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.
I booted up the old 1st edition Force Builder and the group decided to roll a 1,250 point game. Realizing that there would be a lot of “rules whiplash,” as my friend put it, I leaned on a lot of familiar units, putting my faith in the solid standbys like the Typhoons gunboats, MFRs, and Freeriders.
I was paired up with our resident Shaltari player and, even though our table was woefully small for the scenario, I really wanted to put the Monorail on the table. I picked the first scenario as it seemed straight forward. Due to the size of the table (roughly 4′ x 3′), we limited the game to 2 focal points and had the monorail move slower than listed so it would still only complete the table in 6 rounds, hitting the required two “station” buildings. I don’t recommend the changes as I realized later that it can make for an unbalanced scenario but things ended up alright in the end.
As I’ve been doing recently, I’ve been creating my reports in MyMiniReport.
While it isn’t perfect and takes some working through to get used to it, I find it is easier and faster to create my reports in this (comic) style. The time trade is roughly the same as if I were to just post pictures directly and comment in between like I’ve done in the past. The freedom to work it through my phone means I can also work on it any time and not be shackled to the computer.
So concludes our (likely) last 1st edition game. It was a lot of fun and we totally lucked out that no one found the objective as it swings the game too much with only 4 focal points to fight over. The enticement of the Monorail did keep us very focused on it as the Shaltari just kept throwing wave after wave of Braves at the stalwart MFRs. I got lucky with some Colonial Scout command cards to keep healing them up but they were pretty brutal.
The Monorail track itself (nicknamed the Iron Curtain) was a really weird element and kept us both off track for most of the game. I would say it really hurt me taking Typhoons but on the other side, the Shaltari had a lot of anti-air that couldn’t do much unless I wanted to jump the track and invade their airspace.
I did miss a lot of the Beta 2nd edition rules we were getting used to with things like flexible transports and the ability to drop, then fire. We won’t have too long to wait for the full release of 2nd edition and it sounds like they haven’t scrapped a lot of those 2e elements. Until then, I’m thinking of some new terrain ideas. Maybe I can get them going while we wait…