"I'm On My Third Fandom Now."
Or more accurately, my third Collectible game.
The first game was Magic The Gathering, which I got into when it was still rather new, right around "Legends". I bought a fair number of cards, and then when I got bored with it, I sold them back for a pittance to some other players. This was well over a decade ago.
So, about seven years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a collectible strategy minatures game called Heroclix. It's a strategy game where you assemble an army of various Marvel, DC, or "other" superheroes and villains for a massive slugfest. I played for about six years, bought a Metric Ton of the things, had the time of my life playing the game, and then... the game went out of business.
The timing coincided with a move that took me far away from the store I'd been playing at for the last year or so, so I packed the little plastic superheroes away, resigned to the thought of occasionally pulling them out for a nostalgic game.
Then, a couple months ago, Heroclix was revived! Another company bought the rights, and released a new expansion set, with promises of more on the way. Great, right?
Well, the problem was that by this point, I'd lost interest. I play Monsterpocalypse now, which scratches that particular strategy game itch, and I have more fun with that game overall than I did with Heroclix -- which is saying something, I but let's not get off track.
So, I'm at a relatively new Local Game Store, where I sometimes play Monsterpocalypse. Discussion of the new Heroclix comes up. Yay, people are excited about it, the store owner is a big fan and wants to get in on the game, but doesn't have access to a lot of the older figures.
"I do," I mention. "I played from the very beginning, I've got a huge collection I'm not using." The store owner then directly asks me to bring in my collection, so that he and his friends can buy my stuff.
Over the last six weeks or so, I've been down to that store on several occaions specifically to sell clix, and these guys were cleaning me out, in a good way. But I still had a fair number of figures left.
This afternoon, I went in to the store one more time. The owner had called, and mentioned that they wanted to start selling single figures as many other stores have done with great success. They take *every* piece I had left, even the cheap little common figures that I had dozens of and were selling for a quarter apiece, and give me a couple hundred bucks worth of store credit for it, to go towards the next Monsterpocalypse expansion.
Between that and the people who paid me cash in hand for figures over the last few weeks, I made just shy of $1000 selling my old clix figures. That's one heck of a return rate for a collectible game.
I have no illusions about this -- I got VERY lucky, to stumble upon a community of gamers who were hungry for a collection like mine. I now own perhaps a dozen clix now, those last ones saved only because I liked the sculpt (like Beta Ray Bill) or they had sentimental value (dude, they made a clix for DEVIL DINOSAUR AND MOON BOY, I had to hold onto it!).
A gaming era has ended for me, and like the kid from "Fillmore!" who I got the title quote from, I'm now on my third collectible fandom. It probably won't pay returns the way Heroclix, my second game, did. But I'm enjoying it all the same.
The first game was Magic The Gathering, which I got into when it was still rather new, right around "Legends". I bought a fair number of cards, and then when I got bored with it, I sold them back for a pittance to some other players. This was well over a decade ago.
So, about seven years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a collectible strategy minatures game called Heroclix. It's a strategy game where you assemble an army of various Marvel, DC, or "other" superheroes and villains for a massive slugfest. I played for about six years, bought a Metric Ton of the things, had the time of my life playing the game, and then... the game went out of business.
The timing coincided with a move that took me far away from the store I'd been playing at for the last year or so, so I packed the little plastic superheroes away, resigned to the thought of occasionally pulling them out for a nostalgic game.
Then, a couple months ago, Heroclix was revived! Another company bought the rights, and released a new expansion set, with promises of more on the way. Great, right?
Well, the problem was that by this point, I'd lost interest. I play Monsterpocalypse now, which scratches that particular strategy game itch, and I have more fun with that game overall than I did with Heroclix -- which is saying something, I but let's not get off track.
So, I'm at a relatively new Local Game Store, where I sometimes play Monsterpocalypse. Discussion of the new Heroclix comes up. Yay, people are excited about it, the store owner is a big fan and wants to get in on the game, but doesn't have access to a lot of the older figures.
"I do," I mention. "I played from the very beginning, I've got a huge collection I'm not using." The store owner then directly asks me to bring in my collection, so that he and his friends can buy my stuff.
Over the last six weeks or so, I've been down to that store on several occaions specifically to sell clix, and these guys were cleaning me out, in a good way. But I still had a fair number of figures left.
This afternoon, I went in to the store one more time. The owner had called, and mentioned that they wanted to start selling single figures as many other stores have done with great success. They take *every* piece I had left, even the cheap little common figures that I had dozens of and were selling for a quarter apiece, and give me a couple hundred bucks worth of store credit for it, to go towards the next Monsterpocalypse expansion.
Between that and the people who paid me cash in hand for figures over the last few weeks, I made just shy of $1000 selling my old clix figures. That's one heck of a return rate for a collectible game.
I have no illusions about this -- I got VERY lucky, to stumble upon a community of gamers who were hungry for a collection like mine. I now own perhaps a dozen clix now, those last ones saved only because I liked the sculpt (like Beta Ray Bill) or they had sentimental value (dude, they made a clix for DEVIL DINOSAUR AND MOON BOY, I had to hold onto it!).
A gaming era has ended for me, and like the kid from "Fillmore!" who I got the title quote from, I'm now on my third collectible fandom. It probably won't pay returns the way Heroclix, my second game, did. But I'm enjoying it all the same.