Well, I'm excited, even if no one else is.
For those who don't know, Wizkids' major properties at this point are Heroclix and Dicemasters, but they also produce unpainted miniatures for D&D.
Wizkids started out producing a game called "Mage Knight", which involved fantasy characters warring with each other, but used rotating dials on the characters' bases to track changes in the character's powers and abilities. Mage Knight (I'm told) was a great game, and its basic clicking-dial mechanic spawned a number of other games in house - Mech Warrior, Crimson Skies, Heroclix, Horrorclix, and Actionclix. Hasbro even tried to cash in on Wizkids success a bit with their "Attacktix" miniatures line.
Topps shutdown Wizkids for a while to focus on their sports IPs, not seeing any future in comic book superheroes (oops!) and eventually sold Wizkids and some of its product lines to NECA. Over the years, Wizkids has experimented with lots of variations on the same basic mechanics - Actionclix, Horrorclix, and Heroclix were all extremely similar, to the point that they even released a BPRD Horrorclix set that could be played with Heroclix. Heroclix outlasted the others, and many of the ideas and properties explored in the dead-end product lines have ultimately reappeared in Heroclix. For example, the "Undead" set released a couple of years back was basically a revival of Horrorclix, but cleanly integrated with the contemporary Heroclix rules, and Star Trek: Tactics uses Heroclix rules, simply replacing the word "character" with the word "Ship." A few years back, Wizkids released a game model called DiceMasters, which is extremely popular, much cheaper than Heroclix, but looks boring AF to me so I know nothing about it.
Anyway, the way I see it, there are four general ways Wizkids might use the Transformers license.
(1) Collectible Miniatures without any Gaming Element - Back when Wizkids picked up the license to make Pacific Rim Heroclix, they also picked up the license for the Toho Kaiju (e.g., Godzilla). Everyone expected them to make Godzilla Heroclix to play alongside the Pacific Rim pieces, but for some reason that didn't happen - they made the miniatures, but didn't put them on playable bases. Needless to say, that was roundly considered a disappointment, so I don't expect them to revisit the miniatures-for-the-sake-of-miniatures approach.
(2) Dicemasters - The announcement specifically mentions collectible miniatures, so I wouldn't expect to see Transformers Dicemasters, especially since I think that such a game would be competing very much with the current Transformers TCG (since it's basically a TCG with dice).
(3) Transformers D20 - Hasbro's been hitting the market hard with D&D materials, and as part of their existing partnership with Wizkids, WK has been producing unpainted miniatures for use with Hasbro's D&D products. I could easily imagine this 'enhanced licensing deal' being the prelude to announcement of a full Transformers D20 RPG, published by Hasbro, supported by Wizkids miniatures line, and based heavily in IDW's new comic book universe.
(4) Transformers Heroclix - This is solidly the most likely option, as Heroclix remains WK's most well known brand, and WK has pretty much stopped making shoot-offs like Horroclix and Actionclix. WK has gone hard into acquiring licenses and loosely balancing the different licenses against each other to encourage play across property lines. Heroclix has so far included:
- Marvel Superheroes
- DC Superheroes
- A number of Independent comic book properties like Top Cow
- Halo
- Gears of War
- Assassin's Creed
- Street Fighter
- Yu-Gi-Oh
- Iron Maiden (miniatures based on the band's album covers - it was pretty weird)
- Star Trek
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
- Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit
- Probably a lot more that I'm not remembering.
Over the course of those licenses, they've come up with a lot of rule mechanics that suit Transformers very well.
All Heroclix were originally one size, but they now have rules governing Tiny, Standard, Giant, and Colossal characters. (Note: Pacific Rim pieces were "Colossal" size for gameplay purposes, but they were printed on standard 1 x 1 bases, so I don't expect Transformers Heroclix to be over-sized.) Size determines who can see who at what elevations, how far a character reaches, and whether the character can carry other characters.
Along with different sizes came the inclusion of vehicles and bases with more than one character on them (duo-bases and team bases). The super rare Warlock in the
Wolverine and the X-Men set actually had a special power that allowed him to transform into a vehicle.
And, oh, yeah, don't forget that giant robot that split apart into six smaller robots:
"Promotion", "Morph", "Shifting Focus", and "Switchclix" mechanics allow characters to be swapped out of the game with different versions of the same character when different conditions are met. This started with an "Alter-Ego" gimmick that allowed Peter Parker to become Spider-Man, etc., was further explored in Actionclix (your characters could accumulate points and then 'upgrade' to represent picking up different weapons), and reappeared in Heroclix with a version of the Punisher that switched between different weapons. It has now become an extremely common and varied mechanic; it is one way WKs sometimes balances characters that have 'too much going on' to represent well in a single piece, and it's been very good for 'mass shifting' characters like (Gi)Ant-Man. I could imagine this being the way Wizkids might represent the central gimmick of Transformers - a shifting focus style power that lets you swap robot Blitzwing for Jet or tank Blitzwing. Honestly, I hope they don't do that because I don't want to have to collect three miniatures to have one good Blitzwing.
Alternatively, the've also experimented with 'two-sided' dials. The standard size Heroclix dial has 12 slots on it (numbered 1-12), so some characters (e.g., Two-Face, Etrigan) have been represented with dials that are half that long but doubled (i.e., numbered 1-6, twice). I like that mechanic better than shifting focus, but it only works for characters with 5 clicks of health or left.
Finally, we've had a lot of characters now that can 'deploy' weaker, smaller characters to help them (e.g., Squirrel Girl with Monkey Joe or Klarion with Teekl), and that screams 'Targetmasters' to me.
I think the biggest tip off to what's coming though has been the shift in the point balance. Generally speaking, more powerful characters cost more points in your team build than less powerful characters, making team building a balancing act weighing quantity versus quality. That said, most characters can be obtained in different point values - Superman, for example, goes as high as 350pts, and at least as low as 90pts. That sometimes leads to ridiculous moments like a 130pt Ezio from Assassin's Creed severely wounding a 100pt Thor, but ridiculousness is half the fun.
Anyway, lately the point scale has shifted downward. Some of this is due to shortening characters' dials to make the game play faster, and some of it is due to power inflation (a 200pt character from 15 years ago has no real chance against a 100pt character from now). Ostensibly, this is because WK wants to promote 300-400pts as the build for a standard game, but it may also be that WK is trying to give themselves a little space for a property like Transformers, where even lightweight or weak characters like the Cassettes would give the average Avenger trouble. With Avengers: Infinity War, they also tried a gimmick where they made boosters about half again as expensive as they had been, but included a colossal character or vehicle in *every* booster. I could imagine Wizkids coming back around to that same mechanic for Transformers, to account for the wide size differences between characters.
Last thing, I'm going to throw this out there as a reminder that this happened:
Twice:
Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2019 9:48 pm