Wargaming, especially miniatures wargaming, maintains a massive presence in the tabletop gaming industry. Many of the genre’s heavyweights include unpainted, user-assembled miniatures, and rulesets meant to imitate real life rules of engagement and war, allowing players to simulate real or close-to-real battles. But the more lifelike the combat, the more complex it is, necessitating complex rulebooks and lists of unit statistics, which can bog down the speed of the game and complicate play.
Enter WizKids’ Clix system, designed in the early 2000s. Pre-painted miniatures stand on top of bases, similar to other miniatures games, but with an added feature: the base can be twisted like a dial, with a small window revealing a unit’s current statistics and power values. The Clix system introduced a much simpler way to track the evolution of play, with a unit’s statistics and powers changing as the game continues. Units could sustain damage that weakened them, or even empowered them, and all without a pen and paper or stacks of rulebooks.
WizKids first used this system for its game Mage Knight, and would also make use of it in MechWarrior: Dark Age and similar games. But the game that truly put WizKids on the gaming industry map was its 2002 release HeroClix, which applied the Clix system to licenses for Marvel Comics superheroes. As the game progressed, HeroClix introduced sets of DC Comics characters, and even additional heroes from Image Comics and Dark Horse Comics.
In 2003, though, The Topps Company bought WizKids, and five years later, Topps shuttered the HeroClix line to focus on other products. For half a year HeroClix was inactive. Early in 2009 several companies were in talks to buy the rights to the line, including a new company called Piñata Games that was specifically formed by fans and former WizKids employees to buy the game’s rights, but these talks fell through. In 2009 National Entertainment Collectibles Association (NECA) released a promotional mini that was never released by WizKids: a large Thor’s Mighty Chariot piece. The mini launched in July 2009 at Comic-Con International: San Diego, and in doing so, NECA tipped its hand. In September NECA announced it had bought the rights to HeroClix, and to this day the company markets and produces the game, and provides event and tournament support, as WizKids did before its sale.
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