Marvel Strike Teams: a superhero dungeon crawl

On first glance, Marvel Strike Teams looks like another variant in Wizkids' Heroclix line of games. It has many similarities, both thematic and mechanical, but a number of differences that make it an interesting game in its own right.

Like Heroclix, Marvel Strike Teams is a tactical superhero battle game. It uses a grid system for movement and range, and characters find their powers and abilities decreasing in effectiveness as they take on damage, which is a hallmark of the Heroclix system.

Unlike Heroclix, Strike Teams is a one vs. many style game, with one player taking on the role of a supervillain and his minions, and the others each controlling a single hero and working cooperatively to foil the villain's dastardly plans. It's also much more mission oriented, with victory centered on accomplishing certain in-game goals (such as rescuing hostages or finding macguffins rather than just trying to obliterate your opponent's forces. In spite of the superhero theme, the game structure is that of a classic "dungeon crawl," with heroes creeping through rooms and corridors in search of treasure and a quick exit.

The game is designed to be played campaign style over multiple game sessions, with both the heroes and the villains gaining experience and improving their abilities between games, another thing that sets it apart from the one-off battles of Heroclix and makes it seem more like a D&D-style dungeon crawler.

But the really innovative thing about Strike Teams is that it uses a diceless system for combat. Players instead use resource management and damage control to accomplish their side's goals during the game.

Each round, characters are given a certain number of action points, which can be spent to move, heal damage, use special powers, and most importantly, attack and defend. Action points can be saved up from round to round (up to a pre-set maximum), so game play is a balancing act between moving, attacking, and saving aside points to defend your character against attacks.

It's very different from most battle games (including Heroclix), which use random dice rolls to determine the outcome of combat. Sure, most of those games will include game mechanics to mitigate the randomness such as rerolls, bonuses, and extra dice, but there is always the chance that an attack will go badly due to random chance that is outside the player's control.

Monolith's Conan game is probably a closer comparison in terms of the level of strategic resource management and focus on scenario goals over outright fighting, but even it uses dice to resolve combat.

With only a handful of characters to choose from in the base game an one small expansion, Strike Teams lacks the epic scope of what Heroclix can offer with its thousands of different figures over multiple franchises. It's a pity there aren't more expansions planned for Strike Teams, because mechanically it's a much more interesting game.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A terrific alternative to battle games like Heroclix, but unfortunately its lack of commercial success will limit this game to only a handful of characters and limited replayability.

• Marvel Strike Teams official website
• Marvel Strike Teams on BoardGameGeek

Another look at Star Trek: Fleet Captains

I really wish Star Trek: Fleet Captains was a better game than it actually is. It has an incredible amount of potential to be a truly epic game, but is hampered by some clunky, overly complicated game play. A lot of this could be solved by a tiny bit of rules streamlining, but really the game just needs a reference card that clearly summarizes the rules and mechanics, so that players won't be forced to constantly refer to the overwritten and poorly organized rule book.

One of the core mechanics of the game is each player's assembly of a Command Deck of cards. For each faction (Federation, Klingons, Romulans and Dominion) there are 10 mini-decks of 10 cards each, grouped around themes such as "Way of the Warrior" or "Sensor Upgrades," or around particular characters like Captain Kirk or Worf. Each player chooses four of these to shuffle together, giving them a deck of 40 cards that they can use during the game. It's a neat idea in theory, and it adds a bit of CCG-style strategy to the game, but in practice I too often find myself with uninteresting cards that I can't use clogging up my hand. This could be solved by allowing players to further customize their decks by removing cards they don't think they'll use during the game.

An unfortunately under-utilized element of the game is the Encounter Deck, consisting of cards that represent things a starship might encounter while exploring space, such as Abandoned Outposts or Independent traders. Again, this is a wonderful idea that fails a bit in practice, since each unexplored location a ship moves into will only sometimes give up an encounter, and even then, only once per location. We've tried a few different house rules to make encounters happen more often, such as always having an encounter in a newly discovered location, and then checking for additional encounters each time the location is moved into again.

There are also a few superficial issues with the components, such as the unpainted ship miniatures, the poor font choice on the clix dials making them very hard to read, or the flimsiness of the cards and especially the location tiles, but these are easily fixed or ignored. The point is that there are just a few things stopping Fleet Captains from being a magnificent game, and I don't think any of them are insurmountable.

