Clank! Legacy 2: Designer Q&A

Paul: Hi there! I’m Paul Dennen, creator of Clank!, Dune: Imperium, and a few other games along the way. On behalf of everyone at Dire Wolf, I wanted to thank all of the backers who have joined us for our first Kickstarter to bring Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporated – Darkest Magic to life. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind over the past couple of days as we’ve heard from players around the world, and we wanted to open up the conversation, and introduce two of the many folks who’ve been working hard to get Clank! Legacy 2 to your table.

We’ve been answering fans along the way on our Kickstarter page, but we’d love to hear any questions you might have about the game or its development in the Board Game Geek forums – we’ll be selecting and answering a handful of them in a designer Q&A next week. So let us know what you’d like to hear more about!

In the meantime, I wanted to introduce Jay Treat, the lead designer of Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporated – Darkest Magic, and Andy Clautice, the lead designer of the original Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated. There’s a wider team that has been working on the game as a whole, but Jay and Andy are particularly steeped in what we think makes this game special.

Q: What are you most excited for in returning to Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporated – Darkest Magic?

Jay: The Acquisitions Incorporated universe is deep and rich, so getting to explore it more has been a blast: The game has a ton of references, obvious and obscure. Acquisitions Incorporated is so hilarious and unique. We’ve had a ton of laughs playing in that sandbox, and I can’t wait to share that joy with you.

Andy: I’m excited for the moments! Legacy games get to lean into story in a way that most games don’t, and then you get to back that story up with big gameplay changes, and it creates these moments where it feels like everything is changing around you. There’s one particular boss battle late in the campaign that, when Jay showed it to me for the first time, it blew my mind. I think players will remember these adventures for a long time, and that’s very exciting to me.

Paul: It’s been fun to return to the type of game where we get to kind of “go wild” with the game from a design perspective. Because of the legacy format, we’re able to slowly introduce rules so that you reach a really satisfying mix of mechanisms with a complexity level that wouldn’t have been appropriate right out of the box, but feels totally fine when encountered bit by bit.

Q: What are the challenges of designing a legacy game?

Jay: For a multi-game campaign like Darkest Magic, it’s like designing a bunch of different games (every game has to feel distinct from the rest) all at once, except they’re all connected. Every design choice affects three others, and is affected by three more, so changing one thing in game 6 not only has ripple effects on each subsequent game, but setup effects on each prior game. On top of the mechanics of each game, you’re writing an episodic story that has to inform those mechanics and vice-versa, as well as hang together individually and as an epic whole. Trying to integrate choices players may or may not make (or that they might make who-knows-when) into all of that makes their experience much more meaningful, but complicates the puzzle even more.

Q: What are some big changes between this and the first Clank! Legacy?

Andy: One of the biggest changes, to me, is the characters that you get to play as. In the first game, we were pretty hands-off about who exactly you were; the focus was the overall story, and it was up to players to create their characters and do as much or as little as they wanted with them.

This time, we have four distinct characters with their own storylines through the whole campaign. As a player, you get your own specific Journal full of your own story beats. You read a little bit more every game, and you get to mark your big moments on the back, so it becomes this record of your adventure. As a result, the game is a lot more personal; we can actually have narrative arcs for these characters where they get to grow both as an adventurer and as a person.

Mechanically, bringing in fully cooperative games is a huge change. Lots of people played the first game in a “friendly” way, but now you get a bunch more tools to help each other, and that lets us get to actually set the game against you in a much bigger way.

Q: Which character in the game is your favorite?

Andy: I think the most fun is the Vengeful. Well, maybe he’s not that much fun as a person if you met him, but the writing is super fun. He’s this super hard-boiled detective, and he talks like he’s straight out of an old noir story, but with that fun skew that comes from the Acq Inc world. I think players will really dig him.

Jay: I’ve got to go with the Defiant. She values and cares about other people (regardless of their station) and genuinely wants to do good. Even so, she’s naive about how the world really works, and going through an embarrassing teenaged rebellious phase.

Paul: There’s an NPC in the game named Freddy. He’s my favorite new character both because of his overall concept (which I won’t spoil) and his “surfer dude” style of dialogue. Jim and Omin have some pretty great moments in this one, too.

Q: Do I need to play the original Clank! Legacy first?

Jay: You don’t need to play the original in order to appreciate or enjoy the sequel. Darkest Magic builds off Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated in pretty subtle ways, so you should find playing both extra satisfying. I do recommend playing the original, only because it’s such an excellent game. If you do play both, you might as well play them in order, right?

Q: What’s next?

Paul: We’ll have more to share regarding what’s coming in Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporated – Darkest Magic as the Kickstarter campaign unfolds…including a first look at the frosty foe awaiting you at the end of the Rage Track coming tomorrow!

In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you on Board Game Geek with any questions you might have. We’ll be rounding them up into a Q&A article during the KS campaign, so stay tuned for updates there!

As always, thanks for your support, and thanks for backing Clank! Legacy 2!