Clank! Catacombs: Lairs & Lost Chambers Design Diary 2

August 6, 2024

Fresh off of a sell-out performance at Gen Con, Clank! Catacombs: Lairs and Lost Chambers is available for pre-order through August 18th!

In the first Design Diary entry, we looked at Lairs, one of the two titular types of rooms in the expansion. Today we look at the other: Lost Chambers. Like Lairs, one of the goals of Lost Chambers is to get every player’s attention when one is found. Because of portals, players in the dungeon can be effectively closer together than it might appear. And three of the Lost Chamber tiles have a portal on them, though not necessarily going into the Portal room.

Let’s take a look at an example Lost Chamber: the Altar of the Haunted.

The gold-bordered room on the left is the Lost Chamber itself. The first thing to note is that the teal passageways are new to this expansion; they are called “Entry Tunnels.” Whenever a player discovers a tile with Entry Tunnels, they must place the tile such that their adventurer enters the tile through one of them. So, in this case, you might want to get to the Altar of the Haunted Lost Chamber, but, sorry Charlie, you can’t. You’ve encountered a Pit Trap! The Entry Tunnel and Pit Trap mechanics work together on some of the expansion tiles, increasing the sense of danger when you explore new tiles. (If you missed Design Diary #1, you might want to go there to find out what Pit Traps do.) This is, of course, in addition to the danger of finding ghosts when exploring — and note that this tile comes with one of those, too!

But let’s talk about the Lost Chamber on the tile. This is the room that should get everyone at the table to pay attention to what the active player just found, partly because the active player wasn’t allowed to go there directly! But what does this room actually do?

Each Lost Chamber is unique, and the rulebook has a 2-page spread that explains everything you need to know. Once you learn the rules of a Lost Chamber, the icons printed on that Chamber tend to remind you. In this case, those icons mean:

You can trade in (trash) one of your Trophies to gain 2 gold and take an artifact from anywhere on the board. (The one artifact limit applies as normal, unless you have a Backpack.)
When you do this, you place one of the cubes from your supply on the space in the room, indicating that the room is useless from now on.

The ramifications of these rules are mostly self-evident. If someone has already discovered a high-value artifact, but it’s in an awkward, difficult-to-reach spot, then the Haunted Altar may be your answer. Sometimes the chase for a high-value artifact isn’t as clear-cut as it may appear by looking at the players’ locations.

More About Entry Tunnels

Entry Tunnels serve another silent function; they subtly reduce the game time by removing some tile placement decisions from players. I know, that can be translated as less fun, but I believe that even if you don’t have full freedom when placing the occasional tile, the Entry Tunnels create “net positive” fun for the game. Entry Tunnels can also be found on tiles that don’t have Lairs or Lost Chambers, and these are some of my favorite tiles from the expansion. For example, this one:

This is one of the new “safe” tiles in the expansion – one you might find before reaching the Depths. It’s got a special Entry Tunnel that forces you to “slide on through” to the next tile, so you’re going to get a choice when placing that tile even though this one was forced. And because that means you’ll explore an extra tile on your turn, everyone in the game will reach the Depths faster. However, the special icon on this tunnel means that you can’t travel along this tunnel later in the game while carrying an artifact. It’s essentially a one-way path to the Depths, but you’ll have to find another way home. Finally, I really like that from a design perspective, we could tuck high-value rooms on tiles as mini-quests for players to reach later, such as the room featured on this tile which has a gold coin, a treasure chest, and a prison with two prisoners waiting to be freed.

Here’s another one, but this one is found in the depths. At first glance, it looks like the easiest way to get a super high value (“++”) artifact, until you notice the Entry Tunnels. One does not simply walk into such a powerful room. (You’ll have to find “more doors”?)

Trophies

I think it’s worth talking more about trophies. In the first Design Diary entry, we learned that the Medusa figure is a trophy. And we learned in this entry that there are Lost Chambers where you can trade your trophies for special rewards. But who would want to trade in the Medusa trophy, when it allows you to ignore tunnel monsters?! Not many of the playtesters, I’ll tell you that. The good news is that the monster figure trophies are not the only trophies in the expansion.

The expansion comes with 50 cards and a decent number of them are trophies. Whenever you fight a monster or use a device that has TROPHY text, you take that card and keep it in front of you in your supply. Each of these cards has a point value at the end of the game. Here are a couple of examples:

Each of these trophy cards gives you a quest to pursue, in order to increase their point values.

Still, though, you’re probably wondering… why would you want to trash one of these trophy cards. And that’s a good question because in many cases you wouldn’t want to. Though I’ve seen players trade in Hoard Keeper because they knew they weren’t going to rack up a lot of gold. Here are a couple more examples of trophies that you’ll probably be more than happy to trade in for some kind of benefit:

Venemous Lurker is worth a point, but it also has a drawback ability, one that can be a pain when you’re hurt and want to heal from the healing caves found in the Catacombs. And Heart of the Dark is great at first, but if you don’t get rid of it, it actually hurts your score at the end of the game.

Storytelling

The narrative possibilities in this expansion were a big hit with our playtesters. For us, it feels like it makes every game feel even more different than before, based on which special rooms appeared and which ones didn’t. There’s a stronger sense of storytelling that comes from each play, as the special rooms provide focal points to the proceedings. Postgame discussions might center on how “Everybody bought something from the Bizarre Bazaar!” or “Had I only been able to defeat a Living Statue, I could have escaped!”

I hope you enjoy Lairs & Lost Chambers. Hopefully it will bring some exciting stories to your game table!

– Paul Dennen

Clank! Catacombs: Lairs & Lost Chambers is available for pre-order now!