A week ago, I was perfectly willing to open with a discussion of Games Workshop, copyright/ trademark law and the difficulty of claiming to own words and concepts that have existed for at least 50 years prior to your sudden decision not to let anyone else use them.
That was a week ago. I'm told there is such a thing as beating a dead horse and this one seems to be in particularly ill health by now. Besides, others have made the relevant points for me. Best let that horse rest in peace, for now. I have no doubt we will have future occasions to thrash it.
In the mean time, what shall we talk about? How about some weird echos of the past via WizKids, a brief look at the most interesting mechanic in the new Star Wars LCG, and a taste of what is coming in the Year of Shadowrun...
FEATURED:
Many moons ago, a game company burst onto the scene with an amazing new concept in Tabletop Miniature War Gaming. Prior to their advent, the average war game required players to look up things on charts and tables and compare dice rolls to a list of results that told you how your damage to a unit and it's subsequent reactions to that damage resolved. It tended to bog down the actual play of the game as rule books or cards were flipped through, read and the information interpreted. It took what should have been a reasonably fast, exciting experience and made it boggy and tedious.
Then, along came WizKids with Mage Knight. Now, instead of all those charts and things, the information was represented on a dial under each figure and, simply by clicking the dial into a new position, all the effects were rendered immediately with little to no confusion. Game play sped up and people started having more fun. And, thus, an entire line of Clix games was born.
People ate it up. They ate it up so fast that demand outstripped supply for those first few months. WizKids had a veritable hit on their hands and they ran with it. The Collectible Miniatures Game became a new genre of gaming and, like Collectible Card Games before it, brought new folks to the table who might not otherwise have found their way there.
Thanks to Jordan Weisman,who just happened to hold a bunch of licenses from his former FASA product lines, we soon had more options than ever. Mage Knight was followed in rapid succession by Heroclix (Superheroes), MechWarrior (Giant Mechs), Crimson Skies (RetroFuture Airplanes), HorrorClix (Horror Films), MLB SportsClix (Baseball), Shadowrun Duels (Huge Shadowrun RPG based Action Figures), Creepy Freaks (Kid fare HorrorClix) and a bunch of other things to feed our geeky appetites.
Some lines were wildly successful. The HeroClix line in particular, featuring both DC and Marvel Comics, was so successful that it soon eclipsed the original Mage Knight lines in terms of popularity. Other lines, not so much. Creepy Freaks and MLB SportsClix died almost before they got out the door. Crimson Skies had, at the time, an odd distribution model that no one quite seems to have understood and it suffered as well. Other lines had middling success, enough to see them through 5 or 6 expansions at least.
Then, of course, along came Pirates of the Spanish Main, another brand new concept in gaming; the Constructable Collectible Game. Build yourself some little pirate ships, assemble a crew and sail around collecting treasure while sending your opponent to the briny deep. A fun game in it's own right and another extremely successful game for Wizkids. By now Wizkids was doing so well that Topps had stepped in and bought the company.
And then, things started to go downhill. It might have been the influence of Topps that started the problems. It might have been the beginnings of the economic downturn that we are still dealing with eight years later. But, I have an idea that it was neither of these things that really sunk the WizKids ship.
Their biggest downfall was licensing deals.
Licensing, whether it be of an Intellectual Property, i.e., Star Wars or Harry Potter, or a likeness of someone real, say Barry Bonds, is an expensive proposition. Generally speaking, it isn't a pay once sort of deal. Each time you want to do something new with a property or modify it in some way, you will be paying some additional fees; even maintaining your current property can lead to yearly licensing fees depending on how your agreement with the original owner is structured. It costs major money to even begin the process of introducing a game line based on a property, let alone maintaining it.
Look at what WizKids had going in terms of licensing: MLB SportsClix, using player names and likenesses, team names and uniforms; ultimately an unsuccessful game with only one release. HorrorClix, eventually licensing Freddy and Jason, Cthulhu mythos elements, Alien, Predator, and Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. HeroClix with licensing for virtually every significant character from both Marvel and DC Comics. Pirates of the Spanish Main eventually morphed into Pirates of the Caribbean and rode on the back of those successful films with all their licensing from Disney. There was a line of Star Wars Pocket Models and you know that license is not cheap. Start including the Halo ActionClix line, the NASCAR Race Day Pocket Models, a couple of weak forays into genuine CCGs, one of which was licensed on the new Battlestar Galactica show and you begin to see just how deeply they were invested in terms of licensing alone. If any one of these lines failed to take off and not pay for itself Wizkids would be out hundreds of thousands of dollars. And many of them did fail to grab attention and interest.
