Unlocking the Power of Secret Tomes in Clank! The Forgotten Vault

September 17, 2026

A huge thank you to everyone for all the love you’ve shown to the Clank! — Cube of Holding and The Forgotten Vault Kickstarter as we move into its third week! Just as we’ve previously done with the Cube of Holding, Master Thief Edition line, and the Wandering Monsters Mini-Expansion. Now it’s The Forgotten Vault’s turn – the new expansion for the board-based Clank! line.

Let’s start off with one of its major new mechanics: Study Tokens!

Study Tokens: Unlocking the Power of Secret Tomes

The Forgotten Vault contains two new maps on a double-sided board, and on both of them, you’ll find a new type of board space: Study Rooms. And in each Study Room, you’ll find Study Tokens, a way for thieves and dungeon-delvers to level up with the power of reading! (Figuratively, that is — the tokens themselves use icons.)

Each Study Room contains a different type of Study Token — of which there are three — and you can acquire one of each. This applies to all players, so each space will have Study Tokens equal to the total player count. On them, you’ll find a victory point and a special bonus.

Once you’ve acquired a Study Token, it remains in your personal supply, and its effects activate when you play a Secret Tome! This applies to all of your tokens, so if you had all three, you would gain two Swords, a Skill, and a Boot. Not bad! That said, Study Tokens activate only once per turn, so if you play multiple Secret Tomes, you only get these bonuses once. However, you can acquire a Study Token in the same turn that you’ve played a Secret Tome and immediately apply its effects.

Up until now, the value of Secret Tomes has been in their generous victory points — excellent to have at the end of the game, but with no other effects, they can be a nuisance to have in your hand. Study Tokens change that. With just one token, a Secret Tome in your hand is no longer dead weight, and with all three, it may just be a card you actively look forward to drawing!

There are four different Study Rooms on each map: one for each type of Study Token, and a “wild” Study Room that allows you to pick a token of your choice that you don’t already have.

“Wild” Study Rooms allow you to pick a Study Token of your choice… but they’re not so easy to get into!

Studious Deckbuilding with New Cards

We know what you might be thinking: “Sure, these Study Tokens seem neat, but how much use will I actually get out of them?” And it’s a valid question — Secret Tomes have always been a bit of a risk/reward proposition where you pay a costly price for a card that scores high, but acts as a clog in your hand when played. As a result, Secret Tomes are often (but not always) something you’re more likely to acquire later in a game. Not to worry, because The Forgotten Vault comes with 44 new cards in the Dungeon Deck, and a number of them interact with Secret Tomes in new ways:

For starters, there are various cards that make it easier to acquire Secret Tomes. Book Wyrm grants +2 Skill that can only be used to acquire Secret Tomes, while Possessed Tome will grant you one (and a Study Token!) on the spot if you’ve got four Swords to whack at it. Meanwhile, Avid Reader can be added to your deck, reducing their cost every time it comes out.

But that’s not all… you are, after all, exploring the ruins of a crumbling library in The Forgotten Vault, and what would a library be without copious amounts of books filled with arcane knowledge? Seven cards in The Forgotten Vault carry the Secret Tome label, and although they don’t grant the usual 7 points, they are more affordable and they also have their own unique effects:

Alchemist’s Tome incentivizes you to grab Study Tokens, offering a coin for each one you have, while Nictotraxian’s Journal (what is she writing in there?) grants a Skill, Sword, and Boot, potentially resulting in quite a potent turn if you have multiple Study Tokens to pair with it. And there’s Adorned Anthology, which is something we’ve never seen before: a card that is both a Secret Tome and a Gem!

There are other cards that interact with Study Tokens and Secret Tomes. Consider the fun turn you could have if you drew the following three cards in the same hand:

Even if this player didn’t start their turn with a Study Token, they could teleport over to one with Study Buddy, which would be activated by Rogue’s Almanac. Upon grabbing a Study Token, its effects would immediately be doubled by the latter, and then the player could draw another card with Protagonist. That’s quite a juicy turn, and with all the new cards in The Forgotten Vault, there is an endless number of deck-building combos waiting to be discovered!

Now Live on Kickstarter!

The Forgotten Vault is a whole new expansion to the board-based line of Clank! games, compatible with the Cube of Holding storage box and Master Thief Edition line, and all of these are currently available on Kickstarter! Be sure to pledge before the campaign ends on September 29th, and if you’re itching for more knowledge about The Forgotten Vault, we’ll be digging into it more in our next deep dive!

**Learn More About the Clank! — Cube of Holding and The Forgotten Vault Kickstarter**

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