If you grew up in the 1990s or early 2000s, you had a favourite superhero. We didn’t have the MCU, but we had a whole slate of animated series that saw Marvel and DC’s biggest heroes (from Batman to Spider-Man) go on weekly adventures against their classic rogues’ galleries and newly created villains. While technically adaptations of the comic books, these shows had their own unique style and rhythm because of their action-focused approach. POWRS aims to bring this specific superhero feel to the TTRPG world, allowing you to create a superhero and do battle with one of your many foes.
POWRS is a single-player superhero-themed skirmish-based TTRPG. To play, you need a collection of six-sided dice, markers, tokens, grid paper, and a writing implement.
Building A Super Showdown
At the start of the game, the player divides their grid paper into a 10-by-10 grid of squares. After this, it’s time to make your superhero. First, you need to select your character’s strength tier, which affects the maximum number of dice a stat can roll at the start of the game, with street-level heroes getting a single d6, while god-level characters get four d6.
After this, you assign a number (representing the number of dice you roll when you make a check) to three stats: Pow (for melee attacks), Oozt (for ranged attacks), and Woosh (for movement). You also have two other stats: Rrrahhh (your total HP, which is based on your tier) and Smash (which handles special powers). Once you have these base stats, you’ll also need to decide what special power your Smash represents and under what situation it activates.
Once your hero is ready to go, you’ll also have to make a villain for them to fight. Thankfully, this is easy, as villains get the same stat spread as heroes.
The game is made up of individual combat scenes. You start by creating a battle map by putting obstacles on your ten-by-ten grid and deciding why you and the villain are fighting and what the goal of the battle is (or using the included tables to generate them randomly).
After this, the scene starts. The hero and the villain take turns making actions. When your hero wants to make an action, they roll dice equal to the relevant stat. If any of the rolled dice are four or higher, then the action is successful. If all dice are below four, the action fails.
The villain (due to having the same stats) uses the same dice system. The player can either decide the villain’s actions for them, or use a roll table (dubbed an instinct table) to discover what the villain will do that turn.
Saturday Morning Once Again
POWRS is a really clever game that honestly surprised me. While the idea of playing a skirmish or wargame alone may sound odd at first, in practice it works really well, and you’ll quickly find yourself totally focused on your battle. This is especially impressive when you consider POWRS is trying to emulate superhero comics and their tie-in cartoons, a genre notorious for playing fast and loose with rules and relying on out-of-nowhere contrivances to start and end its storylines.
However, POWRS neatly works around this. The hero creation system strikes a nice balance where you are given freedom to create any hero you want (no matter how esoteric their powers are), but while still having rules that firmly guide the experience, meaning players are not having to devise house rules every few minutes.
The only issue with POWRS, as it stands, is the layout. Some of the rules are in a slightly unintuitive order (for example, the game doesn’t explain strength tiers until after character creation, when it feels like something players should have in mind from the start), which does mean you may need to fully read the rules a couple of times before they click, which is a shame, as they are very intuitive and easy to handle once you get them ordered in your brain.
Also, if this game gets developed in the future, I would love to see a way to link a collection of skirmishes together into a single storyline (as most ’90s superhero cartoons had more than one fight per episode).
POWRS really took me by surprise. I’ve always wanted to find a TTRPG that captured the Saturday-morning superhero vibe, but I never expected a solo wargame would be the one to scratch that itch. Despite my initial reservations, POWRS really delivered, giving me a fun solo TTRPG that had me feeling like I was directing the final act of a classic ’90s superhero cartoon like Spider-Man or Batman: The Animated Series. Because of this, it’s honestly worth checking out for both fans of war and tactics games and for people who want a way to take their superhero OCs out for a spin.