And so, in 2008, claiming they were refocusing their business on their traditional sports offerings, Topps closed the doors on WizKids and shut down all the product lines, never to be heard from again.
Except that turned out not to be entirely accurate.
A company called NECA bought WizKids in 2009 with a promise to bring back the HeroClix line. It made sense, in a way. If you are going to bring back WizKids then certainly you would do it with the most successful product they had, the one fans were clamoring for the most.
They were off and running. The fans came back and, for a couple of years at least, the focus was almost entirely on the one line, HeroClix. It seems to have worked. New HeroClix boosters and expansions come out at a regular pace despite a rather different distribution model than before. Fans buy them up and all is happiness.
Although, when you start digging in, something starts to look a bit familiar. Very familiar.
If you look at the product lines that WizKids has put out in the last year or so and pay attention to some of the more recent announcements, the word 'licensing' begins to float strangely to the top of your mind. And, with it, a little warning bell might begin to sound.
NECA/WizKidshas licensed the following properties just since 2011:
Maybe NECA/WizKids has found the secret formula that lets them do this and maintain profitability regardless of how the various product lines fare. Maybe. But, I don't think you can look at things like Hello Kitty HeroClix and believe that.
I don't know about you, but it makes me nervous. Oh, and Mage Knight proper is coming back, too. I wonder if WizKids has it's own version of the Seventh Seal.
ITEMS OF INTEREST:
I finally got a chance to pick up the Star Wars Living Card Game from Fantasy Flight Games. With the announcement of the upcoming Edge of Darkness Deluxe Expansion I figured I'd better hurry up and at least get the base game on the table at some point.
I have a natural love of Star Wars - original trilogy, please - having been of an age where seeing it in the theaters for the first time left an indelible impression on my mind that still has me making "vwoom vwoom" noises every time I wave a broom handle around. Any time a game comes out that promises to put me in the universe somehow, I sit up and take notice.
So, when I got the plastic wrap off the Star Wars LCG box and found the piece of paper telling me to go watch the tutorial online at FFG first, I did so. And I discovered something that seemed, to me, kind of a cool idea.
Most CCGs and LCGs have a set of rules for building custom decks that lead to your sorting through masses of cards while trying to find combos that work well together or provide some sort of unstoppable mechanic by which you can decimate your opponents without them being able to do much about it. This is fine and well and good and proper. It's the big hook that gets you really into these games; building the deck no one else can beat and being reasonably sure it is uniquely yours.
The Star Wars LCG goes about this differently. Instead of sorting through all your available cards, you instead sort through your chosen faction's Objective Sets. Sets, you see, not cards. Each objective, essentially a 'scene' from the films, has 5 associated cards that go with it. If you want a particular objective, you'll be playing with the cards it comes with.
What this does, at least for me, is change the way I have to think about the cards which go in a deck and how to balance them so that the deck does what I want it to do. Now, I can't just throw in four copies of “Captain Unstoppable” and go from there. I now have consider that “Captain Unstoppable” comes along with “Pfc. Very Stoppable Indeed” and I might want to select an objective that lets me beef him up somewhat, or offer him some sort of protection.
This makes deck building at once easier and more complex. I don't have to think about coming up with 50 individual cards that might work together to make a deck, but, I do have to think about whether using the “A Hero's Journey” objective is worth it for the “Luke Skywalker” card it comes with at the cost of having to somehow do something useful with the significantly less powerful “Twi'lek Loyalist” that also tags along. I also have to imagine that cards that appear to be over powered are balanced by my being made to use cards in that particular set that are, perhaps, under powered and so, overall, two given decks are generally pretty well balanced against each other by virtue of this set up.
It'll take me actually getting to play the game before I have a solid grip on it all, and some of you may be there ahead of me, but I am intrigued by this and look forward to exploring the options available.
