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.

The battle itself could have been fun but we probably needed 4 more hours to really finish this out. We barely got into the 2nd round before the store had to close and that was after almost 4 hours of setting up and getting the first turn underway. To be fair, we did talk a lot to catch up and talk shop.

The rules were another thing since we did have to figure out how to handle some of the new book’s ambiguities. That also took some time as the other players really hadn’t read into the rules that closely yet. I was probably overzealous in trying to play what was actually written and not what was assumed to be the same as the previous version. It still didn’t end up going as written most of the time but we’re getting closer.

Since there wasn’t actually much to detail of the game itself, I’ll focus more on my opponent’s amazing paint jobs. I’ve still only gotten Battle For Earth games in against PHR but these ones were particularly lovely.

Jayme’s studio paint scheme was extremely well done with fantastic line work. I’ve played Jayme before back in 1st edition and it was great to see more of his army painted up.

Ethan’s lava inspired PHR was topnotch as well with great use of them and wonderfully executed airbrushed underpainting. His army goes the distance with everything magnetized to the point where walkers magnetize to bases or drop the bases when connecting into their dropships.

I mentioned that we talked a bit and after see their paint jobs, I hope you can understand why. See everything all painted up was a lot of fun and we did, at times, get carried away talking about technique and approaches. So while I did not get as much gaming in as originally expected, the company and the painting takeaways were more than worth it.


In other news, I’m still working on HATE and I’m deep into the actual figures now. I found a lot of bent weapons on the big “Varn” models and while I left the main figures alone because they are more fodder figures and smaller, I felt compelled to fix the larger ones since their presence would be a main factor on the board.

The standard hot water/cold water technique fixed most of them but I struggled with the main “big bad”- the Tyrant.

The water batch made things a little better but his main axe is still just a big spaghetti noodle. Maybe if he wasn’t so important to the game or the world of HATE, I’d let it slide but I just couldn’t abide this time.

I saw that the arms are glued on and the orientation of his right hand (left side of pic) is not aligned to his left hand. I stuck him in the freezer for about 5 hours and, when he was sufficiently frozen, I pulled him and and work on the arm until the glue failed and I could break it off.

With the arm free, I let him get back to room temperature, cleaned off the joint, and re-glued the arm back to make the axe handle straight. This ended up creating a gap so a little green stuff and he was ready to go.

Looking at the mini up close just now, I have to wonder, this guy is a giant among giants. A Varn of massive size and power and yet his skull skirt is all normal-sized skulls. Does this guy never pick on guys his own size? Would that be the equivalent of me boasting about how many 6-year-olds I could take down? One does wonder…