BASH is a wonderful game. I first played it at my MisCon, Montana’s Premiere Science Fiction Convention. Seriously, if you’re in Montana over Memorial Day weekend, why aren’t you at Ruby’s Reserve Street Inn? Four days of convention goodness. Plus, they have a horseshoe pit.
Anyway, I’d promised myself that I’d play in some new games this year. I ran into a few problems with that. One, I don’t like board games. Two, some of the games I wanted to try had time conflicts with panels I wanted to attend more. Three, I’d rather have this happen then play 4th Edition D&D. It is not the game for me. Clearly, it’s fine for a lot of people, but it pisses me off.
Then, lo and behold, I saw that (then) Ennies Judge and legendary gamer Jay Peters was running some sort of superhero game. I love superhero games. I love Mr. Peters (in a creepily platonic way). This was perfect.
Long story short, I walked away amazed by the game, and with an autographed copy in my hands. Over the next few days, I familiarized myself with the rules while taking care of necessary bodily functions. I read and understood the rules in 10 minute chunks over three days! There wasn’t any “wait, how does that work?” moments.
BASH is rules lite, so you can get creative without worrying that you’ll have to consult a table (and every time I’ve played the game, someone has). The powers presented run the gamut, and neither I nor Bearded Dork have been unable to create a clone of any major comic book character or villain. The powers can be used (with a little reconsidering in your own brain) as technology, magic, radiation caused mutation, or just being really, really good at something.
It’s a point buy system, so dice rolling at character generation has NO effect on how bad-ass you are (in d20 games, I sometimes abandon characters whose stats are just too good). Leftover points convert to hero points, which help you out durning play by adding to your roll, or converting to hero dice, which allow you to do really cool things, including temporarily having a new power, not dying, or automatically succeeding.
Having looked at it, many of the powers can be explained by mundane things, so even if the game defaults to baseline humans, you can still do an awful lot. Everyone has the same number of “hits” that they can take (unless you specifically play the really old or young character. Ties go to the hero. If two heros are doing something opposed, the tie goes to the one acting more heroically. The game’s creator, Chris Rutkowsky, routinely answers rules questions on the forums.
It’s simple enough that when legendary gamer Jay Peters gave a copy to a couple of 10 and 11 year old kids I know, they figured it out and now play it almost every day. They then figured out that you don’t have to play superheros. So far, they’ve done heros, anthropomorphic cats (based on a book series one of them loves), Star Wars and have now gone on to superspies…in space.
In short, it’s perfect for the game I want to run. You should go buy it right now.