Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne looks at WizKids' promotions for hobby retailers.

WizKids has kicked the year off with some pretty cool promotions that have our local HeroClix players enthused (and one store owner moderately happy with a change in the company's promotional plans).

I admit to a little concern when I first heard about the Infinity Gauntlet program as I am leery about the promotion's eight month time frame.  I didn't know if our customers would maintain enough interest in it to sustain them over the length of the event.  However, after talking with our customer base about it, I happily found that the program's length didn't seem to put off any of them and a number of sporadic players plan to make a point of showing up for the monthly scheduled events (and, since the kickoff event, at least here, is going to be a Hulk sealed booster tournament, it should help us move a case or two of those Hulk boosters sitting in the back room).  The program has a reasonable buy in for retailers for the original kit, and the monthly kits are surprisingly low cost, given the number of people each one supports and the amount of interest the program has generated among HeroClix players.  We've put the Gauntlet stand on display and have had several customers already asking to buy one.  They have been pleasantly surprised when we tell them they only have to play in the first event in order to walk away with one.  So kudos to WizKids for the Infinity Gauntlet program, at least at the inception.  We will have to see how it plays out over the next eight months and whether my fears about player burnout come to fruition.

WizKids has a second intriguing program that we almost passed on:  the Supremacy  League.  I haven't seen nearly the publicity about this event that I have for the Infinity Gauntlet, which is a shame, because though a
bit on the pricy side, it does encourage lots of in-store casual play.  Gale Force 9 produced a very attractive scorekeeping board for the league, which works very elegantly, I was surprised to find after I read over the rules a couple of times.

The league works like this.  Each player in the league gets a disk on which to write their name.  A tournament is held, with the winner's disk hung in the center of the dart board like Supremacy League scoreboard, making them the target for all the other players.  Other players in the league are then placed, based on their ranking, in the rings surrounding the winner.  Players in the outermost rings receive "Fight" tokens, which they can use to
challenge a player in the next inner ring to a battle.  If the challenger wins, they switch places with the defender.  If the defender wins, they claim the "Fight" token which they can use to challenge a player in the next ring.  Defenders need challenges so they can get "Fight" tokens so they can challenge players closer to the center.  If the player at the center can successfully collect three "Fight" tokens, the league ends and prizes are awarded.  If they lose before doing so, they move to the outer ring.

The beauty of this system is that it causes higher ranking players to seek out opponents so they can acquire "Fight" tokens to move further up the boards.  I like the way it sounds in description, we will have to see how it works in actuality.

WizKids has also moved away from including the Buy It by the Brick figure in each brick and delivering sleeves of the figures to retailers to pass out to players.  However, retailers now have to buy each sleeve of figures and are no longer restricted to serving as a premium for buying a brick.  Now, from what I understand, retailers can give them away with the purchase of a brick, use as tournament prizes, or whatever.  This still reduces the uniqueness of the figure, making it something you can get by means other than buying a brick.  Still, I'm glad to see this change made.

This brings me to the "One Exception" mentioned above.  Despite being exclusive with Alliance, which should give the company all kinds of economies of scale, we still get a smaller discount on WizKids products.  Granted other companies do this too (Fantasy Flight Games, Games Workshop and Wizards of the Coast -- when ordered through distribution come to mind).  However, when WizKids originally reduced the discount, the rationale was to cover the cost of the promotional materials they provided us, which was well and good.  However, the promotional stuff now costs retailers.  I figure the prices we are charged don't cover the full cost of the Infinity Gauntlet, Supremacy League or the whatever we are calling the brick figure now, but still, retailers are charged fees for something that WizKids needed to reduce our discount in order to cover their costs.  Given the charges to retailers for the various programs, it might be time to for Alliance and WizKids to take another look at that discount structure.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.