Clank! Catacombs: Underworld Design Diary 4: Choose Your Fate

July 22, 2025

Welcome to the newest design diary for Clank! Catacombs: Underworld, and a huge thank you to all of the thieves and adventurers who have backed the new expansion on Kickstarter!

Previously, we’ve looked at the basics of the Underworld, how you might find your way down there, and why it might be a good idea to pack some Swords. Now, let’s turn our sights to some of the new chambers waiting for you in the realm below!

After Lairs & Lost Chambers set the bar really high for cool new rooms to find in the dungeon, I wanted Underworld to continue to deliver on the promise of exciting new dungeon rooms. But with a whole new underworld paradigm at work, I didn’t want to “overstuff” the expansion with more unique lairs and lost chambers.

Back when Underworld was first being designed, the first theme of the underworld was more of an infernal landscape, which included a room that caused damage to players who entered. This turned out to be… a bit too harsh! After several iterations, the product’s new room types changed. Soon, we had three special new room types:

Underground Lakes

First, there are underground lakes. These rooms are simple. When you enter one, you may trash a card. This is somewhat similar to Pit Traps from Lairs & Lost Chambers, but underground lakes are typically much harder to find and to reach. You’ll mostly find them in the underworld itself, though there is one new Depths tile with an underground lake.

To go along with underground lakes, Underworld introduces several cards that provide you with a reward for trashing them.

Towers

The next new room type is towers. These have a very simple rule: When you start your turn in a tower room, you get an extra Boot!

Truth be told, throughout most of development, this bonus was a card draw if you ended your turn in a tower. However, there were a few problems we discovered with that rule which caused us to change it:

First off, players often forgot to draw the extra card. Secondly, its power level was a little higher than we were comfortable with. Because of its high power level, we added a condition that you couldn’t get a card draw from a tower if you ended in the same tower that you started, but that added needless complexity to the room. Because of these factors, and considering that towers were really just a minor part of the expansion, we decided to simplify the bonus to a bonus Boot.

Fate Rooms

The final new room type are fate rooms and they’re only available in the Underworld. However, they’re not found on the Underworld starting tile, because I wanted to introduce a cool bonus that every player could aim for, but would have to explore the Underworld to find. The first time you enter any fate room, you draw three fate cards from the all-new fate deck, choose one of those cards to keep, and return the other two to the bottom of the deck. Thus, every player is allowed to get one fate card in the Underworld. Fate cards typically provide you with a quest objective to score points. Here are some example fate cards along those lines:

But there are also some Fate cards that are revealed immediately, such as:

And finally, there are some Fate cards that you can reveal later:

When players draw three fate cards and get to “choose their Fate,” I wanted this to be an interesting and exciting decision. Are you doing well enough in the game that you can take on a quest for big points? Are you a Mister Whiskers type player who wants to watch the world burn via Judgement? Or maybe in some situations, you might feel like you’re going to struggle to survive, and cards like The Lovers or The Star might be just what the doctor ordered.

I think the art team did a great job of pulling together a new card format for these tarot-like Fate cards!

Clank! Catacombs: Underworld – Live on Kickstarter!

Itching to take a dip in an underground lake or take a nap in a tall tower? Get your first-class ticket to the Underworld by ordering Clank! Catacombs: Underworld on Kickstarter!

In the next Design Diary, we’ll be taking a look at some of the juicy new souvenirs you can pick up from Underworld markets. Until then, be sure to join the conversation on Discord and BoardGameGeek!

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