Some of you may have fond memories of playing the Shadowrun RPG back in the day. (Or, maybe not all that far back if you have a group that has kept up.) I don't. Somehow I got the Dark Conspiracy side of things instead. It's all good though. I've got an opportunity to catch up to you thanks to Catalyst Game Labs.
2013 has been declared The Year of Shadowrun, at least by Catalyst if no one else, and I am certain you all know that the newest edition of the Shadowrun RPG is on it's way. However, you 5th Edition fanatics are going to have to wait a bit since it doesn't come out until this Summer.
Meanwhile, us Board and Card Gamers can get in on the action a little early. Shadowrun: Crossfire comes out this Spring and is another entry in the Deck Building genre of games. You know how this works: You start with a limited hand of cards and using your available buying power from those cards you try to add better cards from the tableau to your deck in order to ramp up your power to buy more cards and take bigger actions and... well, accomplish whatever the game's goal is.
The nice thing is, Crossfire is cooperative. That means it is you and your friends against the game itself. Runners will work together as a team to complete group objectives while also working on personal objectives that will enhance your abilities or give you other benefits.
Some time around the Fall or Winter this year, Shadowrun: Sprawl Gangers will come out. Gangers will be a Skirmish level miniatures game featuring nice figures you RPG guys will probably want to grab onto for your games as well. The game promises continuity between it's included scenarios. Advancements and gear gained by individual factions carry over from one scenario to the next as they battle to control turf and resources. You might almost think that it is a Skirmish game with RPG elements, which is not an entirely bad thing at all.
2014 promises to be a Year of Shadowrun all on it's own as well, with promised Euro-style board games, an 'authentic' Shadowrun computer game and even an MMO in the works. Maybe there is something to this Shadowrun thing after all.
That's another two weeks gone by folks. Thanks for reading, again. Remember,we've got a whole comments section down here at the bottom for you to comment in. We had a good discussion last time about Gateway games and I can't wait to see what we talk about this time.
Until then, go get some games on the table.
That was a week ago. I'm told there is such a thing as beating a dead horse and this one seems to be in particularly ill health by now. Besides, others have made the relevant points for me. Best let that horse rest in peace, for now. I have no doubt we will have future occasions to thrash it.
In the mean time, what shall we talk about? How about some weird echos of the past via WizKids, a brief look at the most interesting mechanic in the new Star Wars LCG, and a taste of what is coming in the Year of Shadowrun...
FEATURED:
Many moons ago, a game company burst onto the scene with an amazing new concept in Tabletop Miniature War Gaming. Prior to their advent, the average war game required players to look up things on charts and tables and compare dice rolls to a list of results that told you how your damage to a unit and it's subsequent reactions to that damage resolved. It tended to bog down the actual play of the game as rule books or cards were flipped through, read and the information interpreted. It took what should have been a reasonably fast, exciting experience and made it boggy and tedious.
Then, along came WizKids with Mage Knight. Now, instead of all those charts and things, the information was represented on a dial under each figure and, simply by clicking the dial into a new position, all the effects were rendered immediately with little to no confusion. Game play sped up and people started having more fun. And, thus, an entire line of Clix games was born.
People ate it up. They ate it up so fast that demand outstripped supply for those first few months. WizKids had a veritable hit on their hands and they ran with it. The Collectible Miniatures Game became a new genre of gaming and, like Collectible Card Games before it, brought new folks to the table who might not otherwise have found their way there.
Thanks to Jordan Weisman,who just happened to hold a bunch of licenses from his former FASA product lines, we soon had more options than ever. Mage Knight was followed in rapid succession by Heroclix (Superheroes), MechWarrior (Giant Mechs), Crimson Skies (RetroFuture Airplanes), HorrorClix (Horror Films), MLB SportsClix (Baseball), Shadowrun Duels (Huge Shadowrun RPG based Action Figures), Creepy Freaks (Kid fare HorrorClix) and a bunch of other things to feed our geeky appetites.
Some lines were wildly successful. The HeroClix line in particular, featuring both DC and Marvel Comics, was so successful that it soon eclipsed the original Mage Knight lines in terms of popularity. Other lines, not so much. Creepy Freaks and MLB SportsClix died almost before they got out the door. Crimson Skies had, at the time, an odd distribution model that no one quite seems to have understood and it suffered as well. Other lines had middling success, enough to see them through 5 or 6 expansions at least.
