ATTN: Nerdly Freepers -> Who Plays the WizKids Minitures Games?

my vain self

[Jalapeno]

My kid recently got a couple of those Heroclix figures, and I find the whole concept oddly attractive, and bringing out the nerd in me.

I was looking at the other stuff WizKids do, and I was interested in the Mage Knight series as well. Is anyone playing these and having fun?

[Jalapeno]

Link for those who don't know what I am talking about

Link for those who are in denial

Link for those of you who don't care

[Ex-Dem]

Is it like Warhammer and Battletech?

[egarvue]

Yup. I'm a hard-core long time gamer. I played Mage Knight when it first came out, but I really liked the Battletech game. I attended GenCon the other week, and the coolest WizKids game out there now is Crimson Skies. Think 30's era pulp sci-fi dogfighting planes. You very much have to out-think and out-fly your opponent. And, unlike some of the othe WizKids stuff, you don't have to shell out a ton of money, because its not all that "collectable". The figs are packaged in clear plastic, so you can see what you're getting. @$40 will give you the rules (sold separately as a big package with cards, dice, etc) and two teams of four planes each. Very good investment, give it a try. I played it for hours at GenCon.

[Jalapeno]

Yes but simpler. The figures are prepainted plastic, with a dial at the base showing thier attributes. When they take "hits", you turn the dial to change their attributes - so they get weaker.

[John Will]

How are the quality of the Minis?

[Jalapeno]

Maybe egarvue can respond to that better. To me they look fine, but to a miniatures collector, used to hunting down the best painted or doing that themselves, they are probably not what they want.

[egarvue]

Fair. They're not the hard styrene plastic or pewter of regular minis you have to paint, their made of a medium kind of plastic, slightly bendable, although not too bad. Their first minis were pretty mediocre, both in detail and in paint job. But the quality has vastly improved, they're latest stuff looks really good, several of the players in my weekly D&D group use the figs when we play. As an on again/off again Game Workshop mini player (Necromunda & Space Hulk were my favorites), I've found that in every mini game, after the first five minutes of play, you really don't even notice the quality of the mini or its paint job, no matter how good. The game takes over. And I will say that the WizKids games are fantastic in that they provide a very good mini game that plays FAST. My friends and I can get a huge (8-10 Battlemechs and lots of supporting troops and tanks per side) battle done in an hour and a half. All of the charts, tables, and calculations are taken into account with the click dial bases, very ingenious.

So to kind of sum up, I like them in the fact that even though they aren't GW quality minis, they look pretty good and I don't have to paint them, nor do I have to invest a ton of money to play a decent game. As a slightly older gamer with three kids to support and little spare time, I find that very attractive.

[Jalapeno]

What do you think of the "Dungeons" series, and what about this MK 2.0?

[egarvue]

Dunno, haven't played Dungeons. But from what I've seen, the Dungeons game looks to be a lot like that old game "Heroquest", remember that? To me, Dungeons seems like an excuse to sell accessories, like the treasures and what not. I might buy into it a bit to see what its like.

One of the big announcements at GenCon this year was Mage Knight 2.0. They're going to be revising the rules to fix some spots where they say they've found errors or game flaws. They stressed that they will make MK 2.0 backwards compatable, so that all of your existing MK figs will work with the new rules, i.e. they're not "forcing you to upgrade" in order to sell you more minis.

As a side note, the other huge announcement at the con was that White Wolf is planning on ending, that's right, ending the whole goth-y "World of Darkness" setting for their Vampire, et al, series of games.

[yhwhsman]

Rats, you mean we won't be seeing the goth girls in little skimpy black dresses at the cons anymore???

I've got one of the Battletech figures, it's not too bad. Larger than the pewter mini, and a little different as far as weapons are concerned. But it's a nice looking mini. It's painted, and although I haven't actually played the Wizkid version of Battletech, the fact you don't have to buy a lot of books and keep track of all the stats is appealing.

I'll have to look for the Crimson Skies minis, thought it was a cool idea when the original game came out.



Yhwhsman

[egarvue]

Nah, the goths will still be there :) Its basically some great plot twist that they're going to spread out through books, supplements, magazines, etc. Armageddon or Gehanna comes or something like that, the end of the world. Big mystery yet what happens to vampires, etc. A sort of "New World Order" will appear, and White Wolf will go on from there. I suspect that the goth fad of the 90's is finally on the wane, and White Wolf wants it mileu to be fresh.

[Jalapeno]

Just bumping up this thread and saying I've been playing the MK Dungeons quite a bit. The figures are relatively cheap to get used and the necessity to get one of the blessed "unique limited edition" figures is not very high because of the way the game is played. (I can tell they "adjusted" this for hero clix to make the 'rares' more important.)

It seems to be a good social game as well. Not a good tournanment game though. The rules are a little 'loose' and ambiguous in places, but everyone seems to be able to quickly agree on a resolution. You were iright about the speed of the game, it goes quite fast.

Hero Clix doesn't seem to do it for me. If you look beyond the most expensive figures, many figures are fairly worthless and similar to each other.

The MK Rebellion stuff is intriguing from a grand-scale battle sense, but I am sure that gets expensive real quick....I saw there was a LOTR minitures set out, are you familiar with those? They are much cheaper.

[egarvue]

Thanks for the update. I'm in a bit of a money crunch here, so I can't get into MK Dungeons like I wanted to (have to save up for the D&D 3.5 Players Handbook).

Hero Clix, while kinda fun, is seriously broken in that a few figs can dominate the game (Hulk is utterly unkillable, he gets stronger all the way until his very last click). I didn't know there were LOTR plastic minis. Also coming soon are the D&D minis, will be interesting to see how much they cost as well.

[Jalapeno]

Actually going back to find you a reference I discovered the prices I was looking at were for cards, not figures. There are figures out (Games Workshop I believe), but they are expensive...