As a member of the play-testing crew, one who had a hand in shaping the development of the game, you’ll be hard-pressed to find someone more knowledgeable to write a review of Pulp City, by Pulp Monsters.

The World

Pulp City gets its name from the city in which it takes place: a sprawling city on America’s coast, complete with skyscrapers, beaches, crime, drugs, and above all, super-powered heroes and villains known as “Supremes.” The world itself hasn’t been largely fleshed out yet, and a specific year has been deliberately avoided in order to leave the door open for playing in various time periods, such as a Word War II-based campaign with the timeless heroes fighting along side U.S. soldiers. While I think this is a wise choice on the part of the creators, I can’t help but imagine the place having the slicked back veneer of the 80’s.

The Core Mechanics

Pulp City is built around three pairs of opposing stats and a single six-sided die. Attacks and other actions are resolved by both players rolling a single die and adding the appropriate stat. This single roll determines success, failure, and damage of an attack. In the event of a tie, the characters origins (Science, Nature or Mystery), are compared for a tie breaker, ensuring that every attack is either a success or a failure and allowing you to tip the scales in your favor by attacking the enemy whose origin is weak to your character’s origin. While it may sound simplistic and dull, it really keeps the game running quickly and lets you focus more on the action, instead of the rolling and comparing stats, and therefore more entertaining.

Instead of giving each character a set movement and action phase, as is common in most games, each player has a pool of action points which can be used by any character in any order to preform various actions by paying it’s associated cost. Each character can use a certain amount of points in a round and the limited number of points forces tactical decisions, since you can’t possibly move and act with every character every turn and expect to achieve good results. Another popular aspect of the game is the alternating activation of models within a round. Each player takes turns with a single model, and turns continue to alternate until both players are either out of action points or have no additional actions they wish to preform.

The Options

There are only two factions in Pulp City: heroes and villains. This allows for customization like few other games. This is not a hard fast rule, either, since there are some characters who will work for either side, and some of those are motivated by greed and require you to sacrifice resource points to include them in the opposing faction. Sometimes, you just really need that one character to fill in your team, and the gadgets and minions sacrificed to do so are negligible. Additionally, each side has teams of Supremes who share themes and motivations. When fielding teams consisting of these Supremes, they tend to work extremely well together, and even enjoy some bonuses in the presence of their team leader.

Final Thoughts

Being a new game, with only a handful of models released, and rules available only through download off their website, Pulp City has just begun its struggle to make a mark in the miniatures gaming hobby. Luckily, it has an edge in that the handful of models already offer a lot of variety and flexibility in play, since the average game only requires 2-3 models per side. The bottom line is that it’s a quick and easy game with nowhere to go but up. If you’re an gamer with limited time or money to play, it’s a great alternative to the massed combat games that take hours to play.

Until next time, braaiiins…