Clash of Clans: The Epic Raid is a boardgame that alternates between a simultaneous engine/town building phase followed by an attacking phase – where players earn points rather than permanently damaging their opponents. The boardgame is thematically based around the mobile game Clash of Clans released in 2012. In it, players build up a base, fill it with troops, and then attack other (offline) players in order to steal gold and elixir. Gold is then spent in one’s base to build defensive structures while elixir is spent to build structures that provide troops for the attacks. Clash of Clans is widely seen as one of (if not the) first phone games to mix online and offline portions of play. It was wildly successful, earning an estimated $1.5 million dollars per DAY in 2015. The game spawned many copycats and is still widely played to this day. At Gen Con, I was given a tour of the game by one of its designers, Eric Lang, who considers it one of his favorite games that he’s designed – after all his playtesting he still loves playing it
The boardgame follows the digital game with players using a worker-placement mechanism to build up their town and attack other players. Placement options include adding a building to their town, upgrading one’s town hall, raiding other players, and buying defenses (which are placed on or adjacent to a town tiles.)
A town consists of connected square tiles (although corners are carved out to make room for defences.) These tiles form the heart of a player’s resource and point engine. Each tile has a cost, defense value, and some sort of ability – generating resources, granting new army units, and/or generating points. One of the possible worker actions is to pay and improve your town hall. You take a disc off your player board and place it on top of your town hall disc to show it at a higher level. This unlocks more advanced buildings and defences. There are a plethora of tiles in the game to provide variety, with around 40% or so of them seen in any given game. As one would expect, there are plenty of synergies to be had. In the words of the designer, the game has lots of “busted combos.”
Ok, so your neighbor has just managed to put together one of those mentioned combos, what can you do about it? Well, you can pick the raid action and go after their town. Using your units (produced from your buildings and lined up in a queue at the top of your player card) you attack the enemy (using dice) going from card to adjacent card as you defeat them. However, raids are not especially deadly. Any defeated tile is back in action during the next round, and all resources that a tile provides is collected before raiding happens. The one significant difference is that points for tiles are awarded after raids are complete. Thus, you can raid another player’s town to, in effect, take away his possible victory points for that round. An individual player typically won’t be picked on too much – once a tile is defeated it won’t provide any points to a second attack. Defences come in the form of towers and walls. Towers are placed in those corner cutouts so that they can defend the four adjacent town tiles (possibly some even further away.) Walls are placed on the sides of cards and prevent (or at least hinder) attacks coming from that direction.
There are already two expansions being developed. The first, a smaller expansion, introduces more “stuff” – buildings, army units, etc… that are shuffled into the requisite piles. The expansion also includes a new resource, dark elixir. In the mobile game, dark elixir is used in higher level towns to fuel more advanced buildings and units. The same is true here.
The second expansion, Clan War, brings in several new mechanics. It increases the maximum player count to 6 and adds a special team mode. Players break into teams of two and play the game. The team with the highest lowest score (ignore the top score for each team and compare) will win the game. There is no direct interaction between teammates but there is a new area introduced to the game board that allows players to “donate” to the center so that it can be picked up later by another player. Clan War also adds in trap tokens to protect your town (trap tokens are added upside-down so there can be a bit of bluffing) and spell cards. Spell cards can be played during another player’s turn, interrupting their best laid plans.
As a fan of the mobile game (I’ve played it way too much), I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out. I like how the boardgame allows players to attack one another for points but does not damage a player’s resource production. It allows players the security of knowing their carefully constructed town will still be there for them on the next turn.
If you’re interest in the game is piqued, there was a Kickstarter back in June, but they’re still taking late pledges. The hope is for the game to be released sometime in the Spring of 2026.