Then, of course, along came Pirates of the Spanish Main, another brand new concept in gaming; the Constructable Collectible Game. Build yourself some little pirate ships, assemble a crew and sail around collecting treasure while sending your opponent to the briny deep. A fun game in it's own right and another extremely successful game for Wizkids. By now Wizkids was doing so well that Topps had stepped in and bought the company.
And then, things started to go downhill. It might have been the influence of Topps that started the problems. It might have been the beginnings of the economic downturn that we are still dealing with eight years later. But, I have an idea that it was neither of these things that really sunk the WizKids ship.
Their biggest downfall was licensing deals.
Licensing, whether it be of an Intellectual Property, i.e., Star Wars or Harry Potter, or a likeness of someone real, say Barry Bonds, is an expensive proposition. Generally speaking, it isn't a pay once sort of deal. Each time you want to do something new with a property or modify it in some way, you will be paying some additional fees; even maintaining your current property can lead to yearly licensing fees depending on how your agreement with the original owner is structured. It costs major money to even begin the process of introducing a game line based on a property, let alone maintaining it.
Look at what WizKids had going in terms of licensing: MLB SportsClix, using player names and likenesses, team names and uniforms; ultimately an unsuccessful game with only one release. HorrorClix, eventually licensing Freddy and Jason, Cthulhu mythos elements, Alien, Predator, and Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. HeroClix with licensing for virtually every significant character from both Marvel and DC Comics. Pirates of the Spanish Main eventually morphed into Pirates of the Caribbean and rode on the back of those successful films with all their licensing from Disney. There was a line of Star Wars Pocket Models and you know that license is not cheap. Start including the Halo ActionClix line, the NASCAR Race Day Pocket Models, a couple of weak forays into genuine CCGs, one of which was licensed on the new Battlestar Galactica show and you begin to see just how deeply they were invested in terms of licensing alone. If any one of these lines failed to take off and not pay for itself Wizkids would be out hundreds of thousands of dollars. And many of them did fail to grab attention and interest.
And so, in 2008, claiming they were refocusing their business on their traditional sports offerings, Topps closed the doors on WizKids and shut down all the product lines, never to be heard from again.
Except that turned out not to be entirely accurate.
A company called NECA bought WizKids in 2009 with a promise to bring back the HeroClix line. It made sense, in a way. If you are going to bring back WizKids then certainly you would do it with the most successful product they had, the one fans were clamoring for the most.
They were off and running. The fans came back and, for a couple of years at least, the focus was almost entirely on the one line, HeroClix. It seems to have worked. New HeroClix boosters and expansions come out at a regular pace despite a rather different distribution model than before. Fans buy them up and all is happiness.
Although, when you start digging in, something starts to look a bit familiar. Very familiar.
If you look at the product lines that WizKids has put out in the last year or so and pay attention to some of the more recent announcements, the word 'licensing' begins to float strangely to the top of your mind. And, with it, a little warning bell might begin to sound.
NECA/WizKidshas licensed the following properties just since 2011:
- Star Trek – Fleet Captains, Tactics, Expeditions
- The Smurfs – No Smurf Left Behind, Tag-athon
- The Lord of the Rings – HeroClix, Dice Building Game, and Nazgul
- The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – Journey to the Lonely Mountain,
- The Hunger Games – Jabberjay Card Game, District 12 Strategy Game, Training Days
- Catching Fire – Shuffling the Deck, Seeds of Rebellion
- Batman: Gotham City Strategy Game
- DOTA2 – HeroClix
- Team Fortress 2 – NextChess
- Puzzle Strategy Games based on numerous properties
- Hello Kitty Heroclix
Maybe NECA/WizKids has found the secret formula that lets them do this and maintain profitability regardless of how the various product lines fare. Maybe. But, I don't think you can look at things like Hello Kitty HeroClix and believe that.
I don't know about you, but it makes me nervous. Oh, and Mage Knight proper is coming back, too. I wonder if WizKids has it's own version of the Seventh Seal.
ITEMS OF INTEREST:
I finally got a chance to pick up the Star Wars Living Card Game from Fantasy Flight Games. With the announcement of the upcoming Edge of Darkness Deluxe Expansion I figured I'd better hurry up and at least get the base game on the table at some point.
