A great way to PLAY!

Version Played : V1.19

One thing you should know going in is that this is a game, not simulation, not a crunch fest of list optimization. It is a place for some simple, over the top, Wagnerian space war fun. It is a great place for narrative fun and random events and captures the thrills, weirdness and semi RPG fun of Rogue Trader era play very well. It is NOT a "chase the meta", tournament game and balance is not geared towards tournament players. It is easy and fun to draft an army list. Do the rules have every all the things you would want to see for modern armies in it? NO. What you have is a very good representation of Rogue Trader types with a sprinkling of 2nd edition-ish content. That said, you can home brew with unit and character upgrades to get "close enough" for the feel lof a lot of things. Two things missing, as far as I can tell, are "Terminator" type armor and "Jump Packs" for assualt troops. Jump Packs exist for heros, just not units so, not sure what's going on there. These are both deeply silly, yet uttely awesome, things that were present in Rogue Trader Era content and set the tone moving forward leading us to a mind space of memes such as tank commanders yelling "Drive me closer, i want to hit them with my sword". It felt odd to have "Teleportation" without Termies, but, you could use it for any sort of reserve deployment and just change the flavor, for example, "bug tunnels" coud get your Crawlers onto the table. You just have to get creative with the rules by changing the flavoring, not the mechnics. I ended up adding some unit upgrades to regular infantry to make them feel a bit more hardcore thatn reular assualt troops and that felt Termie enough.

Loving having creative freedom takes pracitce

Need a Chaos army? Well, there is no "Chaos" list. Not an "OFFICIALLY SANCTIONED VERSION" anyway. One thing that is key to enjoying this game is getting away from needing a big vorporation to tell you what you can do and what you can use in a a game.

So what do you do? Well, you could use the "Star Knights" in a "Traitor Mode" by not allowing them any Imperial allies, but letting them take Orks (a very Rogue Tader era Freebooter move) and or picking from the Rebels & Dissidents list, since that happens to include cultists. Want lesser demons? No problem, you could use the "Ancients" from the hired guns section (Slaan stand ins). That gives them two Psionic Abilities. You could use these unchanged. If you want a minor tweak, maybe pick both powers at the cost of having to deploy by teleporting in on turn two or later. Demonic instability? Sure, hired guns have to test each turn to see if they feel like they are getting too much pain for not enough gain. If they fail the check, they leave battle. I hope you can see that there are a lot oftools here as is and the author is still adding updates as menaingful content buildes up and is tested.

Fun ffor the whole family

I was able to play this with my 11 year old. That is saying something. Tournament crunch does not really interest the child, but the random events, exploration, objectives and campaign options were a thrill. We had a great first game (Crawlers against Galactic Knights) with me playing solo for the first two turnes and the kid being drawn in. Things happen quickly. there is not a lot of grind or down time. Turns tend to have have interesting and impactful things happening all the time. You also have a challenge at hand in that your command and comtrol is limited and your choices are important. A huge army will be harder to manage but can soak some hits that a small elite force might find crippling.

Old school weird and wonderful

I found this game while trying to play Rogue Trader. Rogue Hammer gives me the same energy with less obscure complexity. Rogue Trader is wonderfull but it takes more effort to buiil a list and play. Rogue Hammer is currently a "One Book" game. I did not miss any of the granularity of pulling casualties or being fussy about movement. I embraced the "playing with style" guidance and thres down my hand crafted terrain, weird aquarium plants, and purple dyed moss. It felt so much like how I imagined Rogue Trader woudl play based on the photos of models in play.

"Why the purple bears?"

The author has provided a bestiary influenced by some of the best optons from Rogue Trader and these may show up reandomly in game. There is no need for a GM to handle this as the rules on what each creature does are clear. I have sourced nearly all the critters needed and look forward to having my "zoo" ready. Since I know the Bear listing is from Rogue Trader, I was able to learn that that the Rogue Trader versions are purple and look forward to my very own, very angry, purple bears just wrecking a plan at some point. I don't care if it is my plan, or my oponent's plan. I really don't. That is the mindset you want for this game. You want to be ready to embrace the attack of random Death Bears, Human - Sized Psionic Wasps, and perhaps even Mego-Reptiles (dinosaures, dinosaurs everywhere) with a song in your heart. if you can do that, if you can handle using the army lists as a tool kit and the randomness of dice abstracted into far fewer rolls, you will have a great time.

This review is based on v 1.12.

I've never played Squad Hammer, but here are my thoughts and feelings about Rogue Hammer: Basically, it's a game with straight-forward and easy to pick up rules and it plays surprisingly quickly too. Even though you have to keep count of morale and mana and stuff, that is. Unfortunately, the quick and easy nature of the game also means it will sometimes feel a bit basic - even with random events and exploration events. I like how ranged combat was fleshed out with three ranges and a dynamic "melee" style firefight in which the enemy can (and will!) shoot back. All the random event possibilities and exploration markers are much appreciated. I really like the basic and easy to use armylists. They all feature one special rule for each army's infantry and one for its vehicles. This helps make the game feel less standard and more individual without you having to double-consider each choice or look up a unit's special rules. I do think the game could profit from some more in-depth rules concerning weakened units and weapon profiles though. Possibly also a more dynamic or less rigid cap on the total number of controllable units per side could be a good thing. If that's not beside the game's point. In my games, damage dealt tended to be on the lower side, so units rarely got destroyed and that felt a bit unsatisfying, actually.

As it stands, Rogue Hammer is in a bit of an odd place for me - limiting you to play with 4 units per side, fighting skirmish style battles, but with groups instead of individuals. Gameplay is nice and quick and the additions to the rules keep rolling in. All in all, I would say it feels a bit basic and limited at this point in time, but it does have cool capabilities of further individualisation through narration and events.