Pulitzer Review: There is no Pepe Silva!

Hi everyone. Welcome out to the Dice Tower. My name is Chris Yee and today I'm taking a look at a game called Pulitzer, a game about investigative journalism, especially in the '60s and the '70s. This is designed by David Vaquero with art by Juan Vargas and published by Tranjis Games. So, let me show you how this interesting worker placement hidden value kind of bidding game is played and then I'll give you my thoughts.

Here's a little bit of how Pulitzer looks on the table. Now, a note because this is a very long board, I have this set up in a way that well, it doesn't really fit all on camera. So, I'm going to show sections of it at a time. Normally, these cards and some tokens are going to be on the board throughout the course of the game, but I'm a little limited by making sure you can actually see it.

So, this is an individual player's area where typically you're going to have this cork board and it actually is a cork board and these are real push pins on there set up on one of these stands here so that you can keep your information hidden from the other players. But for this overview, I'm not going to be using the stand.

This is three piece of cardboard very easy to assemble. The idea is that this is a worker placement and bidding game and you're trying to connect different trails of evidence using your red string here and the push pins. At the start of the game, every player is going to be dealt one of these cards that shows the trail of evidence they're going to try to collect over the course of the game.

They're going to use these push pins to connect the string to those different highlighted pieces of evidence in order to earn more points for the end of the game. Players can only score at the end in the regular rules version if they have at least a certain number of these evidence highlighted evidence pieces connected by their string, otherwise they do not win a Pulitzer Prize and cannot consider victory points.

The game is played over eight rounds and there are various worker placement areas on the board. Every player is going to have workers numbered one through five and X, which is a variable strength worker which I'll explain as we get to a higher up portion of the board you can't see. But every turn players are going to take one of the workers and place them face down somewhere onto the board.

If they're placed into this area down here, this is the newspaper area. There are different categories. So, there's US events, there's world events, sports, celebrity news and finance. When you place into one of these areas, you're going to earn the amount of money shown on this round's event card in this area.

And you're also going to be playing for majorities in different rows and different columns. Whoever has the highest total value when revealed at the end of a round in each row is going to collect one house of that color for different points at the end of the game and whoever has the majority in columns is going to collect these bonuses there at the end.

So, money immediately and then bonuses as you resolve them. These two spaces here, the buses and the alley allow players to collect evidence because they draw more cards of these types to try to get the evidence they want. The top area over here is going to have players place their workers face down.

This is a secret bid and they will be rearranged shortly. The bottom area here, the buses, players will place their workers out face down but immediately have to pay this amount of money here shown in order to claim these different spots giving them access to draw more of these cards. During the resolution phase, players are going to flip over these workers down here and those ones in the alley.

The ones up here at these windows though are going to be rearranged according to their order. So, four then two then one, which will allow players to draw extra types of these cards. So, the purple player is going to draw one of these pins and one of these spyglasses here as well as a bonus extra because they were able to place workers up here and be in majority, whereas I as the pink player would draw two of each plus a bonus of these spyglasses here.

Now, from these types of cards, I'm going to be able to choose what type of evidence I want to collect hoping that I can get something that will connect, for example, here in column C and I want to try to get these posted notes of evidence. So, because I drew that combination and because in particular that matches the type of evidence that I want to collect, I will take a thumbnail or thumb a one of these thumb tacks here.

I'll wrap the string around it and then place it into that piece of evidence which I now have collected for end game scoring as well as working towards gaining my Pulitzer Prize. One important note is that the value of the worker indicates how many spaces away from the previous starting location you can claim evidence.

Working up here in the overtime area, players are going to reveal their workers and rearrange according to relative strength and then they'll get to pick one of these overtime cards which will give them a little bit more flexibility in the card draw, get some instant points, money and other effects over here that players can either take or hold on to for the future.

The top area of the board is the request area where players are going to be placing out these request markers instead of workers to try to get these bonus tokens. However, as you saw from the top of the deck that shows the how much money you get paid out for writing different types of stories, two of these are going to be shut down each round so you cannot place requests there.

Like I said, these give you tokens which allow you to share a bus space with somebody else or take two workers and place them at the same time. This area down here when resolved allows you to move your marker down down to this area and to claim your X strength worker. This is now going to be a worker of this level up here.

So, for right now it's a level one worker, but as I take this action again in the future, I will be able to bump this forward and make it up to a level five worker by paying these costs over here. And if you're playing with the events deck, this is where you'll flip over an event at the start of the round which will affect worker placement or bonus scoring in some way for the round.

You reveal it at the start of the round, resolve it at the end. In the normal mode of the game, you have to have collected at least five of the highlighted piece of evidences in order to count final scoring. In the alternate version, you gain more bonus points the more of them you've collected. In addition to that, you're going to score the points shown at the top here for all the evidence, three, five points or 10 points depending what column it is.

