Clank!

Clank! is a deckbuilder wearing a dungeon crawl’s clothes, and the noise bag mechanic, cubes going in for every loud thing you do and getting drawn out to potentially wake the dragon, is genuinely the best idea in the box. It’s tactile in a way deckbuilders usually aren’t, you can hear the bag shake, there’s real dread every time you push one more turn instead of heading for the exit.

Here’s the thing though, and it took me a few plays to actually name it, this game runs close to multiplayer solitaire more often than I expected going in. Everyone’s building their own deck, exploring their own path through the dungeon, and the actual interaction is mostly watching the clock together rather than doing things to each other. One review I read called it “mild thwarting” and that’s about right, you’re racing the same dragon and the same exit timing, but you’re rarely directly in each other’s way. I don’t hold this against it exactly, some nights I want that lower-friction parallel-play feeling, but if you’re shopping for a deckbuilder with teeth in the player interaction, look elsewhere.

Price-per-play is genuinely good here, this is not an expensive box for the amount of table time it’s given me, and the market row keeps enough turnover that repeat plays don’t feel like the same game twice, even with the board itself offering only two real layouts. That’s a fair complaint I’ve seen elsewhere, more board variety would help the long-term replay picture, but the huge card pool does a lot of the heavy lifting on its own.

Four stars, a genuinely fun and tense evening most times it hits the table, just don’t go in expecting a deckbuilder that makes the other players a real obstacle. The dragon’s the obstacle here, not the person across from you.