Most of the time I shy away from creating "house rules" or other improvements to commercial board games, my argument being that there are so many games out there that work fine without me needing to change them, so why should I spend my time picking up the game designers' slack? But in this case, the game is so tantalizingly close to being great, and there really isn't another Star Trek game like it...

Read the original review.
Original rating: 3 (out of 5)
New rating (pass or fail): PASS

Another look at Star Trek: Expeditions

With its generic game board and easily replaceable plot cards, Star Trek: Expeditions was clearly designed to be expandable with new missions and challenges for the Enterprise crew. But so far, the only expansion for the game has been a little box containing three new crew member miniatures and their corresponding character cards -- no new mission cards, which is what the game really needs. My suspicion is that the game failed to sell particularly well, and the double-whammy of the license for the Star Trek reboot film and game designer Reiner Knizia's no doubt higher-than-average royalties have made the game's continuation too expensive for the publisher to consider.

We dug the game out recently for a replay, and we enjoyed our game quite a bit, perhaps even more than we were expecting to given the noncommittal rating we originally gave it. We enjoyed everything you are supposed to enjoy about a cooperative game: working together to make decisions, dividing up the game's resources and challenges based on whose characters were best suited, and the feeling that we were struggling against difficult (but not impossible) story-driven game mechanics.

I can still see that my original assessment of this game holds true, in that the thing that will get old after repeated plays is the repetitiveness of the plot cards. While there are incidental side-plots that are randomized for each game, the core plot cards that move the game forward (and determine the players' score at the end) are always the same. Other co-op games like Arkham Horror or A Touch of Evil give players a variety of different enemies to fight, in order to add variety and increase replay value.

However, I honestly don't think the repetitive game play is too much of a problem for us since we only seem to play it every seven months or so, and we always have a good time when we do.

Read the original review.

Original rating: 3 (out of 5)

New rating (pass or fail): PASS

To boldly clix, part 3 -- Star Trek Heroclix: Tactics

The release of Star Trek Heroclix: Tactics came as a bit of a surprise to me. Wizkids Games had already released Fleet Captains, so I wasn't expecting another Star Trek game from them, let alone one that appeared to use the same ship models. I was even more surprised when it turned out that Tactics used the regular Heroclix rules word-for-word, with no changes made to accommodate the fact that it's starships rather than superheroes. Powers and abilities were renamed on individual ship cards, but the rule book and reference card refer to ships having incongruous powers like Super Strength or Psychic Blast.

In all honesty I found the whole thing more than a little bit silly, and as the game did appear to use all the same ship models that had been included in Fleet Captains (although in Tactics they are fully painted, at least), I decided to give the whole thing a miss.

That is, until the first expansion came out. Tactics II introduced Romulan, Cardassian, and even Vulcan ships to the game, but the ship model that sold me on the game after all was the bright orange Ferengi ship, proving that human beings do indeed respond emotionally to bright colors.

We bought a bunch of ships and played a few games. I suppose it was nice that we didn't need to learn a new rules set, but it still seemed a little silly when the odd superhero term would come up during a game.

In spite of that, the Heroclix rules do lend themselves fairly well to the way space combat is depicted on Star Trek. Game pieces in Heroclix don't move fluidly so much as hop around the board from square to square, and they have to stop moving before making an attack, which is more or less what happens on Star Trek, with its ponderous starships slowly moving into position and then firing until the other ship is destroyed or surrenders.

While Heroclix is a tried and true game system, at the end of the day it reduces Star Trek to a simple fight, with none of the drama or intrigue offered by the various television shows, or even by the other two Star Trek clix games.

I still thought it was odd that Wizkids had two competing Star Trek starship games on the market, so imagine my surprise when the announced Star Trek: Attack Wing, yet another ship combat game that would use the same models from Tactics and Fleet Captains, but with the rules system licensed from from Fantasy Flight's Star Wars: X-Wing. I'm definitely not touching that one...

Rating: 2 (out of 5) While Heroclix with space ships works surprisingly well, Star Trek Tactics suffers in comparison to the more interesting Fleet Captains.

