Urban Manhunt is a miniatures game through and through. However, when creating the game system, I decided to add an element of card gaming into the mix. The reason was simple: to create an environment in which the players feel as if anything can happen. This is the primary reason the Event Deck exists.

The secondary reason involves the rules of the sport itself. You see, the players' hunters aren't allowed to attack each other directly, which could have fostered a sense of seclusion and lack of interaction between the players. I didn't want that. I needed to develop a way for the players to affect the hunters controlled by their opponents. Event Cards gave me the means to accomplish that. Take, for example, 'Mistakes Were Made'. When played, a hunter straying too close to the edge of the zone will be attacked by one of the guards, who has mistaken them for a crim trying to escape. Oops! 

The Event Deck is placed within reach of all the players. At certain times throughout the game, players will be instructed to draw a card from it. If the card says 'Keeper', the player who drew it places it in their hand for use later on. Otherwise, the effect on the card is carried out immediately and then discarded (unless it also says 'Remains in Play', in which case the card's effects carry on).

Welcome to the Zone! This is the first installment of a series of articles in which we will shine the spotlight on various aspects of Urban Manhunt.



Movies such as Escape from New York, The Running Man and The Warriors have always captured my imagination; films that show us what the near future is going to be like, even though the likelihood of their accuracy is pretty much nil. Such movies give us a candid look into the collective mindset of the era in which they were made. How they perceived “the future” speaks volumes about the fears, desires and fantasies that we, as a society, possessed at that point in time. Sure, we know now that New York didn’t become a prison city in 1988, as predicted in Escape from New York, or that there wasn’t an economic collapse in 2017 à la The Running Man (...at least not yet!). And we’ve certainly learned that thematic street gangs wouldn’t rule the streets “sometime in the future,” regardless of what we saw in The Warriors. But that doesn’t matter, because that’s what the filmmakers in 1981, 1987 and 1979 (respectively) saw the future as looking like. And it gave our imaginations one hell of a jolt.

It gave mine a jolt anyway. In fact, before I designed my very first (and unpublished) roleplaying game, Intergalactic Wars, in 1987, I attempted to create one called Turf. While I thankfully have no memory of the system my thirteen-year-old brain dreamed up, I do remember that it revolved around colorful street gangs inside a prison city. My inspirations for the setting were, of course, Escape from New York and The Warriors, as well as an arcade game called Trojan that I pumped an untold number of quarters into at my local convenience store. The seeds for Urban Manhunt were planted even then!

It wasn’t until 2005, however, that those seeds would grow into something tangible. In one of my graphic design classes, each student was instructed to create a fully functional package design. Not knowing really what i wanted to create a package for, my mind drifted back to Turf for reasons I genuinely can’t fathom. Adding some elements of The Running Man into the mix, I created a rough idea for a card game called (you guessed it) Urban Manhunt. I still have that package to this day.

Even though the assignment was over, I couldn’t get Urban Manhunt out of my head. And when a game designer fails to expunge something like that from their brain, there’s only one solution: design the game! I worked with another student, who was an artist, to develop the look of the setting and even a few of the hunters. But it wasn’t until I contacted Patrick Sullivan, whose work I had been a fan of for quite a while, that the setting became something special.

Patrick immediately showed that he had a knack for taking my ideas and not only bringing them to life, but also improving upon them exponentially. Every piece of art he cranked out fueled my creative fire even more and it felt to me like my ideas fueled his as well. He and I have working together since that time, crafting many products together.

The card game was finished within a few months and playtesting went beautifully; far better than I expected. It’s a design I’m still proud of after all these years. The game controlled the crims (i.e. convicted criminals to be hunted) while the players tried to guide their hunters to victory. Sound familiar? It should, as the miniatures game was built using the same framework.

This was before making print-on-demand cards was an option, and raising the capital to launch a card game still proved impossible. Rather than let it completely languish, I decided to release it as a print-and-play game.

In 2012, I decided to dust the setting off and use it as the basis for a roleplaying game. Deciding I needed an entirely new history that provided more depth than the miniscule, one-dimensional backstory provided in the card game, I set forth to create something with more story hooks that could be exploited in an RPG. Unfortunately, this project found itself on the backburner.

That brings us to 2017.

As most people who know me can tell you, I’m a miniatures gamer first and foremost. Gaming-wise, it’s my primary love. I enjoy everything about the hobby, from painting miniatures to constructing terrain to actually playing the games. I’ve attempted to design a couple miniatures games over the years, but none of them came to fruition. Truthfully, as an avid miniatures gamer, that fact has always bothered me a great deal. So, I decided to do something about it once and for all.

Over the years, Spectrum Games has become known for faithfully emulating genres, so I had to ensure that whatever miniatures game I designed would stay true to our theme. Given that the Urban Manhunt setting emulated those dark future sci-fi flicks of the ‘70s and ‘80s, it seemed a perfect fit.

I dug out the revised background from the recesses of my harddrive and added more detail to the later sections, starting with the events after the supposed invention of the sport. What shocked me, though, was how the backstory I penned in 2012 paralleled with events from the real world! What a difference five years can make! In fact, I almost scrapped it and started over again lest people think we were making some kind of political statement about current events. However, it created a dynamic backdrop for the game that is bristling with possibilities.

With the setting info in place, I faced the task of actually designing the game. Fortunately for me, some of the work had already been done, as a handful of the core concepts of the card game were easily ported over to the miniatures game, such as Control Cards determining the game length and the crims’ actions.

The use of several decks of cards, especially the Event Deck, was something I argued with myself over for quite some time. Ultimately, I decided in favor of them, feeling that they add another dimension to the game and offer an experience not found in other miniatures games. There are a lot of miniatures games on the market these days. The last thing the world needed was one that played just like all the others. Urban Manhunt had to offer some new wrinkles to the mix, and the card usage contributes to that.

Another important factor of the game is that you won’t have to break the bank to get into it. Miniatures games have garnered a reputation for being an expensive hobby, and there’s a reason for that. Many games require a large number of figures, which can drain gamers of their cash in short order. We aren’t pushing our own line of figures and instead encourage you to scavenge miniatures from your existing collection or pick up whatever miniatures that suit your fancy. We’re even offering cylindrical paper miniatures that can be attached to miniatures bases, which means you won’t even have to purchase miniatures at all if you don’t want to. Even the cards will be available online so that you can just download and print them. In short, the rulebook will be your only required purchase to play the game and it’s going to be reasonably priced.

The end result is a miniatures game that I enjoy playing. Hopefully, gamers the world over will enjoy it, too.

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