• Steve Trease

Critical Hit! is a bi-annual American ASL fanzine billing itself as `The Independent Journal of the ASL Hobby'. So far there have been three issues and they are produced to a high standard as a black and white magazine the same size as The General. Issue 1 has 32 pages, issue 2 has 48 and issue 3 (the latest) has 60.

Critical Hit! 3 contains 15 ASL new scenarios, two SASL scenarios and one Platoon Leader campaign. The scenarios are all presented in the usual ASL format and are quite varied in their scope, with situations ranging from Ethiopia 1936 to Israel 1948 and South Korea 1950, and taking in the East Front, western Europe , the desert and the Pacific along the way. Something for everyone! All scenarios are balanced using the ABS system: there are three handicaps described for each side of increasing severity; whoever chooses the most severe handicap for a side gets that side.

'Arajian Rose' is a Platoon Leader mini campaign. Platoon Leader is a third party add on for mini campaigns using existing maps, although I have not seen a copy yet. It uses a system like Red Barricades and Kampfgruppe Peiper to run small campaigns up to five or six scenarios in length.

There are also a series of articles reminiscent of those in the Annual, including an interesting history of Chindits and Long Range Penetration Groups in China/Burma/India; an article about playing ASL with a chess clock (?); a detailed scenario replay; quite a cliquey retrospective of ten years of Oktoberfest (an American ASL convention) and a couple of editorial type pieces. In some ways the most useful pieces are a detailed flow chart documenting procedures to use for OBA and a set of supplementary SASL rules for infantry only SASL.

All in all I would recommend Critical Hit! to any ASLhead looking for more material. It is available for £7.95 from Esdevium Games, 6 Wellington Street, Aldershot, GU11 1DZ.