• Star Trek Heroclix: Tactics official website
• Star Trek Heroclix: Tactics on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: September 14, 2014

To boldly clix, part 2 -- Star Trek: Fleet Captains

The second Star Trek game from Wizkids Games, Star Trek: Fleet Captains has all the makings of an epic. Rather than go the route of a straight-up combat game, Wizkids delivered a surprisingly deep game about exploration and mission solving, with combat playing only a small part. Players draft fleets of ships and explore a cosmos made up of randomly sorted tiles. The ships you choose determine what types of missions you are given, anything from colonizing planets to scanning stars to conducting hit-and-run attacks into your opponent's territory.

As a player, you can tailor your tactics with the use of a semi-customized deck of Command cards, composed of characters, actions, and combat maneuvers. There are 10 mini-decks of 10 cards organized around themes such as engineering, warfare, or subterfuge; at the start of the game, each player chooses four of these to shuffle together, forming a 40 card deck.

Play centers around solving missions to score points, with bonus points available from random encounters as well as by doing things like building starbases. Play proceeds until one player reaches a number of points (10 in a normal game) determined by the size of the players' starting fleets.

The Star Trek universe is certainly well-represented. Each faction plays differently, with the Federation focused on science and exploration, the Klingons on battle, the Romulans on subterfuge, and the Dominion on brute force conquest. Ships and characters from the original series, The Next Generaition, Deep Space Nine and Voyager are all present, and there's even a Klingon ship from an episode of the animated series.

While it is very successful in terms of theme, the game itself is often bogged down by complicated game play. The game tries to be open-ended, but unfortunately that has resulted in a lot of rules that aren't always intuitive and are often difficult to remember. We have found that we have to refer to the rules very frequently, even after playing several times.

The Command deck is an interesting idea, especially with the ability to customize the deck a bit without spending time hand-picking all the cards. However, each of the mini-decks has too many cards that are only useful in very specific situations. You often find yourself with a hand of cards you can't use, which means you get in the habit of just ignoring them all together.

As with Star Trek Expeditions, the patented clix dial seems a bit out of place and tacked-on. Ostensibly it is used to track power adjustments to each ship, so more power to the shields means less power to the sensors, but the numbers on the dials are in a poorly chosen font that is very hard to read, and in any case all the numbers are also printed on each ship's card, making the dials pretty unnecessary.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) The incredible use of theme goes some way towards making up for some clunky game play, but not enough to make Fleet Captains a great game.

• Star Trek: Fleet Captains official website
• Star Trek: Fleet Captains on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: September 1, 2014

UPDATE May 12, 2015: Another look at Star Trek: Fleet Captains

Same rules, different world

Unlike The Lord of the Rings Dice Building Game, which attempted to add extra game mechanics to Quarriors in order to make it feel more Middle-earthy, Lord of the Rings Heroclix isn't a new game at all. In fact, the figures and rules are 100% compatible with the regular Heroclix game, so players can easily pit Superman against a horde of orcs or have Gandalf and Magneto join forces for an all Ian McKellen team.

The Lord of the Rings sets do add a few interesting and thematic things to Heroclix, however. The least successful, in my opinion, is the addition of Horde tokens. Similar to bystander tokens, these represent unremarkable characters such as orcs and goblins whose only real power is in the fact that there are a lot of them. The tokens are treated as characters and can move around the battlefield individually or in stacks that represent large groups and have better defensive abilities. It's an attempt to get across the idea of large numbers of characters on the battlefield without needing tons of expensive miniatures, but unfortunately it falls a little (pardon the pun) flat.

Epic actions and traits are a lot more interesting. Most of the main characters such as Aragorn, Frodo, Gandalf and Saruman have Epic abilities in addition to their normal powers. Epic abilities can only be used in games with a build total of 400 points or more, and most of them tend to be more effective based on the size of the game, encouraging players to field large forces to get the epic flavor of the story.

The most intriguing game element that Lord of the Rings brings to Heroclix is a six-game scenario-based campaign. The scenarios are intended to be played in sequence and represent major scenes from the Lord of the Rings films such as the trek through the Mines of Moria, the battle at Helm's Deep, and the confrontation with Sauron's forces at the Black Gate of Mordor. The winner of each game gets an advantage to use in the next game, but in order to keep the games balanced, the loser also receives help, usually in the form of a special rule that delays the other player in some way.

Some of the campaign scenarios are straightforward battles, but one of them has an interesting special rule. In Betrayal at Amon Hen, depicting the Fellowship's battle with the Uruk-Hai at the end of the first film, Boromir is placed on the battlefield as a neutral character who will switch back and forth between the players' control based on the roll of the dice, reflecting his attempt to seize the Ring from Frodo.

