Clacks - the boardgame

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David803

New Member
Feb 12, 2017
6
850
43
Tolworth, Surrey, UK
#1
My wife and I are getting into more board and card games and are looking around for new ones to play. I spotted the Clacks game on Amazon - it has good reviews but the description doesn't give much away. Has anybody here played it? Can they offer some insight?

Also, can anyone recommend any other fun card or board games? We've recently enjoyed Camel Cup, Flux, and Codenames.

Thanks!
 
#2
Hi David,

Clacks is an interesting abstract puzzle game - I'd recommend pretty much only playing in cooperative mode (where the players, as clacks operators, try to beat Moist von Lipwig in sending a message from Ankh-Morpork to Genua). If you enjoy spacial puzzles you'll probably enjoy Clacks.

For the other Discworld games, definitely see if you can get Ankh-Morpork - it's probably a little difficult to find (and is in its final print run), but it's definitely the best of the available Discworld board games. I'd avoid Guards! Guards! entirely, and The Witches is OK but not great. (Thud is its own beast, and you can get sets of that from the Discworld Emporium).

If you're getting started in the modern boardgame field, there's *SO* many to choose from, but I would recommend these "Gateway" games (easy to learn, but still with depth of strategy) which are very popular amongst all sorts of gamers, and with good reason:

* Ticket to Ride
* Carcassonne
* Pandemic (or Forbidden Island or Forbidden Desert)
* Sushi Go
* Dominion
* Dead Man's Draw / Captain Carcass
* King of Tokyo

There are, of course, many thousands more but everyone has different tastes, so see if you can find what you like. If you can find a board game cafe near you, give it a shot and ask the staff there to introduce a game to you.
 

RathDarkblade

Moderator
City Watch
Mar 24, 2015
16,059
3,400
47
Melbourne, Victoria
#3
Sigh... hmm. Is the Ankh-Morpork board game still available anywhere? :| Now that I have disposable income, I thought I might snazz it. Is it available from the Discworld Emporium, by any chance?

Also, Molokov... what is so bad about Guards! Guards! or The Witches? :think:
 
#4
Ankh-Morpork seems to be hard to get in Australia - last place online that has stock is Games Paradise: http://www.gamesparadise.com.au/discworld-ankh-morpork (although friends have had terrible experiences with them in the past). Do you have a Games World anywhere nearby? They tend to have decent stock of lots of games, you may just be lucky if they have copies left.

(BTW: Use www.boardgamesearch.com.au to look at online board game purchases in Australia, it's quite a good engine)

Guards! Guards! has a very complicated ruleset, and the game itself takes about 4 hours to play. It's also got a lot of "take that" mechanisms, i.e. you have to be mean to other players (which of course, makes the game even longer). I found it very hard to learn from the (original) rules, and tedious to play. The 2nd edition rules went some way to fixing this, but it's still a long and complex game.

The Witches is fine, it's just... weak, and a bit boring. The components are good quality, the art is superb, and the rules aren't terribly difficult (although once again, the rule book could have been written more clearly), but playing the game isn't all that exciting and it just kind of fizzles out at the end. Playing it cooperatively, it's either "Oh, we won." or "Oh, we lost", rather than anything *exciting* about the finish. (e.g. Pandemic usually has a nail-biting finish. It's a narrow win or loss.)

The advantage of The Witches is it's still quite readily available.

However, all of the Discworld board games are going to be going out of print shortly - after Terry's death, the licenses were cancelled by Terry's estate, so Martin Wallace's third game (The Gods) will never be printed[1], and there won't be any more print runs of the other 3 games[2] (probably. It's possibly Clacks might get another print run because it's so new).

So if you actually want any of the games, I'd suggest trying to get hold of them now, before they're all gone.


[1] I saw a playtest copy at Nullus Anxietas V but never got to actually play a game.
[2] Thud is in a different category and doesn't count here. Its mass-market print run was done in the 90s and has been out of print for a while, but you can still get "travel" copies from the Emporium, and I suspect they'll still be able to produce copies of Thud for as long as they like.
 

RathDarkblade

Moderator
City Watch
Mar 24, 2015
16,059
3,400
47
Melbourne, Victoria
#5
Molokov said:
Ankh-Morpork seems to be hard to get in Australia - last place online that has stock is Games Paradise: http://www.gamesparadise.com.au/discworld-ankh-morpork (although friends have had terrible experiences with them in the past). Do you have a Games World anywhere nearby? They tend to have decent stock of lots of games, you may just be lucky if they have copies left.
Yes, and at $85, the Ankh-Morpork game is horribly overpriced. :(

I have a Games World nearby, but they don't have any of the Discworld merchandise. Shame. :(

Molokov said:
(BTW: Use http://www.boardgamesearch.com.au to look at online board game purchases in Australia, it's quite a good engine)
I looked it up, but again, I couldn't find the Ankh-Morpork game anywhere except for Games Paradise. Too bad. :(
 

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