Clank Legacy and Whether a Deck Building Campaign Can Sustain 10 Sessions

Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated At A Glance

Okay, this is the actual behind the scenes story of what happens when you decide to take on an entire legacy campaign over a university term. I have successfully completed two full campaigns of Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated after it was released in 2019 (BoardGameGeek). Campaign one was undertaken with my housemates over second year who managed to play eight sessions before upcoming exams destroyed our will to play. Campaign two was undertaken over the summer with friends from home who played all ten sessions. Below I have documented how the progression worked, taken pictures of every sticker placed on the board and kept copious notes on how our deck built from session to session.

Legacy board games have always been an interesting concept to me because they have to figure out how to make an entire campaign consistently fun. A game promising ten sessions is either going to have you blowing things up by session five or change the way you look at board games by session ten. Clank! Legacy avoids this by changing how you view your play space. Everything in Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated is modular rather than static.

Clank! Legacy is a legacy deck building game in the Clank! universe (Wikipedia), sure, but it plays that premise really well.

When I first heard about Clank! Legacy I was sold by the idea of a legacy campaign that made us laugh every time we set foot on the board or opened a card. I was sceptical at first. Board game humour is notoriously terrible with many of its laughs coming from stale jokes written into flavour text that nobody reads. Clank! Legacy made us laugh, session after infuriating session.

What Is Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated?

Essentially Clank! is a deck building dungeon crawler where if you make too much noise you die. You start with rubbish starter decks and purchase better cards from a central market. Cards have base costs you pay with skill points but they also generate skill points, movement points, or adventure points when you play them. The twist is that many abilities will net you clank. Clank is essentially noise that you make to chase after treasure and grab chest bonuses.

So the dragons take turns attacking your party based on how much noise you make. The more noise you make the more likely you are to get attacked. You generate clank by almost every action you take so as you greedily greed up treasure and good cards your rising clank totals set off more and more dragons.

Lets break down how that system plays out. Clank is represented by cubes that you place into a dragon bag (UltraBoardGames). At the start of each round every player takes a cube from that bag. If that cube is your colour you take damage equal to the level of dragon attacking. So if you make too much noise early on almost every time you take an action there is a chance you will die.

But you NEED to make noise to open treasure chests that contain the artifacts you need to not only score points but progress through the campaign.

That is just the core loop. A Clank! Legacy campaign changes all of this based on your group accomplishments and failures (Clank Legacy Rulebook PDF). Clank! Legacy has you play through a series of connected games that change both the rules you play by and the board you play on.

Do well and you place stickers that represent permanent upgrades to your character sheet. Fail and you might lose limbs. Literally. Open boxes and place stickers permanently altering rooms from game to game (Clank Legacy Rulebook PDF). There are literal instructions on where to place stickers that will cover entire sections of the dungeon grid in permanent additions and alterations.

Cards get added to the market as you acquire them from treasure chests but cards also get removed from the market permanently as you learn new powers. Every action has the potential to be your last, but every victory will permanently change the way you play through subsequent sessions.

The Acquisitions Incorporated Comedy Framework

This wouldn’t be Legacy without the comedy theme driving some of the decisions. Clank! fits into the Acquisitions Incorporated universe (Dire Wolf Digital), which means instead of being awesome dwarven warriors you are simply employees at a company that gets you treasure hunting adventures. These are not heroic quests to save the day, these are employees sent on ridiculous assignments by management who clearly don’t know what actually goes on during these business trips.

How Legacy Mechanics Create Campaign Momentum

The novelty of any deck building game is your progress reset once the deck gets shuffled. Clank! Legacy gets around this by ensuring everything you do to improve your deck and characters persist between games.

Between sessions your character sheet grows with new abilities you unlock through performance. Make the right decisions and you finish a session with an upgraded character sheet full of one time abilities. Fail too much? Certain failures have lasting consequences. I will never forget session three of our first campaign where I made seriously dumb noise management decisions. As a result I returned to my players with a peg-leg that reduced my max health. Every dragon attack from that point forward was more dangerous because I was physically weaker, but my avatar grew a personality I wanted to protect.

The dungeon changes as well. Fail to disarm a trap? That room gets bricked off the board permanently (UltraBoardGames). Figured out a secret passage? New room tiles get added that only you can access. Long story short by session six you look at the board and feel like you played enough sessions for it to look the way it does.

Market decks change as well. New cards are added that come into the pool permanently based on campaign triggers, but you also lose cards permanently if certain conditions are met. By halfway through our summer campaign we were already getting powerful one of cards that were only available because of decisions we made several sessions prior. It’s a rewarding feeling as your market deck grows and evolves as a direct consequence of your actions.

Your deck gets better every game. You do not start each session with a bare bones deck. You start each session with the deck you left off with at the end of your previous campaign session. Every piece of gear, every character power you acquired previously carries over into your next game. This plays incredibly well with the legacy alterations because it makes every change to the board or market feel impactful.

Noise Management and Risk Escalation Over Ten Sessions

My favourite part of Clank! is how much more dangerous every session becomes the deeper you get into the campaign. The first two or three sessions feel almost trivial because every dragon attack is easily avoidable. You have room for error. As your campaign progresses dragon attacks become more punishing, rooms have more elaborate effects that tend to generate clank, and the artifacts you need to grab become further away and more difficult to steal without setting everything off.

By session eight of any given Clank! Legacy campaign you are frantically scooping up treasure because you KNOW that next dragon attack could kill you. Every game feels impossible yet oddly fair because you know the game is punishing you based on risks you chose to take.

