Baseball game bats for home fun

By Stuart Eskenazi
Seattle Times staff reporter

JAMES BRANAMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES 11-year-old Allan Wilkerson laughs over an out as he plays SportsClix, a new tabletop baseball board game.

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Wearing shorts bearing the Chicago White Sox logo, the other day Ellis coaxed big hit after big hit out of little Randy Winn.

Little, because the Seattle Mariners outfielder only is 1½ inches high.

Between glances at the store TV, showing the much taller Mariners in action, Ellis and five other boys played a new tabletop baseball game featuring miniature figurines sculpted to resemble today's major leaguers. A player's performance reflects his actual statistics from last season — but Winn's hot spell also has a lot to do with Ellis' fortunate rolls of the dice.

If only Mariners manager Bob Melvin had it so good.

	JAMES BRANAMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Kids have fun playing SportsClix, a baseball board game that features miniature collectibles of major leaguers. It was developed by a Bellevue company that was sold to Topps last year for $29.5 million.

Called MLB SportsClix, the game is a creation of WizKids, a Bellevue company purchased last year by veteran baseball-card manufacturer Topps. Known more for futuristic warrior and comic-book-hero games, WizKids launched SportsClix earlier this year as its first foray into sports.

For all of its modern-day intricacies, the game has a retro vibe, which gives rise to the question: Will kids accustomed to fantasy reality games and sophisticated video games be bored by a sports board game?

"We think the figurines bring the game alive and give it personality," said Bob Porter, SportsClix brand manager.

These days, sports video games are so realistic they are hard to distinguish from ESPN telecasts. But back when Pong was as high-tech as it got, boys pretended to manage their own sports teams with Strat-O-Matic, a line of board games played with dice and cards designed to simulate the actual performance of professional athletes. Those who preferred their games more three-dimensional played Electric Football, in which plastic miniatures moved up and down (but mostly sideways) on a vibrating gridiron of painted metal.

SportsClix is a much-advanced cross of those two games, with a collectibility aspect tossed in.

The game employs four levels of rules, the most advanced of which takes into account every nuance of the game and each player's strengths and weaknesses, no matter how subtle. For example, the outstanding leadership qualities of New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter increases his value to his team. A player's defensive range and throwing ability, and his speed on the base paths, are factored in, as are a pitcher's velocity and endurance.

On a plastic game mat that looks like a ballpark, managers set their defense to match the directional hitting tendencies of the player batting. During the course of a game, a player can turn hot or cold by "clicking" a performance dial at the base of the figurine.

"It's complicated the first time you play but after you get used to it, like on your third try, it's pretty fun," said Allan Wilkerson, 11, of Bellevue, one of the boys playing a SportsClix tournament at DJ's Sportscards in Renton.

WizKids was founded in 2000 by Jordan Weisman, who at the time was creative director of Microsoft's games group. The company fashioned a new gaming genre that uses collectible miniatures mounted on encoded dials that click — hence the Clix brand name. WizKids' biggest sellers are Mage Knight, MechWarrior and HeroClix.

Topps, a New York-based company that makes Bazooka bubble gum and began selling baseball cards in 1951, acquired WizKids one year ago for a reported $29.5 million in cash. By then, SportsClix was in its final stages of development, WizKids already having acquired the required baseball licensing rights to release the game.

WizKids' venture into sports had little to do with Topps' acquisition of the company, but the Topps brand name, which is more prominently displayed on SportsClix packaging than WizKids, is very valuable, Porter said.

If SportsClix can earn more than $1 million in sales and hook in 25,000 or so serious players in its first year, the launch will be considered a success, he said.

A WizKids rival, Renton-based Wizards of the Coast, entered the sports-game market in 2000 with a statistics-based baseball-trading-card game, MLB Showdown. In its fifth year of release, it has a bigger following than SportsClix.

Wizards, however, already has discontinued other Showdown games for NFL football and NBA basketball.

"Sports games appeal to a smaller niche," said Debbie Nihart, Showdown's brand manager. "Most sports fans are outside playing or watching the real games, not realizing that another way to play and learn more strategy is through tabletop games."

She said 42 percent of Showdown's players are new to Wizards, which specializes in role-playing fantasy games.

"We're definitely getting more of a sports fan — and not just kids," Nihart said. "We're getting adults, ones that play in fantasy sports leagues and are Monday-morning quarterbacks. We're also getting a lot of fathers who play with their sons."

Porter, who witnessed more than his share of bad baseball while managing public relations for the Mariners in the 1980s, said SportsClix is not just an experiment for WizKids and Topps.

"It's a big part of our laboratory right now," he said. "If this game realizes its full potential, you will see SportsClix in a lot of different sports."

Possibilities include NFL, NBA, NASCAR or international soccer.

"What will drive our game is the collectibility of it," Porter said. "We've created six different levels of rarity for our miniatures."

The Mini-Thems are sculpted out of several compounds, including plumbers putty, and then hand-painted. The collection of 198 figurines includes 32 mounted on blue or red bases — as opposed to green — that are less common to obtain and therefore more collectible. SportsClix miniatures are being listed in the Beckett price guide, considered the bible of sports collectibles, which lends instant credibility, said Don Joss, owner of DJ's Sportscards. WizKids plans to release an updated line of 104 new figurines — Alex Rodriguez in a Yankees uniform, for example — in September.

The SportsClix collection includes several Mariners, including an Ichiro likeness in his signature batting pose — left arm tugging at his right sleeve, a dusting of base-path dirt on his pants.

"You've got Edgar Martinez?" Wilkerson said while admiring Justin Ellis' collection. "Sweeeeeet!"

Justin Ellis, Josh's twin, totes his figurines in a Reebok shoebox. Alex Mantel, 12, of Renton, stores his in Tupperware.

"It's fun to see what the figures look like when he opens a new box," said Connie Mantel, Alex's mom.

The game is sold as starter kits (nine figurines, rule book, playmat and dice) and random three-player "booster packs." The starters sell for $20, and Joss said the $40 minimum investment for two people to play is too steep for a lot of kids. Showdown's starter kit for two players is $10.

"Showdown is a simpler game, but I think the more serious player wants the extra strategies of SportsClix," said Joss, who displays the new game on a table in his store. "I can sit down with someone for 10 minutes and sell them on this game. I sell at least one every day to someone who has never played before."

Justin Ellis predicts SportsClix will really click.

"It's just like real baseball," he said. "If you win a lot, it's either because you have really good players or because you have really good luck."

Stuart Eskenazi: 206-464-2293 or seskenazi@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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