Clank! Catacombs: Underworld Design Diary 3 – Happy Harpy Hunting

July 17, 2025

The Kickstarter for Clank! Catacombs: Underworld is live now, and as of this morning 4,067 of you have joined us for our latest adventure into the deepest reaches of the dungeon!

Previously we’ve looked at what the Underworld is, and how the greediest thieves might arrive there. Today, I wanted to take a moment to talk about a topic that is always on my mind when designing for Clank!: Boots vs. Swords!

Fight or Flight

Each time you enter the dungeon in Clank! is a unique experience, with different cards available to buy and points to score from game to game, so you can never predict what your options will be. While you might easily fall into a “mixed strategy” deck that includes a good amount of both Swords and Boots in a given game, sometimes it’s fun to focus on one or the other.

When designing the base Clank! Catacombs game, we were sure to include a sufficient amount of tunnel monsters so that Swords would almost always be valuable. Sure, if you’re lucky enough, you might be able to zoom around the dungeon and find empty pathways that avoid tunnel monsters, but for the most part, they’re all over the place, so Swords will usually come in handy. With each expansion, I look for reasons why you’ll be happy to have a focus on one or the other. The Underworld expansion is no different.

With Underworld, you’ve got a whole new level of dungeon to explore, so Boots are naturally going to come in handy (or in footy?) to travel the distances you need to reach the places you want to go. But the Underworld is a dangerous place with a lot of tunnel monsters, and it’s also populated with nasty harpies!

Harpy Hunting 101

For those of you who have played Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated, harpies are similar to Dran Agents, in that they’re tokens placed onto the board, residing in rooms. When you enter a room with a harpy, you must either spend two Swords to defeat it, or suffer one damage. As a reward for defeating it, you take the harpy token and place it in front of you as a trophy. You also take one undercoin from the bank for each harpy trophy you have, including the one you just took!

This mechanic creates an implied strategy: the harpy hunting strategy. Because the more harpies you hunt, the better. But, to cover the ground needed to hunt a lot of harpies, you’ll also need a lot of Boots!

Underworld Spending

In the last article, I talked about the toll of 1 undercoin that you must pay at the start of your turn if you’re in the Underworld. One advantage of the harpy hunting strategy is that you’ll likely have plenty of undercoins to cover the costs of these tolls! What I didn’t mention was that there are also tunnels in the Underworld that ask you to pay a toll. To proceed along these paths, you must spend an undercoin. (Though teleporting bypasses the need to pay the toll, as you might have guessed!)

Another advantage of the harpy hunting strategy is that you might be rich enough to spend some of your hard-earned coins on Underworld market items. We’ll talk about that in a future Underworld design article!

On a final note, harpies aren’t the only way to get good use out of your Swords — here’s a little glimpse at some of the surprises waiting for you down the ladders!