Clank Catacombs: Lairs and Lost Chambers from Dire Wolf — Review

Clank Catacombs — Lairs and Lost Chambers Review

Looking at the first expansion for Clank Catacombs. The Dungeon just got a whole lot deadlier.

Publisher — Dire Wolf

Designer — Paul Dennen

Art Direction — Clay Brooks, Anika Burrell, Nate Storm, and Dan Taylor

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Theme and What is it?

Clank Catacombs is a deck building dungeon crawl with a board that’s built out as you explore. Lairs and Lost Chambers is an expansion for this that adds some new rooms and cards. It also adds some new rooms, ideas, and challenges; and a couple of dangers.

What does it add?

First, it adds more cards and rooms. Some of these can be shuffled into your decks and start off without changing the game much at all. There are a few of the pieces in both of these you might want to think about, but for the most part you have some good options.

One of the things in the cards that are added is the term Trophy. There are monsters and devices that are given the trophy designation. Some things in the game will now interact with Trophies. It’s a simple addition and easily shuffles in.

Entry tunnels are now found on tiles. Some tiles will have a green movement line. When one of these is on the tile you flip over you must place it so your character enters the tile along the green line. After it’s placed anyone can enter the tile in the regular way, only the first person on a tile is affected by the entry lines. This is another piece that works well and doesn’t increase the difficulty.

Pit Traps are a new room found in the dungeon. When entering a pit trap you will either take 1 point of damage or trash a non-stumble card from your hand. This room encourages you to hang onto cards when playing your turn so you’ll have cards for when you discover a tile. This is a pretty straight forward room, and if you have experienced players could easily add them in but newer players might have a hard time understanding them.

Lost Chambers are special rooms that appear in the dungeon. There are five different rooms, each with their own rules. The rules are all fairly straight forward and easy to use. You’ll probably have to look them up the first few times you come across them, but don’t increase the difficulty too much.

Lairs are the final bit of new content in the box. There are three lairs, each with its one unique monster. These are represented by wooden tokens that are placed in the room when it’s placed. Each monster has its own rules for defeating it and effects that occur if you win. If you defeat the monsters you get the token as a trophy to keep in your play area. Because of the challenge of some of these monsters this is the most difficult to add to the game for newer players. With that said, I don’t think it’s too bad and have had success teaching people the game with all of the parts included.

Do I want/need this?

This question is going to come down to whether or not you are a completionist or just want more then this is a good buy for you. If you’re just starting into Catacombs and don’t know if you’ll like then you might want to hold off.

If you like catacombs but think it could use something more then this might be the expansion you want. It does up the challenge of the game and offers new effects. This might offer you the experience you would prefer.

Conclusions

I really like this one. I currently have it shuffled into my set and probably won’t be removing it unless I’m playing with new gamers or younger players. The lairs and chambers are all fun and offer unique abilities. The trophy rule is nice and offers something else to collect.

The only real drawback I have for the set is that I wish it had more cards. The trophy rule is nice but there aren’t that many cards that interact with it. I’m hoping the next expansion, Underworld, adds more of this to the box.

All said, I like this expansion and it does what I want a good expansion to do. It gives me more good stuff without upping the difficulty too much.

If you’re interested in the game and would like to pick up a copy you can follow this link to Amazon and pick one up for yourself. If you do, it helps us out at Meeple Gamers and we would appreciate it.

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Until next time, stay safe and be well.

Score ~ 8/10