I really enjoy Heroclix, but I often find that in tournament play the game becomes too competitive and predictable, and the vast array of figures that are available can be a little overwhelming. With the Lord of the Rings set I get a more manageable pool of figures to pick from, and the story-based campaign play adds a nice sense of continuity that is in keeping with the tone of the films and books.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Lord of the Rings Heroclix adds a few nice elements to the game that help reflect the feel of the films without making us learn a whole new set of rules.

• Lord of the Rings Heroclix official website
• Lord of the Rings Heroclix on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: April 19, 2014

Monster squads

When Horrorclix was released in 2006, the collectible miniature/click dial treatment had been given to several games: the original Mage Knight, Marvel and DC Comics Heroclix, Crimson Skies, which was two games in one (air combat and brawling pilots), and Mechwarrior with its giant robots. Strangely, the games' designers made no effort to make any of these games compatible with each other, and in most cases seemed to go out of their way to make them as different as possible.

Freddy Krueger takes on the Aliens

As the name suggests, Horrorclix features all the old standbys of the horror genre, including vampires, werewolves, zombies, Lovecraftian shoggoths and deep ones, and even ghost hunters and vampire slayers. Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street film series and Jason Vorhees from Friday the 13th both make an appearance via a special boxed set, as do the Aliens and Predators from the recent Alien vs. Predator film. They even did a large Alien Queen figure, and an even larger Cthulhu, which stood about 18 inches tall.

The game itself was sold as a more story-driven game than Heroclix, which tended to get right down to the fighting with little preamble. Horrorclix uses the same basic movement and combat system, but the character abilities have been greatly simplified, and the game adds plot twist cards and victim tokens in its attempt to add more narrative to the action.

Hellboy vs the Alien Queen

The plot twists and victims do add an interesting wrinkle to the game, especially the first few turns as each player's monsters scramble to consume (or rescue) the victim tokens in order to enhance their abilities. But in the end it still comes down to a fight between each player's squad of figures.

Rasputin, the Mad Monk

That said, the figures are pretty great. Aliens and Predators aside, the game wasn't beholden to a specific license, so the designers were able to be more imaginative with the characters populating the game. In addition to the standard werewolves, zombies and vampires, the game features some unusual figures such as a ghost-addled Rasputin and a whole set of sinister carnival freaks.

Fun as it is on its own, it's unfortunate that the game wasn't made to be more compatible with Heroclix, but the games are just different enough to make crossovers a bit awkward, and they are best played separately. They did release a Hellboy boxed set that was supposed to work in both games, but in practice the figures are a bit overpowered in Horrorclix and underpowered in Heroclix.

Wizkids Games has been releasing all of their new figures to be fully Heroclix-compatible, so hopefully they'll get around to re-releasing a few figures from Horrorclix. After all, who wouldn't want to pit a hunting party of Predators against the Justice League, or see if Doctor Strange can stop the zombie apocalypse?

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A great game that offers a similar experience to Heroclix, but is a bit easier to play.

• Horrorclix on BoardGameGeek.com

Dates played: February 8 and 16, 2014

With great power comes increasing complexity...

Heroclix is a tabletop miniatures game of superhero combat. It evolved from Mage Knight, using that game's ingenious click-dial and a simplified version of its rules, eliminating its tape measure guided movement and randomly placed terrain in favor of maps with printed terrain and a grid for movement.

One of the major selling points of both Mage Knight and Heroclix was that they were much simpler than the more involved fantasy miniatures games such as Warhammer, with each figure's game information printed right on the base (color-coded and read with the aid of a simple reference card), which could be clicked down to keep track of damage and changes to the character's abilities over the course of the game.

What really set Heroclix apart from Mage Knight was the fact that it featured recognizable characters, first from the Marvel Comics universe, with DC Comics following soon after. Finally, players could answer age-old questions like "who would win in a fight between Superman and the Hulk?"

Hundreds of collectible figures were released, with frequent new versions of popular characters such as Spider-Man, Wolverine and Batman, and a brief foray into the world of independent comics brought more obscure characters such as Hellboy, Judge Dredd, and even the cast of the City of Heroes online computer game to the table.

