Everyone has at some point thought about what it would be like as a fantasy burglar crawling down into a monster-infested dungeon to make off with heaps of loot, all while not waking up the terrible dragon that dwells within. Don’t you dare tell me you haven’t or my perception of reality will be absolutely ruined.
Anyway, tabletop adaptation experts Dire Wolf have dropped a digital version of Clank, a deckbuilder about doing just that: Sneaking into some caves and stealing cool stuff. Your cards let you get loot, fight monsters, and sneak around. You’re aiming for one of a few especially precious artifacts—but it’s inevitable that a player will, eventually, make a loud ‘clank!’ and wake the dragon, accelerating the danger of someone getting caught and eaten.
Right now the digital version of Clank has the two boards of the original tabletop Clank, local play against the AI, and online support for four players.
The combination of pushing your luck and deckbuilding is catnip to a certain kind of player (me) who cannot help but do things that will come back to bite them in the butt (again, me). Clank’s rules are pretty simple to grasp, and the deckbuilding is built on the approachable principle that you add new cards to your discard and only reshuffle your deck when it runs out. There’s none of that constant reshuffling you see in digital-only deckbuilders.
Clank is eight years old for tabletop players now, but still pops up as a recommendation and stays both in-print and selling. It was both a MENSA select and a Spiel Des Jahres recommended game, two rather notable awards. It’s notable as a more approachable deckbuilder for people who don’t always love the ultra-deep combos and metagame strategies—something that might be fresh if your only exposure to deckbuilding is via videogames.
Dire Wolf is a well-known name in digital board game adaptations, most recently for their quite good spin on Dune: Imperium. The Clank release is currently in Early Access, but only aims to be there for “a couple of months” with Dire Wolf expecting a full release in the fall. The full version will include better visuals, more customization, expanded game modes, and cross-platform play.
You can find Clank! on Steam for $23.
