Strange. Other programs are supposed to be able to play sound with ALSA alone.
Pulseaudio is a proxy to kernel sound components like ALSA.
ALSA in many cases needs to be configued by conf files though.
I do audio recording in Mixbus/Ardour, so I just have JACK running on startup and
just route ALSA to it (snd-aloop), and sound for all programs work very well without Pulse.