The evil Lord Eradikus has all but conquered the galaxy and is now on a victory lap across the sector in his flagship, Eradikus Prime. He may rule with an iron grip, but his most prized artifacts are about to slip through his cyborg claws. You and your fellow thieves have challenged each other to sneak aboard his ship, hack your way into its command module, and steal from him. Along the way, you’ll recruit allies and snatch up extra loot. But one false step and — Clank!
Careless noise draws the attention of Lord Eradikus. Hacking into his command module and stealing his artifacts increases his rage. You’d better hope your friends are louder than you are if you want to make it to an escape pod and get out alive… Clank! In! Space! is built on the same game system as Clank!: A Deck-Building Adventure, with players building a personal deck of cards throughout the course of the game, with the cards allowing them to move through the spaceship, attack things, acquire new cards, and — oh yeah — make noise to attract Lord Eradikus and potentially seal their own doom.
Paul Maloney –
An improvement on the original Clank game, with a sci-fi rather than fantasy setting, Clank in Space is a competitive game and with multiple “counters” running the pressure is soon on to get ahead or catch-up with your opponents. The clank mechanic adds a controlled randomness to the game, be stealthy and don’t generate clanks and your safe from the boss attacks but you’re likely to be slower than everyone else.
The hacking rule in the game ensures you travel around the map rather than heading straight for the end game and means the game plays longer than original Clank.
As a deck building game it becomes important to manage your inventory of cards as a card is only useful if you get to play it, that can mean trashing a card (removing it from play) just to make it more likely more powerful cards make it into your hand.
Like any good thief game, winning requires stealth, tactics and betraying your opponents as often as possible. It’s not just about winning it’s about making sure the other players lose.
The rules cover 2, 3 and 4 players and explain how the setup and mechanics change with the number of players.
You never really know someone until you see the look on their face as they pull clank tokens from the bag after they’ve escaped to see who they can kill first.
Some of the rules are a bit vague and require intepration but the official FAQ (