Heroclix is a great game. It's fast paced, and has a lot of strategic depth. There are a lot of tactical decisions to make during a game, and games are seldom predictable due to the random element of rolling dice when your figure makes an attack. The collectible aspect of the game is a turn-off for some: figures are released in random booster packs, with rare figures usually being more powerful. But for others, collecting the figures is half the fun. Most of the fun for me is pitting different groups of heroes against each other, such as Marvel's Nextwave (from the comic by Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen) vs. the Avengers from the recent movie.

Even though it is one of my favorite games, I don't play Heroclix very often. While it started out as a refreshingly simple game, over the years it has gotten gradually more complicated, as the game's designers struggle to add new elements in order to keep longtime players interested, a phenomenon known in the world of collectible gaming as "power creep." Because of that it has become difficult to teach, and its current complexity makes it difficult to pick up and play every once in a while, much like any collectible game.

Many local game stores offer weekly tournaments, where players can get together and play in structured events, but that offers its own set of challenges. In order to stay competitive, tournament players need to keep up with the most recent figures released for the game, and there is just too much new product coming out on a regular basis. The only way to really enjoy Heroclix at the store tournament level is to focus on it to the exclusion of all else, and quite honestly I just haven't got the financial resources or attention span to do that.

I don't keep up with the game any more, but it still catches my eye when I see a new Heroclix product at the game store. The game's publisher has released figures from Lord of the Rings and even spaceships from Star Trek that use the same rules but are closed off from the more high-powered superheroes of the regular Heroclix universe (with Star Trek it is a question of scale as much as anything else). They've also started releasing fixed sets of figures with no randomness or rarity, and every once in a while I'll pick one of those up and convince my wife or one of our friends to spend the afternoon playing.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Heroclix is a very immersive game that drives me to distraction. It would rate a 5 if not for two major barriers to playing regularly: somewhat overly complex rules, and a flood of product that is impossible to keep up with.

• Heroclix official website
• Heroclix online community at HCRealms.com
• Heroclix on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: February 2, 2014

Just to be different

Wizkids Games released Mage Knight in 2000, inspired (so the story goes) by a need for an alternative to overly complex tabletop miniatures games such as Warhammer. Mage Knight consisted of pre-painted plastic miniatures with game information printed on a dial built into the figure's base, and was sold in random starter sets and booster packs like collectible card games. The idea was extremely successful, and Wizkids followed up with Heroclix, a similar game featuring characters licensed from Marvel and DC Comics.

Heroclix was also a raging success, so naturally Wizkids looked for other properties they could give the clix dial treatment to. The first was Mechwarrior, based on FASA's tabletop game of giant robot combat, and the second was Crimson Skies, also based on an earlier tabletop game, this one set in an alternate 1930s where America is divided into competing nation-states who battle one another using bizarre airplane designs.

It would be nice to be able to judge Crimson Skies entirely on its own merits, but unfortunately comparisons to Mage Knight, Heroclix and the later, similarly themed Wings of War and Star Wars: X-Wing are unavoidable.

Other than using the same click dial system to track damage and figure abilities, Crimson Skies seems to be an attempt to do everything as differently as possible from Heroclix. The attack and defense game mechanics are different, with Crimson Skies replacing Heroclix's single attack roll and fixed damage with a system that deals damage based on the number of individual dice that roll above a target number.

The game's movement system is the most well thought out change, given that it is a game about airplanes which move in a particular way. Rather than a tape measure or a playing surface marked with a grid of squares, it uses octagon shaped templates combined with a selection of cards which detail different movement options. These allow for more authentic yet very clunky movement, and the later Wings of War and X-Wing have greatly improved on the idea.

In addition to the main air combat game, Crimson Skies also includes a side game that allows players to play out the inevitable bar fights that pilots get into when they're not in their planes, but even that uses not only a different rules set to Heroclix, but the pilot figures are in a completely different scale.

The game was released in a completely different format as well, abandoning the random booster packs of Heroclix in favor of a series of fixed packs of figures with clear packaging. It almost seems like the whole thing was a test marketing experiment to try out everything they didn't do with Mage Knight, Heroclix, and Mechwarrior.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) Crimson Skies isn't a bad game on its own, but it falls short when compared to more elegantly designed alternatives such as Wings of War, X-Wing and Heroclix.

• Crimson Skies on BoardGameGeek.com

Dates played: December 24 and 27, 2013