Clank!

I’ve only been playing this for a day but it’s a lot of fun and I have a feeling I will get my money’s worth many times over. The creators of this game obviously made it with a respect for the audience and a love for the game. I do get a little confused about which secrets they force you to play right away and which ones you can keep for later, but that’s hardly a dealbreaker. If you are a fan of the board game, and willing to take the six minutes to learn this version, it’s kind of a no-brainer.

Great digital adaptation, but it lacks content. And now that Sunken Treasures has been released for $9, I’m realizing that this is going to be an app that will require around $100 to purchase all available content once it is all released. (Not to mention the large amount of time it takes to each expansion release). The app isn’t guaranteed to be around forever. If the content were half the price I could justify the investment, but I’ll stick with the tabletop versions instead. I would love if content were released quarterly at minimum to keep users interested, including Legacy editions in the future, which would be a bigger task but so much more streamlined than the physical versions with all of the components and stickers. Not sure if even the Steam version will ever get there, but one can hope, and that it’s at a price that doesn’t make me consider if it’s worth it.

Clank! is one of my all-time favorite tabletop games, and the digital implementation is excellent… except that the mobile experience in particular can be a bit tedious. If you exit the app to respond to texts or whatever, the server is often lost, forcing a restart, wherein you need to wait for it to load, then tell it no, you don’t want a replay, etc. (How about don’t make a replay the default, so we don’t need to skip it every time?) And within the game, the animations look great, but it’s all just verrry slooow as you have to wait for every animation and AI player’s turn, even on the “fast mode.” Please, developer, let us enjoy this great game at more than a snail’s pace, and without needing to reconnect almost every time you leave the app.