Rather than derail a thread elsewhere, I'll put my gripes here.

This is your wall of text imminent warning

Now, I've played since the beginning, no lapses, no time out. I love the game of Heroclix.

This isn't intended to be a 'sky is falling' thread, this comes up all the time and the game has plenty of signs that it's not going anywhere.

Over here in Europe, it has been hard to get this game for many years. The sheer lack of it anywhere means our once plentiful lakes of players have heavily decreased into small puddles.

We take this as the norm and have done for many years but....

The last set distributed for UK (probably Europe) was WoV, the 2023 Halloween set landed in mid-January 2024.... We didn't get the Harley/Ivy Valentine set or anything thereafter. It's pretty much November.

We were discussing our UK Nationals but we've completely lost heart.
Despite some lovely offers from a few (US) players.
When you're being told by WK "there's an aggressive rotation this time", and you wonder well, that can't be allowed to affect us because we haven't had sets all year and it trims you to NOT & WoV really.

A few of us have queried with WK & Asmodee (UK distributor) & WK advise they've done their bit which getting the game out, Asmodee said some words but nothing of any substance.
The issue is mainly with distributor BUT WK is aware, so why can't they find another?

I know of another player who is very much involved in Clix and has been since the start but even they have serious thoughts of hanging it up because it's simply getting ridiculous now.

I can't get excited by the Black Panther set. It's a good set but it's pointless to get excited about something I'll never get.

So this thread comes from a standpoint of, if other players as deeply into Clix as me are considering calling it; how long do I have? Do I wait til I'm the last player and can only sit and play with myself?

If you've read this far, that last comment was intentionally loaded with all the smutty humour of a Carry On film . Hope you had a giggle & thanks for reading.

Whew, rant over.

I mean, I have access to product fairly cheap here in the US. Do you not purchase from online retailers? Would you purchase from a seller and pay for shipping?

If I had to guess, they probably can’t find a new distributor because of contractual obligations.

The game is not doing well in many areas.

Weekly play has stagnated because the last two monthly op kits have never released nor have a solid release date.

Premium events like pre-releases and release events are being cancelled and delayed multiple times.

Access to standalone products like iconics is flukey at best with some being delayed to 2025 and many with no firm release date.

None of which are outright killing the game, but compared to all the other organized games, this game is having a lot of trouble just building a foundation to even start to build momentum again.

And players have plenty of other games that they can jump to that have firm dated pre-release and release events and reliable access to new products when they are promised to release.

Like I said in the other thread, the game can't survive another year like the last six months.

The evidence I've seen locally is that the game is on life-support and has been for awhile now.

I've tried to get the game going at a few different local stores but the interest from the players and especially the stores themselves wasn't there. I think part of the problem there is the discretionary funds player's have to play games. They'd rather spend their money on the more popular games that have much larger player bases.

Because of that (lack of store interest), distributors might see the product as a risk not worth taking, especially, as Perplexinator pointed out, there are so many other games players have access to that are managed better and more popular.

Availability

We have been lucky enough to get several cases of each set as it released (SE Massachusetts), but the last time the store tried to order some bricks to put out for individual sale, they could not get recent stuff. They had to buy:

Avengers Forever
Wheels of Vengeance
War of the Realms
Spiderman Beyond Amazing

Each week the players, including myself, often buy a booster or 2 and at this point, I think only the War of the Realms set had any left.

They are currently trying to get us more DPX and MoT.

State of the game

We have about 6 semi regulars, causing us to often have 3 players for our weekly events.

We have run several store wide events of many different games where I have spent the day offering demonstrations of how to play HeroClix while giving out free pieces. None of these have added new players.

This where I'm at in SE Missouri as well. Granted, our venue is hosting state champs next month. But locally we have about 3 reliable weekly players, another 2 players (including me) who haven't been regular due to work or other things, & another 3-4 who are more sporadic on showing up. Product showing up here is fine, I think it's the price that is freezing out new players. For the price of one clix booster you can get 3 packs of MTG or Lorcana or even the new Star Wars TCG.