You'll also score three points per house you've collected, a bonus five points if you have the majority of a color and 10 points if you have one of each set of all of the houses. Whoever has the most points is the winner of Pulitzer. >> [music] >> I will say from the get-go, this game has a lot of great things going for it, wonderful production, awesome themeing and fantastic art.

And I really love the idea of hidden value worker placement that has a kind of bidding on them like you saw in the overview there. However, this game does have some detractions. Let me start by saying I think that while the idea of gathering this evidence is so cool, the way that it's executed with kind of this randomized card draw is the biggest detraction that I have in this game.

I think that the worker placement parts of it are great, balancing money, balancing that income, a little bit of humor of you're trying to win this Pulitzer Prize for exposing corruption and all these things. But that doesn't really pay the bill. Writing about how well the White Sox are doing is going to give you 300 bucks this round, you know, but with just one little action.

So, like, well, I have to do that. So, I think that there's some nice humor to the game but also some great themeing going on and I love that production. That it is such an eye-catching thing to have that stand up of your board and that red string going around. Everyone's of course coming by doing the Charlie Day meme of which awesome, right?

That's so fantastic. It this has some of the best table presence and some phen- you just phenomenal production of any of the games I've seen come out for a while while not being super over the top. The screen printing is good except for as you saw in the overview there, the light blue, the white printed on the light blue meeples is a little bit harder to read in certain lighting.

But for the most part, I think that the art, the look of this is is great. The themeing mostly comes through Oh, I think the theme comes through in gameplay in terms of a bringing little historical notes into it. It mostly comes on the back of those cards that show you your highlighted pieces of evidence that you need.

On the back, it'll show some headlines and it'll and some like the name of some articles that did win Pulitzer Prizes and the years that it happened. I thought it'd have been nice if the evidences had, you know, a little bit more to them specifically. But besides I don't want to talk about what could have been.

I I do appreciate what there is. But I come back to that idea of mechanically, how do you collect that evidence is just the biggest drawback in this game. It is very lucky. It almost has this feel like it's a push your luck card game, but there's not element really of push your luck. Yeah, you can invest in certain worker placement spots to try to get more card draw and you can try to get some little mitigating factors so that you can always choose in column A, right?

If you collect that one of those pink cards, the overtime cards. But if you just don't flip over the the sticky notes at any point, you're just you're just kind of out of luck with it. And then also, once you kind of start going a direction, then you then it's going to cost more of that red string to to jump across the board and it takes a very high level worker or you can get some of those tokens that allow you to increase the distance, but you don't know when you're going to collect a piece of evidence that already is right next to where you are and you spent your five strength worker because you're like, "Oh, I need to be able to mitigate to collect something that's very far away." I think that that part is unfortunately the weakest part of the game.

There are certain cards that show two different icons on them and if they're the type of evidence like the cassette tape in the baggy or the sticky notes, or you know, some written files. There's no There's no downside. There's no punishment to drawing cards, evidence cards that show two types on them.

But, if you draw one of the evidence cards uh for the which column you can go in A, B, C, D, or E, there is a penalty. You have to destroy a piece of evidence uh from being able to collect that in the future if you use one that lets you kind of mitigate between two choices. And that doesn't feel good.

So, while I think that the bidding for majorities and rows and in the newsstands, awesome. Uh while I think that that little bit of some of those spaces where you reveal the strength of the workers and you rearrange them, so you're always trying to use your highest level workers in different spots, and there's little bluffing elements, I I I I just can't recommend the game ultimately because collecting the evidence is so lucky.

And it's not always going to come down to the person who outplayed the other players. It will just come down to how those cards flipped over. But, as you can tell, I really like the worker placement. I really like the bonuses you can get. I really like everything that's going on. And on top of that, I do think that eight rounds of gameplay feels a little long.

Around round seven, everyone kind of feels like this should have already wound down uh when I've taught this to groups of people. So, uh unfortunately, I cannot recommend this one. I am coming in at a 6.5 out of 10 on this one, though. I think that a a lot of the things it does, it does super well. Very interactive.

Incredibly unique theme that I give huge props for. I really like the production. So much about this is great. But, for that main mechanism, the part I was most excited about, collecting the evidence and running that string. I I love in theory how the length of that string is a resource in the game.

And so, if you make too many big leaps across, you'll run out of string, and you have to undo evidence and try to collect better stuff along the way. But, the way that it's carried out, it feels too lucky. So, I do like Pulitzer quite a bit, but I'm just shy of recommending it. I think that other people might have a higher tolerance of that amount of luck in a game this long.

And if you do, and if you're looking for something that has such a nice unique theme, this is going to be cool. But, a 6.5 meaning that as much as I like it, I'm just shy of really recommending this one. So, that's my thoughts here on Pulitzer. Hope that you enjoyed this review, that is useful for you.

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