Tired of the same old thing every week with Clix? Want to try something new and different? Game Type is a series that talks about unique game formats to mix up your clix night or LGS!

Welcome to Game Type, a brand new article series here on Clix Fix! I figured it would be really cool to talk about various game formats that I’ve either played at my local LGS, developed myself, or found on the interwebz. For the initial article in this series, I’m going to take a look at a really cool game format that I read about on reddit quite some time ago. It was submitted by W1nddragon and you can find the original post here.

I’ve been a fan of Dungeons and Dragons for quite some time, but I didn’t seriously get into it until Critical Role started on Geek & Sundry’s Twitch channel. If you aren’t familiar with Critical Role, do yourself a favor and look it up. It’s a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that’s been running for about 4 years (only 2 of which have been filmed) all played by professional voice actors. It’s top-notch and the people on the show are legitimately some of my favorite people on the planet. Once I started watching Critical Role, I took the plunge into DM’ing my first campaign with a homebrew story, and it’s still going to this day roughly 1.5 years in!

Okay, so what the hell does this have to do with Heroclix? Well, D&D has a class system much like Keywords in Heroclix. Different classes correspond to different types of combat or fighting style, so it seems this is a natural transition. Plus, Heroclix games are much shorter than D&D campaigns. Keywords are a natural fit for these classes and can be used to build a ‘party’ much like you would a regular clix force. Let’s take a look at the game format originally posted, and then I want to add a variation.

Dungeons and Superheroes Game Type

Points: 400

Age: Modern (or Golden, whichever you prefer)

Tactics: ATA’s are legal, nothing else

Other Rules: 4 figure minimum. Must play in interior map. Each figure must be from one of the following classes, and you can’t have more than one of each class.

Barbarian: Figures must have Warrior or Brute Keyword and have 0 range.

Fighter: Figures must have Warrior, Brute, or Soldier Keyword and have 6 or less range.

Rogue: Figures must have the Assassin or Spy Keyword

Sorcerer: Figures must have the Mystical keyword and a range of 6 or more (Felix Fuast is banned)

Druid: Figures must have the Animal keyword

Monk: Figures must have the Martial Artist keyword and have 0 range

Ranger: Figures must have Sharpshooter symbol or its sculpt must contain a Bow.

Cleric: Figures’ first click must have Support or Defend

I swapped out the original Warrior for the Fighter, Archer for the Ranger, added Barbarian, and removed Alchemist as there isn’t one in D&D 5th Edition. Warlock was dropped as it’s very similar to Sorcerer, as is Wizard.

As you can see from the build, it really requires you to think about what kind of force you want. Since your opponent has to build along the same rules as you and they’re limited to 4 distinct classes (at least), you have to plan for virtually everything. Do you want two melee attackers in the form of Barbarian and Fighter along with a Cleric to keep them alive and a Sorcerer to dish damage from afar, or do you want a stealthy Rogue and Ranger to cause havoc while your Monk keeps people locked down? The possibilities are endless and what I really like about this game type is that you don’t have to build competitively or to win. You can totally build for fun and feel good about it since it’s a complete themed format.

If you really wanted to encourage people to play for fun, award bonuses for matching characters to their rolls. Maybe if your character resembles the idea of their class they get a combat benefit like +1 to a stat of your choice for the game. It’s a simple boost but doesn’t overpower the format. For example, Iron Fist would be a perfect monk, so you could say he gets a ‘theme bonus’ for making the character fit his class. Likewise, any Hawkeye/Green Arrow would be prime candidates for Rangers.

So what would a build look like for this game type? I’m glad you asked.

400 Point Dungeons and Superheroes Build

FIGHTER: AOU 021 Black Knight | 115 points

AOU 021 Black Knight | SORCERER: WKM-027 Loki | 115 Points

WKM-027 Loki | MONK: AOU 004 Iron Fist | 100 Points

AOU 004 Iron Fist | CLERIC: CWSOP 108 Spider-Man | 70 Points

CWSOP 108 Spider-Man | Build Total: 400 Points

All of these characters (okay, maybe not Spider-Man) really thematically fit their roles. Black Knight has armor and a sword, Loki plays the trickster mage (and anyone who has played D&D knows that occasionally a magic-user does need a weapon), as I stated above Iron Fist is pretty much the perfect monk with light clothing and kung-fu stance, and Spider-Man… well he defends everyone! The team has prob control and some extra heavy damage without being too cheesy. I’m sure there’s a much better build out there, but remember that this game type is about having fun and doing something different. An obvious choice for Rogue would be Nick Fury, but where’s the fun in that?

I mentioned at the start of the article that I wanted to add a variation; D&D is known for being a game that you play with your friends rather than playing against them, so I think this game type needs a format to acknowledge this through a co-op mode.

What if you teamed up with your friend and you each brought 2 different teams, but the second team had to play by different rules? This would constitute a party of at least 8 members rolling in against the hordes of evil. You would each build a team of hero adventurers and a team of villains looking to conquer. Here’s my idea for the villain build:

Dungeons and Superheroes Game Type – Villain Build Points: 400 Age: Modern (or Golden, whichever you prefer) Tactics: ATA’s are legal, nothing else Other Rules: One figure must cost at least 200 points, can use Mastermind, and its’ actions don’t count against your action total. Each figure other figure on the force must cost no more than 50 points. Power Cosmic and Quintessence team abilities are highly suggested.

This setup gives the villain team a much different feeling than the adventurers and really creates an interesting dynamic. In this game type play revolves clockwise like it normally would, and you both sit on opposite sides of the board, much like a typical game of clix. Wait a minute, then how do the villains take their turns? This is where it gets rather interesting. You don’t want to fight your own pieces because you know what they do and what they’re capable of. Instead, I’ll use an example round of play to describe how the game would work.

Player 1 takes their turn with their heroes. When their turn finishes, player 2 takes their turn with player 1’s villain force. Once they finish their turn, player 1 takes their turn with player 2’s villain force followed by player 2 taking their turn with their own hero force.

It might sound rather complicated on paper (or rather on screen), but this ensures that there is no bias here. Secretly, you probably want to defeat the other player with their own villains while conquering your own, so it creates this really interesting dynamic where you have to keep track of multiple forces and what decisions each player will make with the villain teams. The object of the game would be to have your heroes still standing, or at least earn more points than your own villain team earns (that means your teammate is gunning to take down your pieces to ensure his own heroes don’t die. Does that make sense?). Is this perfect? Probably not. I’m honestly thinking about how this works as I’m writing, so there could be some errors or issues here, but I think it’s a really neat idea!

If this sounds a little too weird, you could always adapt the format to either a 1v1 game with one player running a group of adventurers and the other playing a villain team. Or you could do a 4-player game where two people are heroes and 2 are villains and the force with the most amount of points wins. Of course, if the main villains die (the pieces of 150 points or more), then theoretically that team should be eliminated since their lackeys are now without a leader, but that’s for you to decide.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you like the idea? Are you one of the folks that saw this build last year and tried it out? If so, how did it go? I’d really like to give this a go and even keep track of certain hero teams, locking their rosters in place to develop a sort of score board and see how long and how many ‘bosses’ it takes for them to end up losing. Could be a lot of fun.

I hope you liked this new article series on Clix Fix. I’m striving to keep things fresh and interesting for you folks. If you have any ideas or other game types that you feel like sharing, please sound off below! Thanks and I’ll see you next week!

Oh, one last thing. In case you didn’t see it, I made the quite the announcement yesterday. 🙂