When I started playing the game we had 4 venues that held regular events pretty much weekly. Now it's down to one very sporadically and another in a nearby state that is pretty regular but only gets about 3 people for regular non-event games.

But the game really seems to be much more popular based on how it sells and how many new properties they have.

Also Silver Age has been a huge deal for keeping your figures valuable after modern rotation.

And then Legacy cards have given life back to great sculpts that no one ever plays anymore because not a lot of venues want to deal with Golden Age or the figures weren't worth playing.

Maybe it's the non-at-home casual scene that's kinda died down? And this forum as well? I mean look at the banner... JK

So much selling, trading, team building, etc has been on Facebook and discord. HCUnits is a fantastic new resource that everyone loves and it's even the official event tracker for States/Provinces.

There are also a ton of podcasts that put out episodes almost weekly. And unboxing videos that get 1k-7k views online.

This game ain't dying yet. It feels like it's growing.

I think it's great that a third party has created a site that arguably provides a better tool for players, but it's pretty telling when event organizers stop using official channels to promote and share their events because that site is often buggy or unusuable in areas.

People joke about HCRealms banner being old but I feel like this place gets more updates and fixes than the WIN. The WIN may be listed on every product but it lacks many tools event organizers need to schedule, promote and run their events.

I worry that if more and more event organizers deviate from using the WIN, that makes it even harder for new or returning players to find events, because we may know of HCUnits but the majority of casual public does not. Nor is it printed on every product.

Perhaps, much like how they let ROC handle Silver events, they should just conceed event organization and let HCUnits take it over officially.

The HeroClix game has had challenges, going back to the start of the CURSR era. There is a sliding scale of "how much trouble is the game in?" but here are the challenges I see:

1) The game has to be fun to play.

2) The game has to be profitable to sell.

3) The game has to be affordable to players.

The issue has been that "fun" has been mostly relegated to figures that make "profit" possible. It simply isn't as much fun to play relatively underpowered/overcosted "common" figures. It's not really affordable to "chase" after figures that appear at (or below) 1-per-sealed case. The secondary market shouldn't be the final arbiter on whether a game is fun or affordable.

In the old days, we used to say the choice was between "Non-Blind/Affordable/Good Sculpts; pick any two".

Let me tell you, though. I run a game store and my store runs or has run MTG, Yugioh, Pokemon, Lorcana, HeroClix, One Piece, and a cast of other games that aren't even around anymore. The WIN, despite it's many flaws, is still much better than a lot of other tournament software provided by these other companies. Melee is what DISNEY uses for it's Lorcana game. It's not even THEIR software...it's a third party site...and it's HORRENDOUS. Pokemon has a multi-billion dollar franchise...literally the best selling franchise of all time...and it's tournament software looks and operates like an a piece of stone aged software from the extremely early days of computers/internet.

I'd rather spend my money on groceries. Seriously, the price per booster is crazy for some plastic figures and let's be honest, a lot of the inflationary things (gas, etc) have come down, but not the prices. Then after you buy, unless it's the meta pieces or chases, the rest of the pieces become worthless.

I have only bought a few boosters here and there and that's just to help my local store out as they've had a few bad luck things happen in the past few years. Otherwise, I don't play the game and I'm slowly selling my collection off as legacy cards are announced, etc.

That and the rules, smaller maps, meh, just not the game I remember.

The boosters are expensive and balance-wise chances are you didn't pull the super rare, prime, or chase so you got nothing playable.

I agree, next set will be worst because each brick will contain 2 more boosters, so probably nothing special.
if someone spends 200$ or more is correct he gets similar value of single pieces, instead after opening a brick, 90% of each isn't strong and if a new player spends all this money for nothing (especially if he doesn't find a chase) he doesn't continue to buy. is no so hard to guarantee a chase each brick, maybe 2 would be better.

I posted my replies from Wizkids and Asmodee about UK distribution in another post. Basically Wizkids say it's not them, Asmodee don't care. UK, and probably Europe, have no new product. It sucks, and quite frankly it is up to Wizkids to sort distribution.

I have now cancelled my pre-orders at my store. I may buy direct, but buying from the US is expensive due to shipping and Duty and handling costs.