For many years, I’ve been collecting tiny superheroes and sending them remorselessly into battle. It’s not that I don’t love them, but on Wednesday nights, we’d dust the crumbs off of the dorm room floor, put on some Queens of the Stone Age and beat the (virtual) living heck out of each other. Using powers like telekinesis, super-strength, and a super-heroic willpower, we’d have a hell of a time.
With 1.5” inch high superhero figures, feet conveniently glued to dials that contained statistics about their powers, we’d traverse a small map and try to strategies our way towards our survival and the destruction of our enemy. Anyone who’s ever participated in wargaming knows what I’m talking about, but wargaming has always seemed so forbidding, with its rulers and handmade battle terrain and math and general uber-nerdness – so us lesser nerds (species : Dorkinus Minimus) turned to Heroclix, a collectible miniature game by WizKids, which serves as a fair introduction to the much larger culture of miniature gaming.
It’s appeal? Well, within the game of Heroclix, there are hundreds upon hundreds of superheroes and villains to collect and send into battle. Each has their own unique appearance and battle statistics, and you can intermingle characters from both the DC and Marvel comics universes, with a fair smattering of other publishers thrown in there also. Best of all, there’s none of that complicated pencil-and-paper gaming going on. All of the statistics you need for each character are contained in a simple system of numbers and symbols on their individual dials. With the roll of some dice, your battles are waged and won. It’s really quite ingenious, and it was totally addictive to a comic nerd who wanted to see who would win in a fight between Captain America and Batman. The game is complex enough to be interesting and simple enough to be absorbing.
In seventeen days from today, the 17th Heroclix expansion set will be released. Every handful of months since the initial Heroclix offering in 2002, WizKids has set forth a new, large set of characters to be added to your epic battles across imaginary cityscapes. These are released in mystery packs containing three or four figures each, and in every few packs, you have the chance of getting a rare ‘Unique’ figure, representing a powerful or briefly-seen incarnation of a character that might be just too unusual to include in the main set of characters. While being effective game pieces, they’re also very tradable and can fetch high prices. Think of them as three dimensional trading cards.
With this new expansion, called ‘Sinister‘, WizKids is focusing on completing the lexicon of Spider-Man villains, tying in with the release of the third Spider-Man movie. While we’ve had folks like Venom and Green Goblin and Scorpion forever, we finally get a rounded-out collection of classic interpretations of Rhino, Electro, and even our fist glimpse of Hydro Man. If you guessed that his power involves water, you’d be right. Water can be very dangerous, one must assert. We’ll also be seeing Ka-Zar for the first time, in all of his shirtless, savage glory, and… Stilt-Man. Who has the power of really long robot legs. Of course, this unfortunate villain only paved the way for such others as Unicycle Lass and Thirty-Clowns-in-a-Tiny-Car Man, none of whom were effectual by any stretch of the imagination. Nevertheless, each character’s unique abilities are usually useful in making up a powerful team to battle with.
If all of this seems obtuse and inaccessible, there’s hope. On the same day, WizKids will be releasing their ‘Danger Room’ starter set, which is an excellent and convenient jumping-on point for anyone who is interested in playing the game, complete with an updated 
rulebook and everything that you need to play, including six exclusive X-Men figures that you can’t get anywhere else. It might take a few bucks to put together that perfect Fantastic Four team that you’d love to send into battle, since the original versions of these figures (and many other early figures) have been discontinued, but it’s not impossible. And if you really get into playing, Wizkids has national tournaments and very serious venue rules (and free prizes offered) so that you can play competitively at your local comic shop.
For a clearer overview of that excitement that the game has generated, pop on over to HCRealms.com, the internet’s leading community for discussing and trading HeroClix. Also, check out the WizKids official site for some more insight into the gaming process. They can make thirty Spider-Men with different costumes and slightly different powers and I’ll still be excited.
