Pulp Invasion

Pulp Invasion looks exactly as its Kickstarter promised, which is fortunate, because the rest of the promise is less reliable. The atmosphere is present and properly staged; the game knows how to set a scene.

There is strategy in the solo game, there is management, and there is enough replayability that it does not show every card at once. The difficulty scaling is the problem. At times it does not ask you to play better; it simply passes sentence while leaving you no meaningful reply. That is a small distinction. The game appears not to have noticed it.

The X1 expansion turns the experience into a light head-to-head affair: one player runs the full, involved game, while the other watches closely and chooses when to make life difficult. The second player need not absorb the same rules burden, so it suits a pair where only one person wants to commit fully.

I do not think it is a bad solo game; beside the solo deckbuilders I have been playing, it simply feels like a design that stopped before it became much better. I set it up again to give it a fair comparison and left it unfinished, which is usually the clearest review. Without X1, it is a hard pass.