Screw You, Topps

Blarg and hail to the spambots!

Been thinking about old nerdy times.  Specifically the tabletop stuff I used to play and enjoy.  I played the Star Wars CCG.  It was ridiculously complex.  It took ten years for Magic:  The Gathering to approach the complexity this game had after one.  Sometimes I think Decipher was staffed by geeks that wanted to run a modern video game physics engine with cards.  Star Trek CCG was worse.

In any case, I didn't play much, but I had a wonderful time, and near the end of its run I built a small online trading empire out of it.  It was awesome.

Another nerdy passion I had Star Wars Minatures.  I blew way too much money and made a far less successful trading run, but I played it a helluva lot more.  A very good friend and I worked out a modified version that dumped the grid based combat and faction restrictions for actual table terrain, mass fire, the works.  It was even more awesome.

But the reason I'm writing is the game I picked in between.

That game was Mage Knight.

These days, it seem to be so obscure that there is no real data out there.  No background information.  No fan fora.  Very rarely, you see product on Ebay.  The odd very crappy relaunch.  It has gone through the gamer equivalent of Damnatio Memoriae.  I'm amazed there's a Wikipedia article.

Back in the day, it was not so.  It was really great stuff.  It successfully melded the collector's craze of card games with the armchair general's craze of pushing plastic dudes across a table for great justice.  It was even (relatively) cheap.

The basic gist is that Jordan Weisman (yes, that Jordan Weisman, the BattleTech guy) and his sons got their hands on a big Warhammer Fantasy starter set, and realized that on top of the ridiculous initial investment, the game his kids spent all sorts of time and money just getting still needed even more time and money to build and paint, and on top of that, the rules...well somehow they managed to bamboozle an experienced miniature games developer.  He went on to put something together that far more accessible for gamers.

 The miniatures came in starters and boosters, just like a CCG, and came prepainted.  Starters were $20 on a bad day, and came with a rulebook, a tailor-style measuring tape, a nice little background comic, and enough miniatures to get going.  There were multiple rarity tiers, with the highest (at the time) being the unique minis, which tended to be powerful centerpieces for an army.  There were a good mix of factions, and even better, a player could mix and match as they saw fit.  Games were point based, with the typical value being 200, resulting in a nice skirmish-level game.  Stats were on the minis themselves, using revolving clicky bases, pretty much negating bookkeeping. This stuff was fricking awesomeness.

I got hooked into it about three expansions in, and managed to drag a few buddies in for once.  There were weekly tournaments with a decent following.  Then the gravy train just kept a rollin'.   They had already added cavalry models, soon would come big stuff like dragons, giants, cannons, and tanks.  TANKS!  Nice rule variants came out, like Conquest, which brought in official rules for structured multi-battle campaigns, and large scale (1000 point or more) games that really upped the scale, and Dungeons, which brought actual squad level dungeon crawling into Mage Knight.  The awards and cash kept pouring in.  WizKids managed to acquire the rights to DC and Marvel characters, and HeroClix was born.  The stars aligned and clicky BattleTech appeared.  MK, as the flagship game, just kept getting better and better, and the minis (which were admittedly horrible at first) were starting to really come into their own.  It was really something special.

Then it happened.  WizKids was acquired by Topps.  The gravy train had been hijacked by CSX and was about to derail and cause serious casualties.  Long story short, a gaming-oriented demographic was being occluded and cynically shut out in favor of toy store bullshit.

Mage Knight 2.0 came out, and everything went straight to hell.  Every miniature before the new release was invalidated, and the old ruleset, factions, and abilities were null and void.  This wasn't like other miniature games, where basic model variants were still legal (40k's Space Marines still haven't fundamentally changed in loadout since 2nd edition from the 1990s, arguably since Rogue Trader itself), or CCGs, where the shifting meta-game and set-swaps were a constant.  Everybody's army, everywhere, didn't exist anymore.  I freely admit that I had invested heavily, and gotten pretty much all the big goodies, plus a ton of the regular stuff.  I was far from alone, either.

A few other stubborn individuals and I toughed it out to the bitter end.  We bought plenty of 2.0 and tried to hold things to together.  WizKids tried to reinvigorate things by bringing in new unit types, like dedicated flyers, revamped cavalry, magic items, and all sorts of special rules.  But the gravy train was off the track and burning.  The very last set was pure fanservice, bringing back minis from the older edition, along with reinstating the old models, factions, and rules.

Not much to tell after that.  They did some horrible video games, and tried a reboot into a pen-and-paper RPG.  I've been told there is a Mage Knight board game that's pretty awesome, but really hard to get.  Last year, I saw a new set of the things; not sure how it went.

My other gaming obsessions aren't like this.  They had a good run, and I had a blast.  Even where something was killed by corporate suits, and I had to either put them away or jump ship entirely, I still have good feelings overall.

Mage Knight...  Mage Knight is different.  I don't have anything left except for two minis that live on the Shelf of Glory, but I know the rules (especially pre 2.0) very well, and could still tell you about a certain mini's stats and abilities just glancing at a base.  But even so, just seeing the Wizkids logo makes me all maudlin and bitter.  It didn't get a wonderful run and just fade out, it got cut down in its prime, and for stupid reasons.

The thing that really gets my goat:  How many fledgling gamers were alienated and left the tabletop completely because of this mistake?  I felt betrayed, but Star Wars minis were out, and personal business intervened long enough that I got a clean break and came back later.  Not everybody was so forgiving.