Clank! Catacombs: Lairs & Lost Chambers Design Diary 1

Pre-Orders begin August 5th!

Lairs & Lost Chambers is the first expansion for Clank! Catacombs and will be hitting the shelves of your friendly local game stores in a couple of months. How to expand on Catacombs presented an interesting question that the Clank! series hadn’t encountered before. When it was time to come up with an expansion for the original Clank! game, which featured a “set piece” style double-sided board, it felt very natural to include a new board featuring a brand new adventure setting. I was playing around with “hold your breath” style underwater mechanics, and thus, Sunken Treasures was born with its two underwater set pieces. But the nature of Catacombs is very different in that there isn’t a defined set piece at the start of the game. The whole point is the mystery of exploring the tiles and finding out what lies in the dark! So, the Sunken Treasures style approach wasn’t an obvious path.

I should start out by saying that I did explore that path! I prototyped an entirely new set of tiles that represented a different adventure setting. It worked like Catacombs in that you’d explore it randomly, but it wasn’t “Umbrok Vessna’s Catacombs” but rather a different, just-as-dangerous environment. I jokingly called it Fungus University, as it was kind of geological magic school where its experiments on plants had gone astray, with dangerous mushrooms and vines around each corner! That was a pretty fun approach, but it didn’t feel right. Perhaps that style of expansion lies in the future, perhaps not. If only I had a crystal ball…

Ultimately, when discussing options with the larger team, we landed on the fact that pulling out all the base Catacombs tiles and replacing them with a new tile set representing a new map just didn’t feel right. So I pivoted to a more traditional additive style expansion, where you simply add the new tiles to your old tiles so nothing is taken away from the player. With this style, I felt a lot of pressure to have the new tiles from the expansion really make an impact when they were discovered; I didn’t want to just put new configurations of old rooms on the new tiles because while they’d be technically new, they wouldn’t feel particularly different.

Lairs

While thinking about how to have the new tiles have more of an impact, it seemed like some of the tiles needed to be their own miniature set pieces – to use that term again. I’ve written before that I grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons and Clank! is inspired by those experiences. One of the strongest tools in the Dungeon Master’s toolkits is to – every once in a while – throw a unique and memorable room into a dungeon. In Lairs & Lost Chambers, as the title suggests, there are two types of special rooms that serve this purpose. A Lair represents the home of a dangerous monster. When you discover a Lair, you place the corresponding wooden figure on that Lair. Lair monsters tend to be difficult to defeat and only when they are defeated is the figure removed, so the figure tends to remain on the board for a while, as a physical reminder for players that there’s something big going on in this area, with a reward if you are the first to find a way to defeat it.

Let’s take a look at an example: Medusa’s Lair.

As you can see, this tile has multiple rooms, two of which are unusual. For now, let’s focus on the red-bordered Lair room where Medusa herself dwells. Medusa guards a powerful “+” artifact and it’s unusual for a player to be able to simply stroll into such a room and take that kind of artifact without a struggle. The same is true here, as Medusa comes with special rules: when you enter her room,  if you don’t immediately defeat her, she starts to “turn you to stone,” which deals 2 damage to you. Furthermore, she is not easy to defeat because she has magical defenses. In gameplay terms, you must play a Secret Tome on the same turn as spending two swords to defeat Medusa. Clank! players don’t typically acquire Secret Tomes early in the game, because they make your deck worse for proceeding through the dungeon. So if Medusa is found early, there is a real question posed to the players at the table… is anyone going to go for an early Tome and try to hunt Medusa? What I found during playtesting was that the reward for defeating Medusa had to be really juicy to tempt players into going for it.

The back page of the Lairs & Lost Chambers rulebook shows what you need to defeat Medusa as well as your reward for doing so:

So, when you defeat Medusa, not only do you draw two cards, but you’ll also take the figure off the board, keeping it in front of you. It is now considered one of your Trophies. And the Medusa trophy comes with a special effect : you can ignore tunnel monsters while you have it! (This should resonate with anyone who remembers the scene where Harry “Perseus” Hamlin defeated the Kraken in the Clash of the Titans film.)

Pit Traps

Now, let’s talk about that other new type of room on the Medusa’s Lair tile. It’s a Pit Trap and is found on several of the tiles in the expansion. Pit Traps add to the sense of danger lurking in the dungeon. When you enter such a room, you must choose between two options:

• Fall In: Not your typical option! You’ll take 1 damage and can’t spend Boots for the rest of the turn.
• Evade the Trap: A clever adventurer’s typical choice! To do this, you’ll need to trash a non-Stumble card from your hand. Typically, you’d say goodbye to a Burgle card, but I’ve occasionally seen players have to trash Mercenaries, Explores, or something even better.

That’s it! The tricky thing about designing Pit Traps is that I wanted them to add to the feeling of danger without being a purely negative mechanic. Thus, they give players the ability to trash a card which is both good (getting rid of a below average card for the rest of the game) and bad (because the trash is from hand, you lose the ability to play that card this turn). Players quickly learn that the danger of Pit Traps means they shouldn’t just play all their cards at the start of the turn; playing some boots and exploring first is the sensible method. Just in case.

New Cards

Before I sign off (and I note that I will return with a second Design Diary entry), I wanted to mention that the expansion comes with a batch of new cards. Here are a few as a sneak preview!

For those of you on your way to Gen Con, we’ll have a limited number of copies available each day as a special pre-release at the show!  You can pick yours up at the Dire Wolf booth in the Exhibit Hall (#2402) or from the Dire Wolf Event Room (ICC Room 141). We’ll be starting general pre-orders next Monday, and will have more to share about the design and development of the game coming later next week.

Until then…don’t get lost in the dungeon!

– Paul Dennen