I’ll Slip by the Dragon and… CLANK!
Clank! is a deck-building, dungeon-delving, push-your-luck board game designed by Paul Dennen at Dire Wolf Digital. It’s also the most fun “throw caution to the wind” board game I’ve played in a long time.
Players are thieves heading into a dungeon, challenged to see who can come back with the most loot. Bonus points if you walk out instead of getting carried, but you won’t be allowed to walk out unless you have an artifact. (And if you’re too deep in the dungeon when you tip over, the locals won’t carry you out.)
The players each start with identical decks of ten cards. A player shuffles their deck and draws five. These provide movement points to delve deeper and skill points to buy additional cards to add to their deck. There are also stumble cards that force them to add their cubes to the Clank! pile. At the end of a player’s turn, the cards they played and any newly acquired cards are discarded. Once they’ve played through all their cards, the discard pile is shuffled, and those new cards enter play.
Thus the players are building up their decks in the hopes that their draw of five cards will give them an increasing number skill points to buy better and better cards, and also to start bringing combat points and gold into their hand on a turn. (Yes, there are shops in the dungeon.)
Traveller Rule 0 is, roughly, “The Referee Can Make S…tuff Up.”
There’s a paradox in the nature of a dictionary of monsters. The medieval bestiaries at least claimed to be compendia of actual knowledge. But books like Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings (Manual de zoología fantástica) and perhaps even Katharine Briggs’ Dictionary of Fairies are only superficially rational collections of information. Though alphabetised and cross-referenced, the logical framework’s a way of presenting wild fantasy and dream: basilisks and baldanders, brownies and banshees, sylphs and sphinxes. The Monster Manual, and the role-playing handbooks it inspired, take this contradiction to a new level — detailed statistics for each creature described along with the avowed intent of inspiring new stories featuring the legendary or imaginary entities. Quantified, numerically precise, the monsters in these enchiridia still crack open the inside of the head, driving readers to imagine worlds big enough to hold dungeon-dwellers and dragons. Rupert Bottenberg’s Fourscore Phantasmagores is the newest volume of these wonders for gamers and monster-lovers of all stripes, presenting, as it says on the cover, “A Gathering of Grotequeries for Gapejaws and Gamemasters.” And, conscious of its predecessors, the book’s a rich source of inspiration; a grimoire seeding new myths.