Since its premiere in 2016, Clank! has become a beloved and popular board game line, with 15 releases across core games and expansions.

To go deeper on the design process behind the game would require spoilers, and we wouldn’t want to do that. So for now, we’ll say farewell, and get ready to begin your own Clank! Legacy Acquisitions Incorporated adventure later this fall! Each of the players controls a hero (represented by a miniature), with specific stats, equipment, and the whole work. The game really shines via the card mechanic that simultaneously acts as your abilities and your resources. This means you can blow up monsters left and right, but if you pace yourself too fast you might die before you complete the scenario. How you play your cards and coordinate with the rest of the group is the fun part of the game, so you should enjoy that sort of thing. One of the biggest questions I had going into the game, and one someone has asked me a few times, is “How much do I need to like Penny Arcade to play this?”. Thankfully, the answer is very easy: none at all. The biggest influence PA has on the product is that Acquisitions Incorporated is their product, and the card art features Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik’s artwork. But regardless on your opinion of PA or knowledge of their AI world, what you’ll find is an often funny and compelling game that doesn’t ask for anything in return to enjoy it. There are AI characters in some of the cards, but they otherwise do very little to or for the game, meaning that any references to them won’t make much difference either way. As PA told us when we were first discussing a partnership, Acquisitions Incorporated’s tone pretty much lines up perfectly with Clank!’s. The Dire Wolf design team included some longtime Acq Inc fans who dove into their video archive to learn even more about the details and tonal nuances, and we were delighted to find a world very well suited for an epic Clank! tale.

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I have a complicated relationship with the original Betrayal. On one hand, I really love the theme, atmosphere and idea of the game. On the other hand, it could be a clunky weird mess. Betrayal Legacy seems to fix some of my issues with the original setup, but then not completely. Denver-based Dire Wolf is the creator and publisher of award-winning digital and physical strategy games. Titles include Dune: Imperium, the hit line of Clank! board games, Eternal® Card Game, and acclaimed digital board game adaptations of Root, Munchkin, Everdell, Sagrada and others. Players will be dealing with many fantasy staples, including evil monsters, magic, and otherworldly beings. Cultists, witches, vampires, dragons, possessed peoples, and alternate religions may also be encountered. Review Some might call Jaws of the Lion“Gloomhaven lite”. While that might be true, it is in some ways a better game for it When players first open their box, they will discover a double-sided map with several Waypoints on either side. The map also has various unexplored sections that players can reveal during the course of the campaign.

We wanted the game system to act almost like a good game master in an RPG campaign. One of the earliest decisions I made to achieve this goal was to take Clank! out of the dungeon. I did grow up playing and enjoying Wizardry on my Apple ][, and I was perfectly happy as a 13 year old adventurer delving into the same dungeon underneath the town for hours upon hours. But that type of repetitive dungeon dive has fortunately been long forgotten and pushed aside for epic stories that allow players to traverse much larger areas, which allows for more interesting stories to be experienced. So we abandoned the classic side-view dungeon as seen in Clank! and went to an overhead view of a large regional landscape. This gave us a much richer palette for telling a bigger adventure story. We wanted to not only tell a fun and immersive storyline, but we wanted non-linear advancement so that players could feel like they had a good deal of agency on how their particular story played out. To this end, we devised a few primary tools: the Book of Secrets, Waypoints, and Contracts. While this is a good change, the randomness of the original game is still here. Playing a game of Betryal still feels like exploring random tiles, rolling random dice and getting random rewards or random negative effects. And in the end it might be ever before it all started because of how players (randomly) end up position wise with regards to the end goal.

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We just have to start out with what I think is one of the best legacy board games and my all-time favorite board game. Yes, the hype for Gloomhaven is really and it is that good. We’ve been fortunate to work with some amazing partners over the past few years to bring their tabletop games to digital players (and we’ll have a few more to announce soon!),” said Scott Martins, President of Dire Wolf. “ Clank! will be the first time we’re adapting our own board game title to the digital space, so it’s both a logical step and a chance for us to have some fun with it.” Clank! Legacy is dripping with story from the moment you open the box. Having played the original Clank! , most of the expansions, and Clank! In! Space! , I can definitively say that Legacy is my favorite. Not only are you experiencing the story as it unravels and creating a custom game board, but you also get to personalize your characters, watching them improve as the game progresses and giving them even more agency and buy-in to the story elements. I am not sure if we’ll ever play another Legacy game; in fact, most games seem to have moved past Legacy as a mechanic (bringing us to whatever Oath is doing, which feels like… meta Legacy?), but Clank Legacy was, and is, something special. The great thing is that we can take it out whenever we want to play Clank itself with, seeing and revisiting our game and all the choices we made and things we did, which makes it even more enjoyable than other Legacy games which more or less ask you to throw them out when you’re done. If you have a group of 2-4 players and want something longform, Clank Legacy is a great place to look. If you’ve never tried a Legacy game before, Clank Legacy makes a great place to dip your toe into that as well, and, for us, it may even be our only Legacy game. Anyone who has played a story-driven game with a large book will be familiar with how the narrative elements are doled out; as players reach spots on the board or are directed via cards or other game elements, a number inside a book symbol will tell them what to read next to advance the story. Sometimes the text will trigger events such as altering the board, adding or removing cards/items, or receiving rewards or consequences. Because of this, a player’s turn can take a few minutes as the legacy elements are being added or distributed. In my experience, even two-player games can take 90-120 minutes – I could see a four-player game taking over two hours easily.

And just to avoid any confusion: the colour of the game does not change what is inside. Just get the Season 1 version). Finally, the contributions from the two Penny Arcade creators were outstanding. Mike Krahulik provided a gorgeous piece of art for the box cover, and his style served as a guide for our card artists. Unfortunately, Holkins barely did anything at all. Just kidding! Jerry not only worked closely with us on every iteration of the Book of Secrets, massaging as necessary, but he contributed all the flavor text written on the game cards! There’s nothing about the other side, but it’s clear from the rule and the way the component looks that something is up with this component. Again, no spoilers, so I’ll stop here, but for me, this was a success because it’s a simple component that works just like the monkey idols for purposes of learning the game, inherently tantalizing because of the way the rule is written and the way the component looks, and led to pretty clean mechanical progression that felt different without being overly complex. Pandemic Legacy holds a special place in my heart because it was such a great legacy game experience and a very memorable legacy campaign.My City is a polyomino (tile laying) Legacy board game. You lay tiles in a specific way and each game last about 30 min. Each game is a chapter and there is 24 chapters. If you have the patience for one of the biggest board games out there, do give Gloomhaven a go. If you are a bit on the fence, you can also give Gloomhaven a go on PC (which is also a great way of trying out the game solo)