The Elephant In The Room

Hail and Greetings!


Managed a four-player battle of Mage Knight tonight.  I finally had to chalk up a loss (4-1 if anyone cares), mostly due to uncovering a fellow veteran that kept most of his collection intact and therefore having a much bigger pool with superior figures overall.  I managed to make my army count in the end, though.


The battle amounted to the fellow veteran and I choosing a new player to side with and making a scrap of it.  Both of the newbies acquitted themselves well, though there were some missteps and hiccups along the way.  We all had a good time, and it looks like everybody should have a burgeoning collection of their own soon.


Which brings us to the main point for this point.  The other veteran happens to have a very large accumulation of figures, including many from the oft-aligned Mage Knight 2.0 edition of the game.  As can be expected, while the figures themselves got a lot of attention, the very different dials and stats created a fair bit of confusion.  We managed to not bring any into play, but soon that will have to change a bit.


So I need to go ahead and say it straight out:  Mage Knight 2.0 is not a bad edition, nor is it a bad game.  A lot of people knocked it, and there are some very on-point criticisms to be leveled at it, but it is still very much Mage Knight, and still pretty fun to play.  My personal beefs are that it added a lot of layers of complexity to what was supposed to be a fundamentally simple system, presenting a deeper learning curve to what was supposed to be a beginner-friendly game, plus some minor gripes. 


But what WizKids did with it...that was horrible.  The biggest negative is that every figure from the previous editions was null and void as far the rules were concerned.  No 'casual' rulefix was presented, no compromise offered until the very last major expansion (too little, too late).  If you wanted to play a tournament-legal army, you needed to buy the new figures, period.  This would have bad enough, if everybody just had a starter and a few boosters of stuff, making it something like a CCG block format with figures instead of cards.  It would have been a bit painful, especially for the players willing to gather big collections of the stuff (like me).  But Mage Knight has lots of large-scale 'Conquest' figures, meant for big games.  Dragons, artillery pieces, giants, chariots, tanks...they were big, they were fun to play, and they commanded hefty sums.  They were gone, too.


Maybe the money got to their heads, maybe it was what being bought out by a baseball card company does, maybe they really wanted to try a block format but screwed it up, maybe Mage Knight was ultimately an experiment that nobody thought would work, but it succeeded immensely, so they didn't know what to do after a while.  Ultimately, it doesn't matter.


But things...things are different now.  The fanbase is still there, the demand is still there (do some Google-fu if you don't believe me), and the game still have plenty of appeal to the gaming crowd.  So let's break out the minis, roll some dice, and start conquering the tables again.  All Your Clicky Base Are Belong To Us!