"The Next Epic Duels"

Blah blah blah, due to the holiday and con season the blog has stalled, so let's put some content out there....


I joined BGG during the height of Star Wars: Episode III madness. My brother and I had been playing the hell out of Clash of the Lightsabers and of course Star Wars: Epic Duels. It was a search for more games as good as those two that led me to find out about this other incredible Star Wars game I missed (some little game called Queen's Gambit or something like that). From there, BGG.

Epic Duels was just this crazy good game that was stupidly affordable, *completely* opposite of what you'd expect to find. You've probably heard everyone say how they picked up a copy for $5, and in the same breath wonder why Hasbro didn't follow up with an Episode III version (hint: stores don't buy things that only sell when they finally go on clearance).

In today's environment I doubt this could happen--just look at Heroscape...I think if that was released before there was a real AT renaissance and awareness on the web in any significant numbers, it would've had a base game that bombed and that would've been that. I don't think the web-aware boardgaming hobbyists would let games like Epic Duels go unnoticed again.


Funny thing, though, is the aftermarket success of Epic Duels spawned the catchphrase, "The Next Epic Duels". Gamers started talking like speculators. Sure, we're all collectors, but for any of us who lived through the speculation-mad crash n' burn of the comic book industry, that sort of thinking makes you a little wary. People were looking for that cheap game that would make them a hundred bucks after dropping only $5 on it.

Battleball for a long while was considered one such game; people mentioned buying five copies or more from Kaybee Toys. Battleball actually has a lot in common with Epic Duels; it's a mass market game that had a great bits per dollar value that went largely ignored by the gaming public. Probably for very different reasons, of course...video games have bled the notion that licensed gaming properties suck (hence Epic Duels bombing out), and Battleball has probably THE worst "game in action" photo on the back of the box I've ever seen:

...just stay the hell away from me, kid

Seriously, who could slap that thing down on the counter and expect to have any semblance of dignity? Who freakin' greenlit this thing? It's like the kid on the right just discovered his dad's Playboy stash and has been hit by a uncontrolled burst of hormones.

I like Battleball okay...we just played it yesterday in fact (I lost a humiliating 2-0, and *four* of my guys were critically injured by halftime). It has a lot of the same things in common with Epic Duels--nice bits, great price, fast and easy gameplay...it even fills a niche of super-easy to play sports boardgame, a not terribly crowded field.

However, it will never be "The Next Epic Duels".

Why is that? I'll tell you...it's just like something I heard once: "Anything that says 'Collector's Item' on it will NEVER be worth anything." If you've got people buying up cheap copies hoping to sell for a huge profit, but everyone is proclaiming a hot item sure to appreciate in price, who's going to buy it? See anybody willing to fork out $30 for Battleball? $20? $10 is more like it, if you're lucky. Not because it's a bad game, but honestly, who are the speculators going to sell it to? Each other? They were all able to pick up their fill of copies without a hassle...I could still have picked up an extra copy for many, many months after I scooped up mine, and most Toys R' Us stores had a glut of them that took awhile to work through their clearance stock.

Just like comic books, y'know? Marvel printed eleventy-billion copies of X-Men #1, and speculators gobbled them up only to find they had no one to sell copies to at inflated prices. Same deal...supply AND demand.

I had written off the "Next Epic Duels" phenomenon as being a thing not likely to be replicated. Queen's Gambit sells for a decent chunk of change but it was considerably more expensive to begin with...time may see that one increase, but unless Lucas gets his stuff together I doubt we'll see another Star Wars-induced gaming frenzy.

And yet....

The "Next Epic Duels" came and went, didn't it? That's right, it was "Betrayal at House on the Hill". There's another game where the desingers are probably due reparations from the savaging that Betrayal received--and to be fair, some of that was likely deserved thanks to the egregious misprints and rules omissions, monsters without proper stats, underground lakes on upper levels of the house, you know the drill.

Even just prior to this holiday season Betrayal was selling for $20 as Toys R Us was desperate to get rid of their "New and Improved" Avalon Hill stock. But then a crazy thing happened; all the copies in the retail channel dried up, and the price shot up (copies now close for $50-70, and a few for even more than that). And this time, we don't have movie hype to explain it away...more likely, it was a game people meant to get "someday" and when they saw that the game was getting harder to find, they finally got off their butts to get a copy...but for some of them, too late.

The speculators are there, though...there are a couple of Ebay sellers with $100+ copies, if you're interested (ah, Ebay...the home of eternal optimism). But it's possible that this one will continue to rise unless Hasbro decides it's worth reprinting--no one wants to make more copies of something that should sell for $40 but ends up on clearance shelves for $20.

