Hammer's Slammers Handbook

There have been a couple of questions on the list about this, and as I
have a copy I thought I would write up a short review. There are two
caveats - I have not yet played and games using the rules and I don't
have them in front of me while typing this.

First the physical stuff:

The book is a little smaller than A4 in size and has a total of 50 pages
(including the covers) it is profusely illustrated with black and white
and colour pictures, some of these are photographs of models, some are
line drawings and some vehicle pictures.

You get about 7 pages of rules and 5 pages of "army lists", the rest of
the book being background material. If you have the slammers book that
included the interludes or access to the web you will have seen most of
the information in some form before. There are also short biographies of
Alois Hammer, Danny Pritchard and Joachim Steuben as well as
descriptions of some of the Hammers campaigns.

Other mercenaries are covered briefly either by way of the notes on the
colour pictures or army lists, most of them come from the book except
the 101st Texians. The army lists include suggested models either from
GZG or Old Crow for each army's infantry and vehicles.

The rules:

At only 7 pages they are quite simple, the actual fighting is done by
throwing 1D6 to see if you hit (hit number varied by troop quality),
throwing to see if you damaged (1D6 Modified by Weapon vs defence) and
if you hit a vehicle seeing what the damage was (1D6 with a 50% chance
of some kind of kill). The main factor is leadership, each side's
leader(s) get a number of leadership points, and it takes 1 point to
move a unit (vehicle, Heavy Weapon, Infantry Team) for the first time in
your turn, 2 for the second and 4 for the third. A generic Slammer's
Major gets 10 points.

Any damage kills infantry and any hit that does no damage suppresses
them.

The rules look like they will play simply and fast but anyone who wants
a system that simulates all the differences between different vehicles
and weapons will be disappointed. This looks to me more like a system
that could be used for tactical resolution in a campaign game.

Chris Downes-Ward

PS: after Steve Pugh's recommendation I have ordered some of the
Kriegspiel Australians and Musorians from Eureka, the Musorians will
probably get added to my "generic Balkan targets" collection which is
mainly made up of Chiltern Miniatures figures which are also more 28mm
than 25mm.

After some thought Briony has decided not to try and mix plastic 20mm
and metal figures but to concentrate on 25mm for metal figures, she has
also decided to go for WW1, but has not decided whether to do a 1914 BEF
force or 1917 Australians in Palestine (we watched "The Lighthorsemen"
together about a month ago so this might have something to do with it).

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