I had a thought as my little brother messed with some hero clix. Wouldn't Animorphs have been a perfect clix based game?
For those not familiar with Hero Clix, Halo Clix, Mechwarrior: Darkage or Mageknight, they're all games where you have a miniature fully asembled and painted for you attatched to a little dial that contains all of its statistics, no complicated character sheet, just a dial and sometimes a stat card with everything you need to know (other than the rules, which usually come in a little booklet).
You get a map, or just a ruler and battle it out on a table or wherever, boxes are always sealed so you never know what you're going to pull out of it (which can be irritating when you pull something from an army you don't want to play, and no one wants to trade) but you generally know what's coming with a starter.
The Halo Clix rules in particular would be useful to Animorphs, since in Halo Clix you have various flags or some such where you go and there you can upgrade your Spartan or Grunt or whatever to a stronger unit if you've scored enough points (or something, I breezed over the Halo rules, never played it) using a similar system of say, finding a safe point Animorphs or morph capable Yeerks could morph into animal morphs, or controlers could call for "reinforcements" swapping say a weak Taxxon or human out for a Hork-Bajir, pieces like Erek or Chee robots could be sort of like mobile safe zones for whatever player controlled them since their holograms could allow anyone to freely morph.
The point of the game could be to capture and infest/rescue your enemy's pieces rather than killing them, I.E. the yeerk player would try to capture the animorphs and use them against the animorph player, the animoprh player likewise might try to capture the yeerk player's controlers and turn them against the yeerks just so it isn't exactly like every other war game. Finding a way to do this without making the match unbalanced the minute one side takes a single piece from an enemy might require some work of course.
There's always the question of marketability, but then again WizKids (briefly) revived Mechwarrior, and to my knowledge Mageknight was an entirely original creation (mildly based off of magic the gathering?) so Animorphs the clicky-base game could be sold to all sorts of people, not just ani-fans, I remember playing matches of Mechwarrior Dark Age against people who had no idea it was even remotely related to the Mechwarrior PC games or who didn't remember the PC games.
So . . . if WizKids could be convinced to release the game (and given that I'm pretty sure their Freddy vs Jason set came out ages after the movie they clearly aren't beyond doing something nostalgic) they could release figures like human controllers as common pieces, maybe Taxxons too, Hork-Bajir as uncommon pieces, races like the Leerans and whatever the inspector was as rare pieces, then unique pieces (rares that you can only use one of in your army, encouraging you to trade and not horde them) you could have the notable controllers like Chapman, or Tom, for the Animorphs obviously you could release many weaker morphs like seagulls or insects as commons, the rougher combat morphs as uncommons, maybe some andalite warriors or deadlier morphs like Howler as rares, and allies like Erek and the free Hork-Bajir as uniques, I mean wouldn't it be cool to open up a box of miniatures and pull out a grizzly bear, a Taxxon, a human controller, Erek and who knows what else? With all the aliens of K.A.'s world and all the real morphable animals in our world (plus Dinosaurs) it'd be difficult to run out of new pieces to make.
The more I think of it the more I think it could work as a game and collectable set, and you would be able to choose the morphs the characters use, always thought Rachel's Polar Bear Parade would have worked in other situations? Have your Animorphs morph polar bear, ever thought the group should have swapped Cassie for say, Toby? Then do it. It'd be awesome.
The boosters would be random but the starters might come with the Animorphs (of course) and maybe a couple signature morphs (Jake's tiger, Cassie's wolf, etc.) Visser Three, some controllers and a monster morph, if the game took off future starter sets could contain other large morphs, like a T-Rex, or a whale. Since WizKids pretty much always makes tournament content (which means nothing to me living here in southern Utah where no venues exist) some tournament prizes could be stronger versions of the Animorphs, Elfangor himself, maybe a version of Erek that can freely engage in combat, or even a morph capable human Tobias or controller versions of the Animorphs (so the yeerk player would have more morph capable units without having to first capture them from an enemy player)
So . . . what do you think? According to their web site WizKids is currently not operating but they intend to resume business in the future, if they do wouldn't this be something worth asking for? Or rather, wouldn't this be the sort of thing you might consider buying if it were a product?
