The Great Redialing Project

I've spent a great deal of time the last couple of years redialing over a thousand HeroClix, with more to come as time permits. There are a number of threads on HC Realms detailing the individual clix, as well as a brief paragraph stating the intention and purpose of the redials, but I've never really delved into the specific whys of this little project of mine. In this post I will attempt to shed a bit of light on the inner workings of The Great Redialing Project.

I was there at the very beginning, eagerly awaiting the clerk at the local gaming shop to unpack the latest and greatest game to ever hit the shelves, HeroClix. A collectible miniatures game featuring my favorite (and lets face it, some not so favorite) comic book characters in a battle to the finish! What could be better? The game was an instant success in my area, with case after case flying off the shelves. Soon everyone had at least a handful of clix, and of course, I had to have them all. This "Golden Age" lasted for several years, with each successive set bringing more and more beloved comic book characters to the table.

I didn't get a lot of chances to play, unfortunately. My schedule was inconsistent and almost always prevented me from participating in the local tournaments. Though often disappointed by this, my enthusiasm for the game was undiminished, even if I only played sparingly. The years passed and my collection grew steadily, one box became two, two became four, then four became too many to conveniently transport anywhere. No matter, this had happened with other games and I began to take along those clix I thought I might want to play with when I headed out, things were good and I was happy.

Of course there were problems with the game, flying characters were simply better than everyone else, not having them was a crippling handicap because they effectively gave everyone Charge and Running Shot. Soaring was pointless and the flying bases were annoying, especially when you had characters whose pegs didn't quite fit into the stand. Other rules issues cropped up and were dealt with, the rule of three was adopted, characters were no longer allowed to take actions after being carried, and soaring went away entirely. In all the game worked and behaved like you would expect from an experiment that had become fare more successful than anyone had anticipated.

Much like Magic the Gathering, Heroclix underwent some fundamental changes over the years, but in opposite directions. The problem with early Magic cards is that they were too powerful relative to their cost in the game, hence the moniker the "Power Nine". Subsequent editions of Magic eliminated these cards and sought to bring balance to the game, but the fact will always remain that many of the first cards ever produced were also among the best. For Heroclix, the exact opposite is true. Rules changes and a shift in design philosophy has made the vast majority of the original Heroclix sets completely unplayable against any modern clix.

I, with my limited ability to play, never really had a chance to fully appreciate this as it was happening. Organized play in my area began to die off somewhere around the release of Armor Wars, circa 2005, by the release of Crisis in 2008, I was one of a bare handful of people still buying clix in any quantity, and nobody was playing. Secret Invasion was the first set I had to special order, since the local stores had just stopped carrying Heroclix altogether. At his point I had become a collector, and the game itself became secondary.

Eventually my collection became so massive that it seemed to be sheer folly to not do something with it, so I decided I should actively coerce my friends to play with me. In order to do so I had to make choosing a team from thousands of clix quick and easy, so I pre-made teams, lots of them. Being something of a comic book fanatic, I meticulously tried to recreate as many moments in comic book history as I could while still remaining within the rules of the game. Theme teams were a relatively new thing and I wholeheartedly embraced the concept. Every team would be a theme if I could make it one. This required hours of tedious point calculations, keyword cross-referencing, and brainstorming.

After creating hundreds of teams and sealing them in Ziplock bags, I was finally ready to play. I dragged a few friends over and played a few games with my painstakingly assembled forces......and found out just how unbelievably useless so many of my HeroClix were.

This presented me with a rather serious problem. I had, literally, thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours invested in useless pieces of plastic for a game I barely played. Now, a sane person might just throw up their hands and walk away from the whole sordid mess. Clearly, I did no such thing. Instead, I embarked on a years-long crusade to transform those useless bits of plastic into usable game pieces.

To do so I required three things: a way to accurately an consistently calculate the point cost of the dials, a means to create physical replacement dials, and time. Fortunately for me there are others out there who are at least partially unhinged and had laid the groundwork for me.  Retardog from HC realms had done a great deal of work in extrapolating the point formula used to create the HeroClix dials. This formula was then further worked on by Manchine, who created an easy-to-use online point
generator that I stumbled across began using with glee. Alas, the site was not permanent and I had to find other means to complete my project, and that is when I discovered Xploidac's Dial Generator for Microsoft XL. As a spreadsheet, it was more difficult to use than the online generator, but it had the very desirable trait of existing independently on my hard drive after I downloaded it. With a generator in hand I now needed a way to create all the dials so I could print them.

I initially found the website, aduckwhat.com, that had a working dial generation tool that would create fully printable dials. While the dials did print, their quality was vastly inferior to that of the real dials and were immediately identifiable as redials. With no better option, I completely redialed Infinity Challenge, Clobberin' Time, and Critical Mass before I came up with a better solution. While looking for a way to make better dials, I came across a forum that mentioned the program Adobe Illustrator as a useful tool for making dials. A very helpful soul (whose name I will find and mention here) had already gone through the trouble of making a dial template. I downloaded the trial version and began churning out dials, and they were fantastic! The Illustrator dials were functionally indistinguishable from the original dials and I was in business!

As far as time goes, I'm still looking for more of that. If you find any please send some my way.

Making new dials for me is all fine and dandy, but I thought it was such a great idea of mine that I had to share it, the end result is this blog and the accompanying dials. Eventually, I hope to have every set completely (or nearly so) redialed all the way up to Avengers. There are some select few from beyond that that I have also redialed because they were so terrible (Avengers Taskmaster, I'm looking at you). I'll do the best I can to bring as many dials up to date as fast as I can. Thanks for reading this, whomever you may be. :)

Oh, and I suppose I should mention that I am only changing the dial itself, that little piece of paper sandwiched between two pieces of plastic with the colored boxes and numbers on it. The top of the dial, which includes the range, point value, movement type, targets, damage type, and team abilities is completely unchanged. My dials are meant to simply replace the existing ones with a minimum of hassle and bookkeeping. Just take out the old dial and slip in the new one, no other steps required.