Clank! Expeditions: Gold and Silk

Clank!

If you haven’t yet played Clank please note this is an expansion and requires the base game, so go and read the review for Clank! here, purchase it and then come back to read my review of this expansion to see if it is worth getting (spoiler, it definitely is).

The world’s quickest recap of Clank! It is a deck building, dungeon crawling, dragon chasing, treasure stealing super fun game with elements of push your luck and the constant threat of being destroyed by your own bravery / stupidity due to the clever Clank! bag pulling mechanism.

CLANK! Expeditions Gold And Silk Expansion

So, what are you getting with this expansion? A new double-sided game board with two very unique maps. The first side is the Dwarven Mine which is all about collecting lots and lots of gold before the nasty old dragon gets you. The second side is the Spider Queen’s Lair which rewards only the bravest and strongest adventurers as you have to cut your way through the passages and also cut out some of the treasures all before the spider hunts you down.

You also receive lots of new gold tokens, a new 8 point artefact and twelve web tokens (for use with the spider queen lair map), three mining bonus tokens (for use with the dwarven mine map), a market board for storing market items off the map, a new spider boss meeple and four new player meeples.

What is so good about this expansion is they haven’t just released a couple of new maps with nothing else, instead they have included new gameplay mechanisms for both maps which really change the way you approach the game all whilst leaving the core concept intact.

The changes on the Dwarven Mine map are as follows:

Mining Gold. Across the map, you will find rooms that are connected to veins of gold. When you enter a room with a vein of gold attached to it you can choose to mine this vein by spending two skill points. You then place one of your Clank! cubes on top of the number in the vein and collect that amount of gold. This vein is now depleted and you (or any other players) cannot mine this vein again. Once you have decided to mine a vein you can no longer use any more boots this turn to move (teleporting is still allowed).

Mining Bonus. At the end of the game players are rewarded for the amount of mining they carried out with the player who mined the most getting a bonus of twenty points. Second place gets ten points and third place gets five points. Please note points are only awarded if you would score normally. So if you were knocked out in the depths or you hadn’t yet picked up an artifact you would not be rewarded with the mining bonus and the bonus would go to the next player. Ties are settled by the player who has mined the deepest in the dungeon.

Elevators. As you will be diving deeper and deeper for the best gold veins and treasures you may need a speedy escape and luckily the dwarfs have built an elevator system which takes you right up to the top of the map. There is a catch which is you must spend one gold to use the elevator each time.

With this map it is very easy to gain gold and therefore easy to purchase more items from the market. This provides a very satisfying gameplay loop and you feel like you can move around the map very easily. So far games with this map have provided the highest scores I have ever achieved with Clank! However, the lure of the deepest gold veins can catch you out and you have to be aware of how close you are to certain doom before you decide to mine just one more vein.

The changes with the Spider Queen’s Lair are as follows:

Web Tokens. In between some rooms will be a web token and to move through these you will need to spend an extra boot or sword. Once you have allocated your boot/sword you can take the token and keep it in front of you face down. Each token scores between one and three points at the end of the game. Once a web token has been removed you and your competitors can move through this space normally.

Webbed Rooms. Some gold, major & minor secret rooms as well as the monkey idols have spider webs in them. To claim any of these rewards you must spend a sword to cut it free. Note, it doesn’t cost any extra resources to enter the room.

The Queen’s Web Cache. In the top corner of the board is a cache of eight treasures. On your turn you may spend eight skill to place once of your Clank! cubes on a space and then claim that reward for yourself.

With this map you are constantly bogged down with cutting yourself through webs and it makes it difficult to be brave and to get deeper where the real rewards lie. But you must change your strategy to get the most points out of this map with dungeon cards with swords as well as movement highly sought after.

Clankity Clank

This is my kind of expansion, more of what I like and a few nice surprises. Both maps make you focus your game on different strategies with the Dwarven Mine rewarding brave gameplay choices with rewards and plenty of gold, whilst the Spider Queen’s Lair feels very thematically linked as it is hard going to move through the dungeons due to all of the colossal webs. It would have been nice to have a few new dungeon cards thrown in and that is my only real criticism.

The artwork is well thought out and each dungeon looks exactly as you would imagine them to be. The rules are very easy to understand and you can be playing within minutes of reading.