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.

If you are looking for quick, dynamic, mecha combat full of memorable pilots and swirling combat, this game delivers. Using simple but elegant mechanics, GUNFRAME, allows you to build your bots any way you like. There are three example builds from purly speculative anime. Once you know the rules, you can build anything from Transformers to Gundam or Evangelion.

This is not a "crunch" game. Torso twists, heat tracking, ammo fires, crit charts...those do not live here. If you have ever played a rules heavy game and tried to get it to feel like anime, you will understand why this is a good thing. Your "frame" determines movement, weapons loadout and armor (hit points). Weapons loadouts are not by weapon but a die pool by range band. No bullet counting here. You can then add a quality like "powerful" to a range band and improve your chances of dealing a nasty critical hit.

This game has flow to it. Positioning is important, you are going to want to move your "frame" Initiative wins keep the turn sequence from being predictable. Crits open up a number of cool options for the shooter to select. What seals the deal for me are the number of anime tropes you can play with to give your pilots personality. Maybe you have a pair of lovers in the squadron, maybe a pair of rivals, a berzerker pilot with "anger issues". Perhaps a young, heroic pilot will meet an enemy ace who becomes his nemesis...all this and more is in the game as part of your force building. You could do "historical refights" of favorite anime episodes with ease.

There are a few places where a minor edit could help but nothing that prevents me wanting to order a hard copy for the bookshelf. Love of the genre permeates these rules and if you want to bring anime style combat to the table, using any models you like, from any show or movie, your way, then this is going to deliver for you. If you need to know if your pilots have built up too much heat by firing missiles and making a latte using the onboard espresso maker in the same round, well, this is not going to work for you.

Give it a try. It's great fun and easy for kids and non grognards to learn and enjoy.

OK. I must begin by confessing it took me at least five times of downloading, starting to read, and then deleting this book from my reader before I took the bit and soldiered through reading them. I know these are play test rules but, spelling their as THIER, almost every time, the casual tone of writing, the lack of diagrams, basing information and splashy use of "kewl fontz" distracts from what looks like a really easy, fast and fun game mechanic. What this currently looks like is a big middle finger for Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Perhaps because of this, many things a new player might need to know about getting started in miniature gaming are missing and the knowledge of them seems to be assumed by the authors. I've tried a number of Warhammer surrogates which are better written, but no less cumbersome than what they were replacing. I think this game has great potential however, I don't care for the "Get Some!" branding It feels like Nu-Metal, and every time I look at the cover I expect someone to jump in front of me and yell "Extreme".

Now, that said, and given a pass by a professional editor for clarity and spelling, these will be really great and I am really interested in playing them.

This is one of the best games I've played in over a decade of gaming. Everything you need to play, except dice and a ruler, is provided in this print and play product. There is a scenario and counters representing the ships are included. The rules are very easy to play and give very gripping and flavorful games. There are rules for everything from sloops to enormous 110 gun sailing "death star" ships. The rules also cover static elements like forts and gun emplacements. There are points values given for those wanting to build fleet lists but, you can just as well look up historical battles and create fleets based on real events. The rules handle large battles well and the battle my gaming group played with ten ships a side was a great way to test the waters for battles with larger fleets. One of the best games I have played, of anything, to date in terms of action, flow and player involvement. But, it is not just the fleet actions which shine. The game also gives a system for dropping down a level and re creating the duels between single ships which you might have seen in pirate movies or recall from the history of the war of 1812. You can use 1/2400 scale models on bases, as the rules suggest, or dust off some Wizkids pirate ship models. Whatever you use, you will have a great game. BUY THIS GAME.