I have a natural love of Star Wars - original trilogy, please - having been of an age where seeing it in the theaters for the first time left an indelible impression on my mind that still has me making "vwoom vwoom" noises every time I wave a broom handle around. Any time a game comes out that promises to put me in the universe somehow, I sit up and take notice.
So, when I got the plastic wrap off the Star Wars LCG box and found the piece of paper telling me to go watch the tutorial online at FFG first, I did so. And I discovered something that seemed, to me, kind of a cool idea.
Most CCGs and LCGs have a set of rules for building custom decks that lead to your sorting through masses of cards while trying to find combos that work well together or provide some sort of unstoppable mechanic by which you can decimate your opponents without them being able to do much about it. This is fine and well and good and proper. It's the big hook that gets you really into these games; building the deck no one else can beat and being reasonably sure it is uniquely yours.
The Star Wars LCG goes about this differently. Instead of sorting through all your available cards, you instead sort through your chosen faction's Objective Sets. Sets, you see, not cards. Each objective, essentially a 'scene' from the films, has 5 associated cards that go with it. If you want a particular objective, you'll be playing with the cards it comes with.
What this does, at least for me, is change the way I have to think about the cards which go in a deck and how to balance them so that the deck does what I want it to do. Now, I can't just throw in four copies of “Captain Unstoppable” and go from there. I now have consider that “Captain Unstoppable” comes along with “Pfc. Very Stoppable Indeed” and I might want to select an objective that lets me beef him up somewhat, or offer him some sort of protection.
This makes deck building at once easier and more complex. I don't have to think about coming up with 50 individual cards that might work together to make a deck, but, I do have to think about whether using the “A Hero's Journey” objective is worth it for the “Luke Skywalker” card it comes with at the cost of having to somehow do something useful with the significantly less powerful “Twi'lek Loyalist” that also tags along. I also have to imagine that cards that appear to be over powered are balanced by my being made to use cards in that particular set that are, perhaps, under powered and so, overall, two given decks are generally pretty well balanced against each other by virtue of this set up.
It'll take me actually getting to play the game before I have a solid grip on it all, and some of you may be there ahead of me, but I am intrigued by this and look forward to exploring the options available.
Some of you may have fond memories of playing the Shadowrun RPG back in the day. (Or, maybe not all that far back if you have a group that has kept up.) I don't. Somehow I got the Dark Conspiracy side of things instead. It's all good though. I've got an opportunity to catch up to you thanks to Catalyst Game Labs.
2013 has been declared The Year of Shadowrun, at least by Catalyst if no one else, and I am certain you all know that the newest edition of the Shadowrun RPG is on it's way. However, you 5th Edition fanatics are going to have to wait a bit since it doesn't come out until this Summer.
Meanwhile, us Board and Card Gamers can get in on the action a little early. Shadowrun: Crossfire comes out this Spring and is another entry in the Deck Building genre of games. You know how this works: You start with a limited hand of cards and using your available buying power from those cards you try to add better cards from the tableau to your deck in order to ramp up your power to buy more cards and take bigger actions and... well, accomplish whatever the game's goal is.
The nice thing is, Crossfire is cooperative. That means it is you and your friends against the game itself. Runners will work together as a team to complete group objectives while also working on personal objectives that will enhance your abilities or give you other benefits.
Some time around the Fall or Winter this year, Shadowrun: Sprawl Gangers will come out. Gangers will be a Skirmish level miniatures game featuring nice figures you RPG guys will probably want to grab onto for your games as well. The game promises continuity between it's included scenarios. Advancements and gear gained by individual factions carry over from one scenario to the next as they battle to control turf and resources. You might almost think that it is a Skirmish game with RPG elements, which is not an entirely bad thing at all.
2014 promises to be a Year of Shadowrun all on it's own as well, with promised Euro-style board games, an 'authentic' Shadowrun computer game and even an MMO in the works. Maybe there is something to this Shadowrun thing after all.
That's another two weeks gone by folks. Thanks for reading, again. Remember,we've got a whole comments section down here at the bottom for you to comment in. We had a good discussion last time about Gateway games and I can't wait to see what we talk about this time.
Until then, go get some games on the table.
