Blind Boxes & Blind Bag Miniatures SUCK!

It's official! Blind boxes and blind-anything, packaged to reap companies more money, completely and entirely suck. There is no escaping the full depth and breadth of the suckiness. It's a money grab, pure and simple. If each and every miniature, Heroclix, article, or whatever, were worth getting, this would not be a problem. It is because half the characters and sculpts are of poor quality, badly painted, and broken junk that these blind boxes are of value to the companies that market tiny plastic game pieces. They are of no value to gamers.

Doubles, triples, quadruples and more (always of the lamest characters) continue to pile up fast—like speeding cars on a highway in dense fog.

To name all the companies that practice this money-grab would be futile. They all do it. The uber-nerd hipster gamers might irrationally argue that if all figures released were seen then the powerful, or rare ones would get snatched up quickly and all the crap would be left. Yes. The crap would go unsold. Crap merchandise should go unsold. Solutions, to this quandary? I say make the rare ones still rare. Just manufacture fewer overall. Maybe only sell the rare ones to people for every 10 figures they buy. There are lots of solutions. None of them include me continuing to pull a stupid hammerhead shark min from Pathfinder over and over. Broken twice, no less. Does this item truly need to be hidden? Will gameplay suffer if we all see what is in the boxes? I doubt it. Some dudes docking fees at Nantucket might take a hit. That's it.

For Heroclix and strategy games, I truly do not understand the blind package. It's like buying a chess game without the King, or having to keep buying forever in hopes of pulling a king. It would be madness.

For RPG games where people simply want the characters and minis that they want to use for their game, the blind package is insulting. That we continue to act like lemmings buying blind packages again and again says more of our stupidity than the arrogance of the companies behind such practices. If we stopped buying until the blind package system stopped making money, the practice would change very quickly.

Action figures in which a few figures are rare but can all be seen have been sold like that forever. This should be the way the gaming community functions going forward. It won't.

I tell my kids they can buy a few blind boxes here and there. When they start to get doubles, stop buying.

Using sites like StrikeZone make more sense. Even though some figures cost more we take fewer trips to the store. We buy less. We drive less. We waste less time. Overall it's better. Getting complete sets on Ebay is also not a bad choice. Often times gaming stores have piles of their unwanted quintuplets stuck under counters in boxes, often times for less that they were originally sold for.

Would you buy a book if you did not know what you were getting? A CD? A DVD? What about a Star Wars figure? Maybe in a 5 pack, only one figure is blind? Something. Anything but the casino slot machine road to addiction we are on now.

To sum up...

• Companies need to stop selling blind boxes of miniatures.

• Companies need to stop making crap figures that come broken.

• Consumers need to demand the elimination of blind packaging, especially for RPGs where there is zero value for rare figures except to generate repeat purchases.

Stupid broken double of a crappy Hammerhead Shark