BASH! is a fantastic little game of Super Heroes. Instead of a huge book of powers or effects, BASH instead focuses on "What do you want to do?" and "What kind of hero are you?", Simple, but powerful questions.

BASH is a simple supers RPG that I am sure I am going to be playing more of in the near future. But what has impressed me the most are the number of conversions that the BASH fan community has already put together. I converted one of my M&M characters over to BASH fairly quickly. I have another character I am working on now that started out in BESM 3.0, re-done in M&M (as PL 5), then converted over to Marvel Super Heroes. It will be interesting to see if the BASH conversion goes over well.

The game achieves the near miraculous feat of being simple to use and learn and yet powerful enough to keep you interested and coming back to the game. The mechanic is kind of an odd one with multipliers (but I think it works for supers) and exploding doubles on 2d6, which I admit I like. It also has a cool FASRIP-looking chart for die results, so it gives it an old school feel (something all old school supers games had were charts, lots of them!). I like that the main Abilities have been reduced to just three; reminiscent of Tri-Stat, but these a Brawn, Agility Mind (BAM!), which appeals to me. Everything after that are skills and powers. It has it's legions of fans and I can see why. There are BASH Fantasy and BASH Sci-Fi games too, which I will need to check out.

BASH is a nice alternative to M&M or Icons, both very fine games, but BASH is easier to get going in. Yes, even compared to Icons. In addition to all of that BASH has a great power leveling system to play everything from Street Level Mystery Men to Cosmic "New Gods".

Like most Supers games, well pretty much every game, I look at the magic first. So far the powers look very Champions or Mutants & Masterminds like, i.e. I choose the "Blast" power and call it "Arcane Blast". I plan to look at Fantasy BASH for more classical, ritualized spellcasting. Given my GM's preferences, I also expect we will be diving into Sci-Fi BASH at some point this year as well. Since that seems to be the thing to do I'll post some conversions for BASH myself, after I have read it a bit more.

It's not perfect. BUT just like like the comics would sometimes have huge cross-over events, so can games. If you are happy with your current Supers RPG, great, but maybe the characters fall into a wormhole-spacetimebridge-cosmicsink and end up in a BASH universe.

If you like supers games then get this.