Clank!: Catacombs vs Clank! In! Space!: A Deck-Building Adventure: Which Should You Buy?

In Catacombs, the map doesn't exist when you sit down. You build it as you go, flipping and rotating tiles into a new dungeon layout every game, all while the dragon gets angrier with every artifact you snatch. Every step deeper is a bet that you'll make it back out, and that greed-versus-survival tension is the whole point. The dungeon itself becomes a fresh puzzle each time, which is a genuinely lovely twist on a series that was already great.

In! Space! plays the same core game but dresses it as a heist on Lord Eradikus's ship. You're building your engine and racing across a board at the same time, and every card you buy might drop a noise cube into the bag. When the rage track triggers, those cubes come out swinging. The big structural difference is the terminal hacking and telepad keys, which kill the cheap grab-and-run. You can't just dash for the exit, and that makes the whole race feel more earned. It's a heist with a clock you keep winding yourself.

Both games sit at the same medium weight, and both are recommended for ages 13 and up, so neither is going to scare off a group that's played a deck-builder before. Catacombs is arguably the gentler teach in practice because there's no extra heist structure to explain, though the tile placement does stretch play time as everyone agonizes over rotations, and setup means shuffling cardboard chits that just don't shuffle like cards.

In! Space! asks a little more of you up front. The rulebook is weirdly fuzzy (the Clank symbol itself goes barely explained), so expect to clarify a few things in your first game. Once it clicks, though, the deck-building and board movement lock together so cleanly that the strategy just emerges on its own. One practical note: players report the cards and map pieces scuff fast, so budget for sleeves.

Catacombs wins on pure variety, and it isn't close. Because the dungeon builds itself from random tiles, no two games look the same, and reviewers across the board rank it the best Clank! made. The trade-off is luck. A rough tile draw can leave one player flush and another stranded, and a game can tip lopsided fast. If your group treats a swingy loss as a story rather than a crime, that won't bother you much.

In! Space! gets its staying power a different way: a modular double-sided map plus a deep card pool give it strong table-to-table variety without handing the game to the tile gods. Its real weakness shows at the end. Once someone escapes, the ship starts killing stragglers, and an eliminated player can sit doing nothing while everyone else finishes. Both play 2-4, but that downtime stings more at a full table, so if your group hates sitting out, Catacombs is the safer pick at four.