Superstar Pro-Wrestling Game
Deluxe Edition

Game Review

Reviewed by Kerry Lloyd


Superstar Game Co., Inc. P.O. Box 108, Woodmere, NY 11598
Released. 1984
Price: $15.95 plus $2 postage and handling
Complexity: Beginner
Solitaire Suitability: High
* * 1/2

Superstar Pro-Wrestling is an interesting game depicting the world and a lot of the action of professional wrestling, as practiced in various arenas throughout the country. The players can do one-onone matches, tag-teams (both two and three men to a side), and even play out some of the more bizarre forms of mayhem found on the circuit, such as Texas Death, the Steel Cage, Russian Chain, and Nebraska Bullrope. All the equipment necessary to play the game (with the single exception of a pencil-a minor quibble) come in the Superstar ProWresding box.

Pro-Wrestling comes in a 9 X 12 X 1 inch box, with an action shot of a wrestler leaping upon his prone opponent on the cover. The box contains a fair amount of material. There are 60 Action Cards detailing major wrestlers ranging from Abdullah the Butcher to Larry Zbyszko, and including most of the well-known denizens of the ring such as Andre the Giant and One Man Gang. Each card provides a general reaction block and other blocks for defensive and offensive moves, and for specialty and ropes moves. Also included are 4 six-sided dice. an "Official" rule book, two card stock sheets of charts, a folder listing all 60 of the wrestlers depicted in this edition of the game, and five copies of an "Official" score card, each of which should be able to handle nine wrestling matches. This is a reasonable supply of components, but the players are limited to 45 matches, which don't require all that much time to play out unless they photocopy some more of the scorecards, or send off to the Superstar Game Company Inc. for more.

The play is fairly simple. Players choose their wrestling stars, then mutually decide upon a method of wrestling (oneon-one, tag team, etc.). The cards for the wrestlers determine their actions according to dice rolls, and the rounds of play are considered to be of approximately one-minute duration. In each round, the procedure below is followed.

First, the general tone for that round/minute is determined for each wrestler--either offensive or defensive. If both wrestlers roll defensive, nothing happens and the round is ignored and rerolled. If either or both are offensive, the play then proceeds to a determination of the particular move for each wrestler. Offensive moves include such genteel actions as "bite opponent's neck;' "tear at chest hair," wrench bicep;' "kick by manager;' and "choke against ropes," The "specialty" moves for each wrestler are even nastier: "clobber with 2x4," "buckshot elbow smash," "smash with chair," etc. Defensive options are limited to reverses where the defender assumes the offensive, and the positions switch, and "A" "B" and "C" results-attempt to break hold, absorb punishment, or neutralize hold. The punishment taken by each wrestler is tracked on the score sheet as points for his opponent, with the total controlling the probability of a pin when such attempts are allowed.

If nobody has succeeded in pinning his opponent at the end of a given round, the action starts all over again with rolls for general tone for the next round. It can occasionally take quite a while to resolve even a single pin match if both wrestlers roll a lot of defensive tones. in one of the matches, we ran for play-testing, it took 24 rounds (minutes) before King Kong Bundy managed to pin Andre the Giant. A tag team match ran 20 minutes; however, another match between Roddy Piper and Ricky Steamboat required only four minutes for Steamboat to put Piper into a submission hold. All in all, the moves for the wrestlers seem to be fairly accurate, and the timing is not unreasonable.

Pro-Wresding is not the most strategic game I've ever played--in fact, other than selecting the opponents for a particular match, there is little (if any) strategy in the game. The dice-roll results control the action completely, and the players simply record the results on the wrestlers' cards. For fans of the professional wrestling circuit, this may provide a decent amount of entertainment, recreating matches (or proposing matches) between their favorite wrestling stars, but I would like to see a bit more choice in the game for true gainers. The Superstar Game Company Inc. does offer an expansion set of extra specialty cards for the 60 wrestlers in the set, but I haven't seen them yet, and so can offer no opinions as to their utility.

This game should appeal to the wrestling fan particularly, and those with reasonably good imaginations may enjoy the game as well, despite the lack of actual strategy in the play. It does take a little mental work to fill in the remainder of the action for each round, but you can occasionally picture a large, hairy character flying over the ropes into the audience, leaping up with a roar, and charging back into the fray. Superstar ProWrestling is not for everyone, but it should appeal to a fairly broad segment of the population.

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© Copyright 1985 by Dana Lombardy.
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