a bag — then, based on the dragon’s level of anger, a certain number of cubes will be drawn randomly from that bag. If you draw a black cube, great! Nothing happens. But draw a player’s cube, and they’ve just taken a point of damage. Not much, but you’ve only got 10 health; and the more noise you make, the more risk you’re taking.

That is the heart of Clank, and a brilliant heart it is. On a number of occasions, you’ll have the option of taking a slower and stealthier (thus, generating less clank) route or throwing caution to the wind and barrelling onwards, trusting that you’ll be able to get out before the dragon mauls you too badly. It’s a wonderful knife-edge of tension that never quite goes away, because you never know when a competitor might decide to call it a day and start heading back to the surface; you never want to be left too far behind.
Clank is an excellent game, both thanks to its solid mechanics and thanks to the fact that it doesn’t take itself too seriously — there’s some genuinely funny nuggets hidden away in that deck of cards. Overall, it’s a blast with every player count and you should give it a try!