Sunday, March 07, 2004
MLB SportsClix
 Ichiro!
| I just finished my first few games of MLB SportsClix and here are some first impressions. First of all, this game intersects a staggering number of my interests. I'm, of course, a huge baseball fan. Regular readers know I'm heavily into Magic the Gathering and other collectable games. What I haven't told you is that I own at least a few figures from most of the collectable miniature games that WizKids Games have produced (Mage Knight, HeroClix, and MechWarrior). I really want to like all these games but my dirty little secret is that I don't play any of them. I don't know anyone else who plays and they are still a bit to complex for my daughter to play. With the release of the baseball game, I've got some interest from some guys at work, and my daughter, so I hope to play it regularly.
If you're not familiar with the "clix" games, they created a new game category, collectable miniature games, in much the same way that Magic created the collectable card game category. They are innovative in many respects. They come prepainted as opposed to other miniature games where painting the figures was part of the "fun." Their main game innovation is the combat dial. The base of each figure is round and there is a cut out window on top that shows various statistics. Up until the baseball game all of the clix games have been combat oriented. When a figure was damages you rotated the base that many click. This causes the stats of the figure to change. In the baseball game there are about 150 figures of players from the 2003 season. Each figure has a unique performance dial that attempts to match the player’s performance. When I heard about the baseball game I wondered how they were going to work the clicks in without the overt combat of their other games. They did it by creating a hot/cold system. Essentially, when a player does something good (get a hit, drive in a run, make a great play in the field, etc.) they heat up one click. When they do something bad (hit into a double play, make an error, etc.) They cool off one click. The heart of the game, as with any baseball game, is the batter-pitcher confrontation. Both the batter figure and the pitcher figure show for different results through the cut out window of their bases. These results correspond to the different possible symbols that can appear on the batter and pitcher dice. At the start of an at bat the batter chooses which dice to throw (contact or power) and the pitcher makes his own choice (velocity or control). The dice land and you look up the result, which will be on either the pitcher's base or the hitter's base. There are two combinations that aren't on the bases, one for the hitter and one for the pitcher. These correspond to gaining total control of the at bat. The player who gets total control gets to immediately heat up on click and then choose whatever result they want from their base. Another excellent innovation of MLB SportsClix is defensive positioning. The game comes with a fold up play mat representing the stadium. The field is divided into six hitting zones radiating from home plate. Most figures have two different spots they can line up at on defense for their position. Each figure has a spray chart on their base corresponding to the six hitting zones. Each zone on the spray chart either has a number range such as 1 or 4-5, or is empty. Along with the hitting die the batter also rolls a standard six-sided die. If the ball is put in play this indicates from the spray chart which hitting zone the ball was hit in. If you do not have a defender in the zone where the ball was hit, the defensive play will be harder to make. This is an impressive innovation for a tabletop baseball game. The game MLB SportsClix is most comparable to is the collectable card game MLB Showdown from Wizards of the Coast. As you can imagine I got fairly heavily into that game when it first came out. I became disappointed with the game due to it's card game mechanic. Most of this game is dice rolling and looking up what happened off either the pitcher or hitter card. But each player also had a play deck and has a hand of cards. At various times through the game you could play cards that mainly altered the rolls of the dice. This mechanic did not work for me, as the smart thing to do is to hoard good cards through the game and play large amounts of them in the final inning or two. While I'm just starting out, I like the feel of MLB SportsClix. There have been exciting plays and home runs. I'm hoping to get a work league going. I'll post about my progress. Links: MLB SportsClix Home Page Rule Book SportsClixRealms fan site |
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