Clank!: A Deck-Building Adventure (2016)
Clank! (a game that’s difficult to write about in a grammatically correct way due to that darned exclamation mark!) combined deck building with movement on a board and added the push-your-luck of the dragon.
You see, in Clank!, your deck starts with a couple of noisy cards which generate Clank. The last thing you want to be is noisy in this game, as there’s a dragon down in the depths of the board who is hungry and looking to eat someone. The more noise you’ve made, the more likely it is to be you!
The board is split into above- and under-ground halves, with all the really good stuff being below ground. There’s an endgame here triggered one of two ways - either by the first person to get below ground, grab a relic, and get all the way back through the above-ground to escape the board; or by the first person to die to damage. End the game below ground and your final score is zero, but collapse to damage above ground and the townsfolk will rescue you and even let you keep all your treasure. Get all the way back to town without dying and a 20 point mastery bonus is yours.
There’s probably a whole article to be written at some point about how games decide when they are over. In this case, Clank! does a good job of ratcheting up the tension with a simple bag of cubes. Initially containing a number (24?) of black ‘neutral’ cubes, each time a dragon attack occurs any Clank that’s been generated since the last time is going into the bag, and some number of cubes are being drawn out according to the dragon’s rage, which increases further as treasure (and eggs!) are stolen from it. Dragon attacks also happen at random based on players purchasing cards from the shop - if a purchased card is replaced with a card with a dragon symbol on it, an attack happens.
This puts 3 layers of uncertainty between you and death - You don’t know how often dragon attacks are going to happen, you don’t know how quickly the dragon will become angry, and you don’t know who will get hurt and how badly in each attack. I love this multi-layered approach to ratcheting tension as the game progresses.
Clank! comes with a double-sided board to play on, but a later entry in the Clank! series brought modular boards into the fold to increase the feeling of not quite knowing what paths lay ahead of you.
Tyrants of the Underdark (2016)
Tyrants of the Underdark also combined deckbuilding with a board - this time it’s an area control game - one of the resources that you generate is power which can be used to deploy troops to empty spaces or assassinate troops already on the board - either the neutral troops which begin at strategic locations on the board, or troops belonging to your opponent.
Tyrants builds the market deck out of 2 shuffled together half decks, so that’s not quite as granular as the Legendary modular deck, but makes for a lot of different possible setups.
Presence is an important mechanic in this game, most of the time you can only interact with areas where you have troops, or adjacent to where you have troops. A wonderfully layered spy mechanic however can really mess with your opponents by having them pop out of nowhere so suddenly give you presence where you weren’t expected - and this is where the half-decks shine as they may add more or less emphasis on the spy mechanic for your chosen setup.
Probably the worst-kept secret of deckbuilding games is that it can be hugely beneficial to remove cards from your deck. Every time you add an above-average card to your deck, or remove a below-average card, the overall quality of your deck improves. In some games it could even be possible to draw your entire deck every turn of the game, at which point you’ve probably won. Or lost if you did it really badly and actually took out all the cards that did something important.
Newcomers to deckbuilding games don’t often immediately understand this point though, they don’t see the power of removing cards from their deck, especially if they spent precious resources on obtaining those cards. Tyrants addresses this by reframing the mechanic - you’re not trashing cards out of your deck, you’re promoting them to your inner circle. Most cards are worth more points once promoted, so it’s clear that promoting is a positive action, and it can be beneficial to promote even when you don’t have starter trash in your hand, so long as you time it right.
Let’s have a board-off!
So far in this guide I’ve covered 3 games which fused a deckbuilding engine with a board-based gameplay experience: Trains, Clank! and Tyrants of the Underdark (Tyrants board is from 2021 reprint).
Trains has a simple hexagonal grid layout, but as play continues the game can get busy with tokens for track and cities going all over the place. The simpler board makes the game state a nice easy read.
In Clank! however, the board is only displaying player health, dragon rage, and player position, together with tokens depicting remaining major and minor secrets and artifacts. It’s important for a player to know how far away they are from any given treasure at any given time.
Note the ‘secret’ passageway that wraps from the left to the right of the map just underground!
Tyrants of the Underdark’s map does a great job of adding to the theme of the game without taking away from the functionality. When populated with player tokens it’s still an easy read - which locations are major points of interest, who has control of what and for how many points, and where are the spies?
Mystic Vale (2016)
Mystic Vale’s innovation was to realise that you didn’t have to start the game with a small deck and add cards to it - you could instead purchase upgrades to cards you already have in your deck. The physicality of this game is very enjoyable as the cards you buy are actually transparent overlays that combine with your sleeved base cards.
