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Games I Have Played: Clank! Legacy (Campaigns 1-3)
So the Spouse and I are both huge fans of Clank!, which is a super fun deck-builder dungeon exploration game with a push-your-luck element and sense of humor. Getting him Clank! Legacy for Christmas was a no-brainer, and the actual risk was that we'd both gotten it for each other. We started playing this weekend and have so far loved it. The campaigns are long, somewhere in the realm of two and a half to three hours each, because we're having too much fun doing as much as we can each game.
The game's been a delight so far. I'm going to put the rest of my comments, including some remarks about our individual campaigns, because I believe anyone thinking about playing this should go in as spoiler-free as possible. A lot of the delight has come from discovering different things in the game, and I don't want to spoil someone else's potential playthrough.
Campaign 1, Spouse won pretty handily but it didn't feel like it because we both did so much exploring and trying to trigger everything we could. Our policy so far has been that the person who triggers reading from the Book of Secrets gets to read the passage and make decisions, although we do aim to work together so we can do all the things. And then at the very end when the game had us change how we can enter/leave the starting square felt really "Whoa..." and really drove home how this game was going to be different than any other game we've played before. (Clank! is our first legacy-style game! It makes me potentially want to do more, but I'm not sure how much any of the other legacy games out there appeal to me.) And there's so many stickers! I had forgotten how much I enjoy stickers. There's a real sense of the game expanding as you go along. I was worried a bit the game would suffer having only the minimum two players rather than three or the maximum four, but so far that hasn't been borne out.
Campaign 2 was rough for us. We both died, and I was able to score points but Spouse wasn't. This campaign suffered a teensy bit in that we had done so many of the starting secrets in Campaign 1, but we also had a bunch of dragon attacks and were not very good at managing our clank, so that also contributed a lot to the somewhat shorter feel as compared to Campaign 1. Still left us wanting more though!
Campaign 3 was fantastic. We got to add a whole quadrant to the starting board, which also managed to be an experiment in who was the better sticker placer. I'm curious to see if Campaign 4 adds the other quadrant to the board (We got to choose which direction the campaign went.), and at the end of the entire game whether I'm right in thinking that there are two pairs of stickers so the board ends up different depending on which direction you chose. We're avoiding looking at stickers, cards, tokens, etc. except as needed to keep the surprise, so I can't see if there will be leftover stickers until the end of all ten campaigns. This game was so close too! Spouse waited on escaping a couple turns because if he had, I would probably have scored zero points, but in doing so he allowed me a couple turns where I really racked up points. We did a lot better managing our clank this game too, despite me being near death at one point, which also let us run the game very long. And when I was counting up, I realized there was one thing I should have bought on my last turn to get a couple more points. Spouse let me go ahead and say I'd bought it, which brought my total to 129 versus his 127. I would have had 126 without that last buy. In a different game, I probably would not have asked for the rewind, but it involved a newly introduced play element that I was still getting used to so I didn't remember that I needed to account for it.
The game does take up a lot of real estate. It's our entire dining room table right now, and I am very glad we can just leave it on the table without worrying about having to pack everything up each campaign. The base board itself is average size but wanting to keep the cards, Book of Secrets, secret boxes/stickers/etc., and quest reminders easily accessible takes a lot of space. Packing/unpacking wouldn't be horrible in the sense that everything's well-labeled so nothing would get lost, but it would be time consuming and the beginning setup and end game wrap up are already long enough. Even counting points can be tricky because as the game progresses, there are more conditional points in the scoring. Plus there's the epilogue of each campaign and potential character level ups. There is a lot going on! But that's part of what's made it so much fun so far.
I'm going to stop there as anything else I'd want to say would be very much specific spoilers, as opposed to the more general game play ones so far.
The game's been a delight so far. I'm going to put the rest of my comments, including some remarks about our individual campaigns, because I believe anyone thinking about playing this should go in as spoiler-free as possible. A lot of the delight has come from discovering different things in the game, and I don't want to spoil someone else's potential playthrough.
Campaign 1, Spouse won pretty handily but it didn't feel like it because we both did so much exploring and trying to trigger everything we could. Our policy so far has been that the person who triggers reading from the Book of Secrets gets to read the passage and make decisions, although we do aim to work together so we can do all the things. And then at the very end when the game had us change how we can enter/leave the starting square felt really "Whoa..." and really drove home how this game was going to be different than any other game we've played before. (Clank! is our first legacy-style game! It makes me potentially want to do more, but I'm not sure how much any of the other legacy games out there appeal to me.) And there's so many stickers! I had forgotten how much I enjoy stickers. There's a real sense of the game expanding as you go along. I was worried a bit the game would suffer having only the minimum two players rather than three or the maximum four, but so far that hasn't been borne out.
Campaign 2 was rough for us. We both died, and I was able to score points but Spouse wasn't. This campaign suffered a teensy bit in that we had done so many of the starting secrets in Campaign 1, but we also had a bunch of dragon attacks and were not very good at managing our clank, so that also contributed a lot to the somewhat shorter feel as compared to Campaign 1. Still left us wanting more though!
Campaign 3 was fantastic. We got to add a whole quadrant to the starting board, which also managed to be an experiment in who was the better sticker placer. I'm curious to see if Campaign 4 adds the other quadrant to the board (We got to choose which direction the campaign went.), and at the end of the entire game whether I'm right in thinking that there are two pairs of stickers so the board ends up different depending on which direction you chose. We're avoiding looking at stickers, cards, tokens, etc. except as needed to keep the surprise, so I can't see if there will be leftover stickers until the end of all ten campaigns. This game was so close too! Spouse waited on escaping a couple turns because if he had, I would probably have scored zero points, but in doing so he allowed me a couple turns where I really racked up points. We did a lot better managing our clank this game too, despite me being near death at one point, which also let us run the game very long. And when I was counting up, I realized there was one thing I should have bought on my last turn to get a couple more points. Spouse let me go ahead and say I'd bought it, which brought my total to 129 versus his 127. I would have had 126 without that last buy. In a different game, I probably would not have asked for the rewind, but it involved a newly introduced play element that I was still getting used to so I didn't remember that I needed to account for it.
The game does take up a lot of real estate. It's our entire dining room table right now, and I am very glad we can just leave it on the table without worrying about having to pack everything up each campaign. The base board itself is average size but wanting to keep the cards, Book of Secrets, secret boxes/stickers/etc., and quest reminders easily accessible takes a lot of space. Packing/unpacking wouldn't be horrible in the sense that everything's well-labeled so nothing would get lost, but it would be time consuming and the beginning setup and end game wrap up are already long enough. Even counting points can be tricky because as the game progresses, there are more conditional points in the scoring. Plus there's the epilogue of each campaign and potential character level ups. There is a lot going on! But that's part of what's made it so much fun so far.
I'm going to stop there as anything else I'd want to say would be very much specific spoilers, as opposed to the more general game play ones so far.