This will sound weird but I actually measured how much noise we made as a group over both campaigns. I took detailed notes on our clank totals at the end of every round just to see how our team performance changed as we got better. Sessions one through about three of Clank! felt pretty easy. We were never brutally punished for large clank totals because dragons only went so deep into that silly dragon bag. I watched us rack up around 12 clank a player per game before daring to make it into the treasure room. By sessions seven through nine we were averaging closer to 8 clank a person per game. But that clutch felt so much worse. Our dragon bag was loaded with cubes because we didn’t know any better the first three sessions. Taking damage felt considerably worse.

Why The Comedy Works

Clank! doesn’t take itself seriously. None of your infamous dice are story protected because your entire party is made up of corporate drones searching for treasure. There are dragons? Fine but we’re stealing their stuff. Every rubber dying moment we had was amplified by how ridiculous the situation was made to feel.

Dan decided he was slick and took too much treasure from the dragon’s hoard because he didn’t want us to split it. We failed an ambush trap because sudden movement generates too much clank. Long story short the dragon attacked and killed Dan’s rogue because he got greedy over treasure that wasn’t even worth the health points lost.

As a group we made inside jokes about each others play styles. Another player always went rogue heavy and ended up triggering ambush traps way too often so we dubbed him “the rogue who always pulls the traps”. Since I tended to cheap out on purchases Dan and I would take forever during the market phase because “the accountant was holding up the meeting”. We personified our dumb decisions with inside jokes that pointed back at failed deck choices.

These jokes worked because Clank! Legacy is structured around telling you to fail more. Management decided we needed to grab printer paper from a dragon’s lair by session five because they ran out? Fine clip away management we’re running out TOO. The humour and story are genuinely entertaining (Shut Up and Sit Down) because they serve the mechanical progression rather than competing with it.

Whether Ten Sessions Actually Work

Does ten sessions sound like a lot to commit? It is and it isn’t. Clank! Legacy promises players a campaign of 10 games (UltraBoardGames), but ten games is all it gives you. That doesn’t mean you won’t feel satisfied with the adventure you put your party through.

I have reviewed both of my campaigns as both successful and stressful. We never felt like Clank! was providing repetitive content but the time between sessions needs to be manageable if you want to maintain the narrative drive of a legacy campaign. Our first campaign suffered because we got into session eight and then couldn’t play for weeks. Nobody remembered where stickers went or what certain symbols meant.

Our summer campaign was a success because we played every three days for thirty days. Sessions didn’t feel so much like standalone adventures as chapters in a longer story. Our board changed each session in visible and permanent ways that didn’t confuse us because we didn’t take too long off.

The game keeps delivering surprises session after session (Shut Up and Sit Down). Ten sessions provides a nice narrative arc to your campaign. Sessions one through three feel like pure mechanical discovery as you learn what you can get away with. Sessions four through six start to open up the full potential of your turn structure but introduce legacy setbacks. Sessions seven through nine are where Clank! really starts to kick you when you are down. Session ten finishes off what your group accomplished with enough oomph to make it worth the pain.

You do need to maintain consistency in your player count. Clank! lists playability at 2-4 players (BoardGameGeek), but your party grows with you over the course of a campaign. Someone dropping out mid campaign leaves your new player at a serious mechanical and narrative disadvantage.

Is Clank! Legacy Still Relevant Today?

Five years after its initial release Clank! Legacy remains the gold standard for legacy boards telling a cohesive narrative across a ten session campaign. The market has since exploded with greatness since Clank! launched, but many of those entries felt like they frontloaded a single session wonder and padded out with mediocre content.

Quality of the components feels premium. Cards still look and feel awesome even after heavy shuffling. Stickers haven’t come loose or lost their adhering abilities. The legacy tags and upgrades feel like an extension of the game rather than an afterthought. Setup does take a few minutes longer but never at the cost of shutting people out. And teaching is only slightly more involved because you unlock legacy mechanics over the first three sessions.

Difficulty scaling feels cleverer and more measured than recent entries into the legacy arena. New sessions don’t overwhelm with new rules they simply amplify the danger of existing actions. This lets players get comfortable with the rulesets before throwing them into higher stakes decisions.

My only complaint with Clank! Legacy is the comedy starts to wear thin once you know what you are getting yourself into on subsequent campaigns. The first time running the office themed jokes will earn you laughs, but the second and third times with different groups it won’t land. Luckily enough your deck building progression and forward momentum remains consistent even if the jokes grow old.

Why You Should Play This Game

Play Clank! Legacy if your deck building decks feel too static and disposable.

Play it if you promised your friends a ten session campaign and need something that can hold their attention.

Play it if previous legacy board games have started great for you but faded into mediocrity.

Play it if you want workplace comedy reflected in your play style rather than on some cardboard.

Play it if your gaming group has erratic schedules and needs something that can be picked up and played weeks apart.

Play it if you want to see legacy game design done right.

Verdict

Clank! Legacy gets a 9/10 for redefining what long form campaign gaming can look like. I have now played through two full campaigns and am currently discussing a third with my coworkers. Progression in Clank! feels required to stay engaged rather than just being there to mess with you. Comedy elements complement the main story beats instead of taking away from your group’s narrative.

Legacy design has never felt more confident than it does in Clank!. New legacy games being published learn something new from how Clank! Legacy iterates on its core formula every time you play through a session. It never feels overwhelming because it constantly relates new mechanical developments back to core systems we learned during session one. Each of ten sessions feels like a complete story with clear stakes by the time you reach the campaign climax.

See our breakdown of the best legacy board games for long campaigns

Billy

Billy’s a university student from Manchester who somehow turned “game night” into his full-time personality. He writes about social games, university life, and how board games make awkward people (like him) instantly more interesting. Friendly, funny, and all about community over competition.