Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated rules refresher

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You are trying to grab an Artifact and get back to your headquarters alive, and score more points than anyone else. You do that by building a deck of cards that generates Skill, Swords, and Boots, while keeping your noise, your Clank!, low enough that the dragon does not kill you.

For setup, start by reading the Prologue Passage for this game in the Book of Secrets, which tells you which side of the board to use. Put any Contract cards you kept from last game, or that the Prologue gave you, in a row above the board, and read them aloud. A Patron card, if you got one, goes in the Reserve. The Bank holds the Gold plus the minor secret tokens, shuffled face down. All the black cubes go in the Dragon Bag, and the Dragon Marker starts on the first space of the Rage Track with four players, the second with three, and the third with two. The Reserve gets the Cultist, plus the Mercenary, Explore, and Mysterious Tome piles. Deal six cards from the Adventure Deck for the Adventure Row, but no Event cards and no cards with a Dragon Attack symbol may be in that starting row: set those aside, replace them, and shuffle them back once the row is legal. Then place one Mug token per player near HQ, one random face-down major secret on each major secret space with extras going to the Bank, the mystic fruit whole side up, the Artifacts on the spaces matching their values, and the market items on the Franchise Board. Each player takes thirty Clank! cubes, puts their figure on HQ, and shuffles their ten card starting deck: six Burgles, two Stumbles, a Sidestep, and a Scramble. Pick a first player at random. The first player puts three Clank! cubes in the Clank! Area, the second puts two, the third one, the fourth none. Everyone draws five.

On your turn you play cards from your hand and spend what they produce. The one hard requirement is that you must play all your cards before you end your turn, but you may play them in any order and take actions between plays or all at the end. Skill, Swords, and Boots pool together, you may take each action as many times as you can afford, and anything unspent is wasted. When you are done you declare the end of your turn, resolve Contracts, discard your play area, draw five new cards, refill the Adventure Row, and check whether the dragon attacks. Then play passes clockwise.

The actions are these. Skill buys blue banner cards from the Adventure Row and yellow banner cards from the Reserve; acquired cards go straight to your discard pile and empty spots in the Row are not refilled until end of turn. Swords defeat red banner monsters in the Row for the reward in their Defeat text; the monster goes to the Adventure discard pile. The Cultist in the Reserve is never discarded and can be fought repeatedly, by anyone, as often as you can pay.

Each Boot moves you along one path. Paths with footprint icons cost two or three Boots total. A path with monster icons deals one damage per icon unless you spend a Sword to cancel each one. Water paths need a Canoe token. Arrow paths are one way only, and paths leading nowhere cannot be used at all. Entering a Forest exhausts you: you cannot spend Boots on movement for the rest of the turn, though you may still spend them for other purposes and you may still teleport. Teleporting needs no Boots and ignores path icons, including one way arrows.

On a Town space you may buy market items for seven Gold each, one of each type only. On a Coach space you may hire a Coach to any other Coach space, spending one Boot plus Gold equal to the totals shown on both the departure and destination spaces.

Taking an Artifact is an action you may take any time you are standing on its space, so you do not have to grab it the moment you arrive. You may only ever hold one, and once you take it you are stuck with it. Taking an Artifact advances the Dragon Marker one space up the Rage Track, and so does discovering a Gold Dragon Egg. Once you leave HQ you cannot return there without an Artifact.

Many spaces give you something the first time you enter them each turn: a random minor secret from the Bank, the major secret sitting on that space, a mystic fruit, a card draw, Gold, or healing. Numbered Waypoint spaces pause your turn to read the matching Passage from the Book of Secrets. Contracts are completed by any player who meets their conditions, usually at the end of a turn.

Whenever a card says plus Clank!, add that many of your cubes to the Clank! Area. Negative Clank! removes your cubes from there, and any leftover negative Clank! is lost at end of turn. After you refill the Adventure Row, if any newly revealed card shows a Dragon Attack symbol, Malathrex attacks, once only, no matter how many symbols appeared. Dump every cube in the Clank! Area into the bag, shake, and draw cubes equal to the number on the Dragon Marker's current space, plus one extra for each Danger card in the Adventure Row. Black cubes are set aside; each colored cube is one damage to that player. Damage from the dragon uses the drawn cubes, damage from anything else comes from your personal supply, and you may not voluntarily take damage if you have no cubes or if it would fill your meter. Healing returns a cube to your supply. A full Health Meter means you are knocked out. Also, if the Dragon Bag is ever empty after an attack, the game ends immediately and everyone still in is knocked out.

An Event card revealed while refilling the Row resolves immediately, goes to the Adventure discard pile, and you keep refilling.

The game ends when every player is off the clock. You go off voluntarily by escaping: arrive at HQ with an Artifact, finish your turn, then before refilling the Adventure Row remove your figure and all your Clank! cubes from the Clank! Area, and take a Mug token worth twenty points. You go off involuntarily by being knocked out; lay your figure on its side. Once off the clock you take no turns, make no Clank!, take no dragon damage, and are unaffected by cards affecting all players. But when your turn would come around, you still dump the Clank! Area into the bag and draw exactly four cubes, or six in a two player game, ignoring the Rage Track and any Danger cards, and damage applies as normal.

When everyone is off the clock, score your Artifact's value, the points printed on cards in your deck, hand and discard pile, points from tokens including the Mug, and one point per Gold. You need an Artifact to score anything, and if you were knocked out without an Artifact, or knocked out anywhere in the Danger Zone, you score zero. Most points wins and is Most Valuable Employee. Ties go to the tied player with the more valuable Artifact.

A turn, played out

You are yellow in a three player game. The Clank! Area holds 2 of your cubes, 3 red and 1 green. Your Health Meter already carries 3 damage. You stand 1 path away from the most valuable Artifact left on the board, and that path shows 1 monster icon. Your five cards produce 2 Skill, 2 Swords, 3 Boots and plus 2 Clank! That noisy card hurts, but every card must be played before your turn ends, so 2 more yellow cubes go into the Clank! Area, making 4. You spend 1 Boot to walk the monster path and 1 Sword to cancel its damage, so your meter stays at 3. On the Artifact space you take it, and the Dragon Marker climbs one space up the Rage Track. Now you are stuck with that Artifact, but it is also your ticket back into HQ. Your last 2 Boots pay for the footprint path heading home, which costs exactly 2. Your 2 Skill buy a blue banner card costing 2 from the Adventure Row. It goes to your discard pile, and its spot stays empty until end of turn. Your last Sword finds no monster you want to fight, so it is wasted. You declare the end of your turn, discard your play area and draw 5. Refilling the Row reveals a Dragon Attack symbol. All 8 cubes in the Clank! Area go into the bag. You draw as many as the Marker's new space shows, plus 1 for the Danger card in the Row. Out come 2 yellow, 1 red, and the rest black. Your meter rises to 5, and play passes to your left.