I’ve had some time to think about the Dropzone Commander games that I played over the weekend. While I enjoy the gathering of friends and the rolling of dice, the games themselves were more of a farce than a gaming experience. That isn’t a slight on my opponents as they played with the superior strategy and won out legitimately. Moreover, the game did not excite or engage like it did in the past and now I find myself wondering where to go from here.
With our individual match-ups ending quickly, we decided to be more social and play with everyone at the same extended table. We left the two main floor maps as is and created 8 starter armies: two UCM teamed with two Resistance against two Shaltari with one Scourge and one PHR. A “Humans vs Alien” mega-battle.
A friend has made it a tradition to host a day long session of Dropzone Commander for his birthday. While the timing of when we host this changes based on availability, it is a great chance to get a group together and explore more of the Dropzone universe. With the recent rules getting a much needed FAQ and Errata, we were finally ready to put the official rules to more use.
With Gen Con over and my Recaps done, I finally had time to put everything away and get life back to normal. While putting everything back is never the most exciting thing to do, it does give me time to see what all I came home with.
With Day 1 of Gen Con down, my main dealer hall day comes up and I have several games I want to see in action to judge if they are shelf-worthy.
Like every year, I think I’ll have time during the show to update things but that never happens. The convention is just too busy and entertaining to stop and post so as I settle back into to post-Con life, I get the energy to recapture the magic before too much of the memories fade. Because my photos are in order, it’s easiest to just go through things each day.
I got to take another crack at Dropzone Commander’s 2nd Edition with a local game. Not realizing what it would be like, I wanted to see what a “standard” army would look like at the new 1750 points. It turned out to be a pretty futile attempt as we had only three players and three-way games are, as I’ve found in this system, a really slow affair. Compound this with still trying to get the rules in our minds and we simply bit off more than we could chew.
I picked up the new Dropzone Commander rule book, Battle for Earth, and have had a little bit of time to start reading through. Of course the first thing I did was flip to the back of the book to go through the new 2nd edition rules. This has been a long time coming and with the force builder out, these rules helped fill in some gaps the unit stats were showing.
Dropzone Commander has been a great ride and even with all the ups and downs of the last few years as the original company was sold and a new edition announced, it still holds a lot of weight with my friends. The UKGE convention happened over the weekend and the first salvos of the real 2nd edition have landed.
I complained last week that releasing the book without unit stats will be dangerous unless the online builder is released as well and it seems they did just that. There is still a bit of dust for TTCombat to clean up with the new army builder in Beta and having some obvious errors but the company seems fully committed and that is really all we can hope for.
While 2nd edition gets cleaned up for its official opening later this month, we decided to do one last game in 1st edition to give the original a final and proper send off.
It’s been a long road, but a Second Edition is finally coming to Dropzone Commander. The new ruleset, titled “Battle for Earth,” is an odd compilation of fluff (more on that in a minute), Dropfleet Commander updates and new units, and complete Dropzone Commander 2.0 rules.
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