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Wait — that's not the plan, but that is the reality, with online retailer Cool Stuff Inc noting that it "will be receiving less than 10% of [its] total order" for starter sets and brick-and-mortar retailers being similarly shorted (as noted here and here and here).
How did such shortages happen when WizKids knew it had a devastatingly popular item in the offing? Several reasons, starting with the simplest one, namely that WizKids knew nothing of the kind. True, WizKids is releasing a game based on its popular Quarriors! game series, and this new item features Marvel superheroes — who are on a bit of hot streak these days thanks to various movies — so WizKids might have expected sales equal to Quarriors! multiplied by some X factor, but given the manufacturing lead time involved in creating custom dice, creating the packaging, shipping everything from China and all of the other steps involved in the process, WizKids placed its production order months ago and the excitement and fervor for the game has been building since then, with demand now far outstripping supply. (That said, WizKids announced in early April 2014 that it was restocking the game ahead of its release, with more starter sets being due in out May-June 2014.)
I managed a comic book store in the late 1980s, and we experienced this phenomenon all the time: A publisher announces a title or issue that you expect will be hot; distributors ask retailers for preorders 2-3 months ahead of when this title will be released; publishers set production quantities (with comic book production being far simpler than game production); news of this comic book event starts leaking into the public, and people who don't normally read that comic (or any comics) ask to reserve copies; retailers increase their orders with distributors; then, one week before its release, distributors let retailers know they're going to get x% of what they ordered due to high demand. Panic ensues. Eventually you get through the shortage thanks to additional printings, and when the next "hot" comic is solicited, you remember what happened previously, anticipate a shortage of x% and increase your order accordingly — then you're still shorted, so you increase your preorder on the next hot title by even more, and the cycle continues until eventually you're choking under dozens of pounds of Valiant comics that no one will buy because they weren't that good to begin with and everyone suddenly realized that all at the same time.
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Sample cards from late 2013; some details changed prior to publication
So what's Marvel Dice Masters: Avengers vs. X-Men about anyway? In this two-player game, each player is a mastermind who controls a team of Marvel characters, and you want to use them to inflict damage on the other guy. Do enough damage, and you win the game.
In somewhat more detail, each player starts with eight sidekick dice in a bag, a number of hero cards on their side of the table (each with 1-4 dice on them), and 3-4 shared action cards (each with three dice on them) in the center of the table. On a turn, you draw four dice from your bag, then roll them together with any dice prepped on the previous turn. You can use the energy you roll to recruit hero dice or action dice, placing all of the dice spent or purchased in your used pile; if you roll characters, you can use energy to field them, making them ready to attack or defend on the current turn or in the future; if you roll actions, you can use them now or save them for use before the next turn (while possibly also saving energy for other special actions). You can then attack with any character dice that you want; the opponent defends, if desired, by placing characters to block; then damage resolves, with unblocked characters hitting the opposing mastermind.
That description is stripped to the basics, so much so that you might be wondering what all the excitement is about. To begin with, each character card has a unique special ability, and each character (Captain America, Thor, Silver Surfer, Rogue, etc.) appears on 3-4 cards, with the specific abilities differing from card to card while all still being of the same type. As an example, here's the text of the four Iron Man cards:
Quote:
• Inventor - Each time Iron Man takes damage, reduce the damage he takes by 1. *Reduce the damage by 2 instead. Global: Pay [shield] to redirect 1 damage from you to one of your characters.
• Billionaire - Iron Man takes no damage from non-[shield] characters.
• Playboy - Each time Iron Man takes damage in the attack step, he deals 3 damage to one opposing character that is attacking or blocking.
• Philanthropist - Each time Iron Man takes damage, you gain 1 life. *Gain 2 life instead.
Really, WizKids? "Inventor" instead of "Genius"? (The * symbol appears on some character and action dice, and it modifies the normal abilities of that character or action. Global actions can be used by either player who can pay the cost. [Shield] refers to one of the five energy types in the game, and you need specific types of energy to use certain actions or recruit character dice; to recruit Iron Man, you need at least one [shield], while Thor and Human Torch require at least one [bolt], etc.)• Billionaire - Iron Man takes no damage from non-[shield] characters.
• Playboy - Each time Iron Man takes damage in the attack step, he deals 3 damage to one opposing character that is attacking or blocking.
• Philanthropist - Each time Iron Man takes damage, you gain 1 life. *Gain 2 life instead.
Character dice have different levels of characters on three sides while providing 1-2 energy on the other three sides, and some actions and abilities affect characters of particular levels. One of the Angel cards, for example, prevents Angel from being blocked by a character of a lower level. Once you add in character levels, unique abilities, combat tricks, the one reroll you're allowed each turn, the generic sidekicks that have a mere 1 attack and defense value, the notion that you can draft characters prior to play or each show up with prepared teams and action cards — well, then things get more complicated.
That complication shows in the rulebook, which appears overwhelming at first at 24 pages, but then you see that five pages show a detailed combat example, four discuss powers and abilities in exacting detail, three show another example of play, etc., and in the end the rules aren't that tough to stomach. (That said, the rules needed another pass by the editor as you run into phrases like "rules are on the other side of this sheet", which indicates that at one point the rules were going to be a giant folded sheet of paper. In a game with so much other stuff going on, you don't want anything to be confusing that doesn't have to be.)
