Rattling the cubes

Somebody at the bar brought Clank! in a gym bag maybe two years back, cards already sleeved, and it’s been in rotation since. Paul Dennen’s deckbuilder with a board: cards come through an Ascension-style continuous offer, but instead of just building an engine you’re delving into a dungeon as a low-rent thief, grabbing treasure, trying to get back out before a dragon that lives upstairs gets annoyed enough to eat you. The noise mechanic, they call it clank, is the whole hook: certain cards, usually the good ones, make you add cubes to the dragon bag, and when a dragon card turns up in the market somebody pulls from that bag, seeded with neutral cubes too, and if yours comes out you take the hit. You can hear your own doom rattling around in there before it happens. That’s good design, whatever else is true about the rest of it.

Setup’s tedious the first game, working through the rulebook while everybody keeps asking what a key does, but once you’ve got the hang of it setup becomes a breeze, closer to ten minutes than twenty five, and on a Tuesday after a double that’s the difference between playing and not. Sweet spot’s three players, two works fine too, but it’s not so great with four. One of my regulars turns every purchase into a seminar, and I get it, there are four currencies to juggle here, skill, attack, movement, gold, which makes the turns more involved than most Ascension-style games, but it also means a table full of people staring at their hands doing nothing while he works it out.

The cards get marked easily too, chip if you don’t sleeve them, and ours weren’t for the first two plays, which I regret now every time I shuffle. And the ending’s a little mean: first player out triggers the end of game, four more turns for everybody else, and if you’re still underground when that timer runs out you can end up with nothing, dead broke in a hole after an hour of work. Happened to me once. I still went back for more.