The 3 constituent parts here…
…become a full card here
The hand-drawing part of the game is also significantly different in this game. Up to this point, I think every game I have mentioned has a small starting deck consisting of as many cards as you would draw in 2 turns, typically with a hand size of 5 cards and a starting deck size of 10. This formula has had some minor alterations, there are games that draw 6 from 12 for example, and I think Legendary Encounters Alien might even have been 5 from 11 - but it holds up pretty well.
Mystic Vale innovated here with a 20 card basic deck, with some number of cards having a bad thing on them - corruption or blight or something flavourfully awful like that. You can draw cards as much as you like, but have to decide when to stop, or be forced to stop if you drew 3 corruption. Including a push-your-luck mechanic for how much value you dared attempt to extract from your deck in a given turn - informed by what’s available in the market at that moment.
The Quest for El Dorado (2017)
The Quest for El Dorado also features a board which players must race across - first to the end wins. Can you win the game by racing to the end as fast as you can? Or, does it bear fruit to stall a while improving your engine before heading toward the goal?
The Quest For El Dorado also features a market innovation I’d not seen elsewhere, and I’m not sure what to call it - in contrast to the static and dynamic markets mentioned last week, I’m going to go with calling this the semi-static market.
The first thing you’ll notice from El Dorado’s market on setup is that there aren’t many cards - Dominion set the standard that when the market is static, there should be enough of each card to go around. Dominion put 10 of each card in the game and also treated piles of cards running out as an alternate end condition. Trains has 10 of each card. Puzzle Strike I don’t think went that far - my memory is hazy but maybe only had 5 of each chip available for players.
El Dorado bucks that and says “Nah. 3.” That’s all the copies of a card you’re getting. That’s not even enough for one each if you’re playing a 4 player game. However, before you think the game is going to start like this:
Player 1: Buys a Trailblazer
Player 2: Buys a Trailblazer
Player 3: Buys a Trailblazer
Player 4: Cries in lack-of-Trailblazer
The El Dorado market has something else up its sleeve. See, there are two tiers to the market in this game. The first, basic tier, consists of 6 different cards, all 3 copies of which are available to buy. All of the other cards in the game are available in a second tier of the market, but you can’t get at them all of the time. Instead, you can only access the second tier of the market when there is a hole in the first tier - i.e. because the 3 copies of an earlier card have been bought and a pile is now empty, the next purchase can be made from any card. Purchasing that card brings the other 2 copies of that card down into the first tier of the market to be available to everyone (at least, for the short while those 2 copies will last).
This way, the game has a fixed, static opening market, but that market evolves in different directions each game based on decisions the players make at key moments. (Also, I’m saying that the basic market is fixed and all cards are available in the second tier - this is true when playing the base game but expansions do exist which allow you to modify both tiers of the market, playing once more with only a subset of your cards.)
Let’s take a look at the board to add it to the now premature seeming board-off!
El Dorado’s modular board makes for a variety of different setups, categorised in the rulebook with difficulty levels attached. Nothing is stopping you making up your own maps or randomising either, but accidentally creating a near enough dead-end or tough gear check when playing with people who are not used to reading the map for choke points could turn some away!
Quickfire Round!
I have a couple of entries I wanted to include, but they push the envelope a bit too far on what it means to be a deckbuilding game. Still, innovations in a genre can often come from cross-pollination with other genres, and that’s no less true in board games.
Dice Forge (2017)
In Dice Forge you don’t buy cards that go into a deck to draw randomly from each turn, you buy dice faces to go on the dice that you roll each turn.
Physically a very exciting innovation, manages to not be extremely fiddly, and I love that they have every player roll dice every turn, meaning in a 4-player game you get to roll your dice 4 times before it’s your turn to modify them again.
Quacks [of Quedlinburg] (2018)
Quacks also realised that deck builders don’t have to consist of cards and a deck, they could be tokens in a bag. This time, rather than cram the rules for a token on the token, they are on a separate “spellbook”.
Introduced simultaneous play and a similar push-your-luck element to how you gain resources to Mystic Vale, but also strictly limited the number of turns. This game has exactly 9 rounds of “Draw from your bag until you stop or go bust, score points based on what happened, and buy new ingredients to do it again”.
Lost Ruins of Arnak (2020)
Arnak combined the smell of a deckbuilding game with a worker placement game, but the two function somewhat independently with card play generally happening to gain resources spent by the worker’s actions.
It’s true that you have a small deck of cards that you add items and artifacts to during the game, but with only 5 rounds of play it just doesn’t quite feel like a “deckbuilder” any more, despite sharing many of its tropes.
Dune Imperium (2020)
Dune also combined deckbuilding with worker placement but this time the worker could only be placed where a card tells them they can go, making the deck immediately more important.
Having reduced the number of cards you can play from your hand from the now-normal expectation of “Play your whole hand” Dune offers a compensatory effect on cards not played in a round that all trigger during a special “Refresh” turn.
Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game (2023)
Made specifically for two players, the great innovation in the Star Wars deckbuilding game is in the ‘galaxy row’ - their name for the market. Cards belong to one of 3 equally sized groups - either they are my card and can only be bought by me, they are your card and can only be bought by you, or they are a neutral card and can be bought by either player.
The galaxy row can look like a confusing mess of card orientations, but each serves a purpose - distinguish Capital Ships from other units, and distinguish Rebel Scum from Empire and Neutrals.
Note how the destroyable Empire AT-AT has, from our point of view, the reward text for destroying it facing us.
That’s not to say that you’re helpless against cards of mine that are cluttering up the galaxy row. No - you can destroy cards before I get a chance to buy them, not merely robbing me of a chance to obtain that card, but to obtain an additional side benefit, maybe some resource or altering the balance of The Force.
There’s also innovation in how the PvP ‘life total’ is handled. Instead of having a straight health value of say 50, Star Wars starts by giving you a base with only 8 health. Crucially, once that base is destroyed, no further damage can be dealt to you that turn (giving another reason for the ‘destroy cards from the galaxy row’ mechanic to exist).
Whilst your opponent is finishing their turn after destroying your base, you mull over your choices of which base to head to next, because at the start of your turn you’re going to pop a fresh base into play, which might trigger an ability there and then, or might adjust the rules for your turns whilst you’re at that base. These later bases have anywhere between about 12-18 health, balanced against how strong the abilities on them are. You choose ahead of time whether to play until 3, 4 or 5 bases are destroyed, though in theory you could do a 10-base marathon if that kind of thing takes your fancy.
Later expansions give you more choice over which factions to play and add a 3-player game mode, but even that mode retains the duel feeling as it’s more like having 3 separate duels happening at once - one between you and your left neighbour, one between you and your right neighbour, and one you’re not involved with.
Astro Knights (2023)
Astro Knights was not the first co-operative deckbuilder game, nor was it the first game to forgo the constant shuffling required to play a deckbuilder and just have you turn your discard pile upside down to form your new deck. I think that first featured in Aeon’s End, but sadly that’s not a game I’ve ever had the chance to play. (If I remember rightly Dominion credits a “Sir Shufflesalot” in their playtest credits, and to this day I don’t know if that’s a real person or a nod to the amount of physical card manipulation required)
Now I’m unsure if this game was the first to use it, and I have the later Invincible Card Game which uses the Astro Knights system, but the innovation from this game is the ‘tiered’ dynamic market. Instead of 1 deck shuffled to form the entire market, there are 6 separate decks, each contributing 1 card to the market at a time. These decks consist of low, mid and high cost weapons (power), low and high cost fuel (economy), and tech.
This solves many problems of the completely randomised dynamic market whilst still allowing market manipulation effects to shine - if you draw a hand high on fuel, there will be an expensive weapon to spend it on, you just don’t know which one.
Unstoppable (2025)
John D. Clair gets a second entry on today’s list with Unstoppable, and once again he’s gone for an innovation on the physicality of the cards themselves.
Cards in Unstoppable are double-sided with threats on one side which you must defeat to draw the card to your hand to play the ‘good’ side. Upgrades can be slotted into each card, but beware, the upgrade affects your side of the card and the threat side!
Moon Colony Bloodbath (2025)
It seems fitting to end this article back where it began, with an innovative deckbuilding game by Donald X. In his Moon Colony Bloodbath however, the game deckbuilds against you! Players are really playing a kind of engine-building game where they gather resources to build buildings for their moon colony, but the flow of the game is driven by a main event deck which starts containing 4 work cards where players get to decide whether to Farm, Build, Mine, Research or Restock.
The innovation here is that players can also add cards to the event deck, either by earning perks or by triggering certain cards, usually drawbacks to building certain buildings (Build an automated warehouse for stocking your resources? You get a glitched robot that definitely isn’t going to doom all of humanity 👀 )
The cadence of this game is lovely as it starts all promising and hopeful and people get to build their moon colony, then slowly ramps up in disasters and glitched robots until you can’t keep up and your colony is pulled apart in front of your very eyes. You’re supposed to stop playing when someone’s colony is wiped out and the largest colony at that point wins, but we often play to a last-colony-standing endpoint. It’s not usually that much longer, and we haven’t yet had anyone survive long enough to find the instruction manual and beat the game…
But for deckbuilding innovation, I love that the game shows you everything that will happen by showing you the cards that are going into the main deck, you’re merely at the whim of the shuffle to find out in which order those things are going to happen to you.
Summary
And that brings us to the end of my whistle-stop tour through innovations in the deckbuilding genre. Did I miss your favourite deckbuilding game? Comment below or send me a mail at [email protected].
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