WizKids keeps things simple for your first game, telling you to play with three specific action cards and teams of two specific character cards. (The starter set comes with 24 character cards [three each of eight characters], two dice for each character, ten action cards, twelve action dice [color coded to reminder cards you slide under the actions in play], and sixteen sidekick dice.) That approach makes sense because with all that's going on in the game, you don't players to feel overwhelmed by choices that they can't comprehend. That problem, however, is that the first game isn't that interesting to someone who's played a lot of games. It feels too simple — "Quarriors!-lite", as one of my opponents put it. If that's your only experience of the game, you're going to shrug and leave it at that.
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Shirt matches game opinion for non-comics fan Matt
But you have a bunch of other characters and dice in the starter set, so you might be inclined to try out some other combination of superhero teams. WizKids gives no guidance as to which characters you might want to add or swap out, so you'll probably read over a couple, add one to each side, then see how things go. You might have a blowout, you might have a close game — for gamers who want level playing fields and balanced options, such freedom is disorienting. Not only are you unsure of how to play the game, but you have no idea of how to preplay, of how to approach the battlefield with a competent team. I'm thrown back to 1994 and my 120-card Magic: The Gathering decks. Play all of the good stuff, right?
WizKids includes guidelines for how to draft teams (should only one person own cards) as well as how to construct basic and tournament teams, but they describe only how many dice and cards you're allowed, not which cards might be suitable. The publisher and designers could have greatly helped new players by including a few specific team/action card suggestions so that folks aren't floundering in the dark. If you take Thor, am I going to be okay with Storm? Or should I go for a beefy guy, too, with one of the Hulk cards? (Turns out that I was okay as that version of Storm allows you to reroll an opposing character whenever you field a Storm die, and while on the brink of death, I fielded two Storm to take out two Thor and rush in — thanks to Cap and an action die — for ten points of damage in a single turn. Boom!)
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Comics fan Dan has a better reaction and came dressed for the occasion
Co-designer Mike Elliott has written on BGG about MDM's collectible distribution model — with the starter set containing a fixed set of cards and dice, and booster packs containing two random cards (with cards coming in common, uncommon, rare and super-rare distributions) and two dice to match those cards — but he's focusing on the price angle of this decision. By making the game collectible, he argues that WizKids can sell the starters for $15 and boosters for $1 and everyone can buy into the game in the amount that feels right to them rather than having WizKids bring to market a single expensive boxed set. (The dice bags are tiny and made out of that weird untearable Tyvek material used in mailing envelopes, but otherwise the production quality is good, with the dice being clear and readable, aside from Thor's blue on red, which is too high contrast for my old eyes.)
Some folks hate collectible games because they want everything at once and don't want to chase down an elusive Higgs boson while buying extra copies of stuff they already own; others like the excitement of getting a surprise with each pack they open, and the $1 price point for boosters is an ideal hook for retailers and for parents who will have their coat sleeves tugged upon by eager young gamers. (My brother is two years younger than me, and as kids we would have eaten this game up, playing over and over and over again with me, given my proclivities at the time, probably tracking every single team combination that we used in order to try them all.)
My take on the collectible distribution model is that it makes perfect sense for this game because in some ways you really don't want everything at once — or rather, you don't need everything at once, even if you do want it. I've played the game six times now with review material sent by WizKids, and I'll sheepishly confess that the publisher sent me one of each card and four of each dice. My first four games consisted of two of the suggested starting set-up, and two with one additional character and a new mix of action cards. For game five with Dan, we thought we'd dip into characters not included in the starter set, and we both found it overwhelming. We're going to read 98 cards for the thirty new characters to figure out which ones we want to use? How long do we have?!
Instead we picked two rare, two uncommon and two common characters at random, then drafted them. In our first game, I think Dan had just recruited a Loki (with some Green Goblin already in his die mix), when I rolled a Hawkeye and three sidekicks, put them all in the field, killed his solitary blocking sidekick with Hawkeye's special ability (When fielded, Hawkeye deals his attack value in damage to a target opposing character), then hit Dan for eight to the head. The game ended shortly afterward.
In our rematch with the same characters, I managed to recruit Magneto once but didn't get him into play in the single roll that I made with him before pinging Dan for the final point of damage. Dan didn't pick up a Loki or Cyclops, and my Phoenix just looked all smoldery without actually smoldering anything. Lesson learned: Don't make up teams with only high-cost characters or else you'll be rolling actions that you can't use because you have nothing but dinky sidekicks in play. Why didn't you tell us that ahead of time, WizKids? (Or maybe we're playing wrong. We picked up on how you sometimes want to get sidekicks KOed on purpose because then you'll be able to roll them on your subsequent turn in addition to your four new dice, but we almost never mustered the energy for the larger characters, leaving them looking like chumps on the sideline.)
By portioning out the cards like Noah, WizKids drips complexity into the game instead of hitting you with it all at once. That's small comfort for gamers who want to compose tournament teams of eight character cards and twenty dice today — an idea I can't even fathom given that the interaction of three vs. three characters was already causing a few in-game pauses — but for young Eric and his counterparts that idea makes perfect sense. The starter set lets you fool around with teams of up to four characters each, albeit with only two dice per character, and that number of permutations (given the three cards for each character) is already huge. By adding two or four new cards to the game, you've now expanded that number of possibilities by a huge degree, so if you're interested in playing the game and seeing how all those combinations pan out, then boosters make perfect sense. For those who want to collect everything, though, you've got a tough job ahead of you.
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