So for all the hawkish claims, Betrayal slipped under the radar...how long 'till we hear, "Hey man, this might be the next Betrayal!"

Star Wars Heroscape? Dream on

As the world waits for this year's crop of Superhero films (Spidey 3, FF 2) the comic book fans among us are waiting on Marvel Heroscape to finally grace store shelves.


The idea is of course so obvious...Heroscape has been a tremendously successful product for Hasbro, bringing a level of AT Geekiness to the store shelves of Target and Wal-Mart, and managing to cross that "mass-market" barrier that so many games find difficult to cross.

Your mind begins to wonder at the possibilities of licensing this system...and it doesn't take long for the geeky mind to move to one of the biggest licensed properties in the world, Star Wars. It's a natural fit--packs of Star Wars heroes and villains would be flying off the shelves as fans gobbled up ten different versions of Luke, Han, and company.

The first thought is of course George Lucas' reluctance to allow his properties to intermingle with others, particularly in the same setting or framework. Lucas is something of a renowned control freak, so that is understandable. Of course, that idea flies right out the window when you consider that Hasbro made both Transformers and Marvel Heroes characters for use in the game Attacktix, even going so far as to package Star Wars and Transformers characters in the same pack!

Running out of options to stop
General Grievous, Shaak Ti was
forced to throw her best candy dish

So we're looking at a company that owns the rights to a system that lends itself well to expansion and licensed properties....the *same* company owning the rights to one of the biggest franchises in the world...and yet...as far as I can tell, there are no plans for a Star Wars Heroscape.


Why is that?


Let's take a short trip back in time to 2002, when Epic Duels was on the shelves. Most geek gamers know the story of that one; this was released during a time when most gamers (especially Ameritrash gamers) knew nothing about BGG and had no online resource for telling if a game was any good or not. I saw Epic Duels on the shelves many times but assumed it was bad, licensed drek--let's face it, Star Wars up until that time had a pretty poor reputation in terms of licensed boardgames and videogames (it was this same assumption that had hampered sales of AH's stellar Star Wars: The Queen's Gambit a few years before).

Epic Duels became a word-of-mouth phenomenon, but not in time to save it from the clearance racks. I heard from a friend who said it was a great game, and scooped up a copy from K-Mart as the last of them were flying off the shelves for $5 apiece.

Of course, as you know, now the flagship Hasbro product for Star Wars is Star Wars Miniatures. I think that SWM is a fine system and quite a bit of fun, and really is only a few magnitudes of complexity removed from Heroscape. As you are also probably aware, SWM uses the random blind booster packs for distribution.

This creates a bit of a problem.

Let's look again at Epic Duels. The game included 31 plastic figures (badly painted, but I digress), including *all* the big names from the Star Wars franchise. Vader? Mace? Luke? Leia? Han? Chewie? Boba? ALL of them were included. You also got two double-sided gameboards and custom decks for each team that was included in the game, whether it was Vader and his two Stormtroopers or the AOTC team of Jango and Zam. The kicker to all of this was the fact that even at full retail price, this only cost $20.



$20! I know most of us bought it for $5 or so, but $20! That was it!

I will not dispute that the quality of the Star Wars Minis is far better than those included in Epic Duels. But for the same $20, you get one pack of randomized figures, and you are desparately hoping every time you crack one of them open that you at least pull someone that had more than five seconds of screen time. The heart doesn't exactly leap when you reveal your treasured rare only to find San Hill (who? I'm a Star Wars geek so that's a rhetorical question, but you get my point).


Do you see the problem here?


If gamers were allowed to get their Star Wars fix in a non-randomized fashion, the ability to sell you a pack of figures containing the illustrious BoShek as your prize would be destroyed. I've seen online petitions asking for Epic Duels to be returned to print, but the rationale is the same--if you can get 31 figures for $20, why would you go back to paying the same price for 7 random ones?

I think that the potential for repeat sales of packs would be considerable--after all, just imagine how many packs of a six-pack of Stormtroopers would fly from shelves every time they were stocked. Imagine wanting to play the Endor scenario and just buying a pack of Scout Troopers to make that a reality quickly and easily. Couple that with unique packs containing Obi-Wan, Chewie, and all the rest of your favorite characters...the mind boggles.



I think that Marvel Heroscape is going to probably crush and do away with the Heroclix brand for the same reasons--if you want Ultron, why buy random packs until you hit one when you can just go pick up the "Avengers Enemies" Heroscape pack from Toys R Us? I think Hasbro understands this and won't likely trample on their own product lines. This is probably sound business, but it doesn't stop me from hoping that if the SWM line finally goes down in flames, we'll see Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight draw his lightsaber as an orc riding a dinosaur bears down on him.