Want more wrestling news, rumors, and results? Be sure to visit PWInsider.com and PWInsiderXtra.com.
Professional wrestling has always had a funny relationship with chance. The finishes are planned, the champions are chosen, and nothing in the ring is supposed to be left to fortune. Yet for about seventy years, the games fans took home to play with the same stars have leaned on dice, spinners, charts and sealed card packs. A sport built on careful booking produced a whole shelf of games where a lucky roll could topple the biggest name on the card.
The earliest known example came out in 1956, when Gardner Games released Verne Gagne Wrestling. It was sold as one of six sports games in a single package, next to football, golf, basketball, stock car racing and baseball, and Gagne was one of only two pro athletes whose name went on a box in that set. The other was Mickey Mantle. That tells you how big a television wrestler could be in the mid-fifties.
Like most sports board games of the era, it turned a contest of skill into something a roll could settle. Nobody expected it to simulate a real match. The point was to put a famous face on the kitchen table and let two kids argue about who won.
The format got more ambitious in 1970 with The Original Superstar Wrestling, designed by John Harwood. It used a pair of dice plus wrestler cards and result cards, handled up to four players, and a full match took about fifteen minutes. In chart-driven games of this kind, the cards do the job a referee would, turning a number into something that happened in the ring: a clean takedown, a missed charge, a sudden pin.
That chart-driven chance never really went away. It simply moved onto screens. The same fans who once rolled for pinfalls on a card table now fill quiet evenings with quick digital games that run on a random outcome and a bright reveal, from mobile card battlers to Playfame free slots online. The mechanics are a long way from a cardboard ring, but the pleasure of not knowing what the next result will be is the same one that sold those early boxes.
The 1980s wrestling boom brought a wave of licensed games, and most of them still ran on dice. A 1983 dice-rolling game built around the lucha libre legend Mil Máscaras showed the star diving off the top rope on its cover, though it never earned much love from players. Two years later Milton Bradley released WWF Wrestling Superstars, officially licensed and packed with a board, cardboard pawns, dice and stat cards for twelve wrestlers including Hulk Hogan and Ricky Steamboat. Players managed a stable rather than a single star, which added a little strategy on top of the rolls.
Collectible cards added a different kind of luck. The 1985 Topps WWF Pro Wrestling Stars set had 66 base cards and 22 stickers, and every sealed pack was a small lottery of its own. Some kids pulled Hogan twice. Others spent a whole summer hunting for one missing wrestler.
The reason for all that randomness is simple. A real promotion has a booker who decides the finish. A board game has no booker, so the dice take the job. Two dice are especially useful for this, because their totals are not equally likely. A seven comes up about one roll in six, while a two or a twelve appears only one time in thirty-six. A designer can put ordinary strikes in the crowded middle of the chart and save the rare comebacks and finishing moves for the edges, which produces something that feels a lot like a well-paced match.
It also explains why the star on the box mattered so much. Gagne sold games because television had already made him familiar to millions of households. The Pavek Museum of Broadcasting credits him with building much of the modern wrestling entertainment industry, from his Saturday night matches in Chicago on the DuMont Network to All Star Wrestling, the show he began producing in 1960 that eventually ran on about 120 stations and stayed in syndication for three decades.
There is a quiet irony in reducing wrestlers like Gagne to a dice roll. He won two NCAA titles at the University of Minnesota before turning pro in 1949, and he was far from the only legitimate grappler in that first era of stars. The National Wrestling Hall of Fame honors that lineage of amateur-trained pros through the George Tragos and Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame, and its first class in 1999 included Gagne alongside Thesz, Tragos, Frank Gotch and Ed Lewis. Some of the most skilled men ever to lace up boots ended up, in cardboard form, at the mercy of whoever held the dice.
By 1993 the WWF had gone further still and licensed a full role-playing game. It was far more complicated than most wrestling fans expected, with detailed rules for damage and stun, and it showed how hard it is to turn a performance art into a fair contest.
The luck-based wrestling game survived every era because it solves a problem the real product never has to face. Wrestling tells stories with predetermined endings, and fans love it for that. At home, though, there is no script, no writer and no backstage plan, so chance becomes the booker. Every upset on a kitchen table, every sudden pin from a snake-eyes roll, was a match nobody had written in advance. For a sport where the outcome is always decided before the bell, that small taste of genuine surprise turned out to be a surprisingly durable thing to put in a box.
If you enjoy PWInsider.com you can check out the AD-FREE PWInsider Elite section, which features exclusive audio updates, news, our critically acclaimed podcasts, interviews and more by clicking here!
