I have finished up the draft of scenario 4 and ran it through some paces to make sure it initially works as expected. I had to tweak a few things but I’m happy with the final result. And of course I needed to mix up my board some more to fit the new scenario layout.

The scenario is the second in my “linked” scenarios where the army list results from the first scenario impact what you can use in the second.

This mission has a few more moving parts. I expanded on the concept of set Search deck piles by making them also mobile, moving from building to building every other round. This helps expand the idea from the last mission of getting your forces across the map but also makes for an interesting little shell game.

Only one pile has the real objective and that is only known after searching through the entire pile. With uneven amounts of buildings in each of the search token “tracks”, it also creates some choices on how you want to tackle each token set.

The board is very asymmetrical as well with most of the buildings on the far side of the map. I had my broken highway cut across the middle of this one and the “low” section of the city really need air support as the first opportunity for my hovercrafts to get down there is on the ramp almost 3 feet into the map.

Fauna showing up to harass you every round helps even out the chase. I may tweak the balance a little more to add to the challenge by making the tokens move at the end of every round (starting at the end of round 2). That would make the game run 4-6 rounds. That just seems really fast to me, especially if you did horribly in the preceding scenario. For now I’ll leave it but if you feel like it wasn’t challenging enough, that could be an easy variant.

I have all 4 scenarios saved in an easy PDF file on the Dropzone Commander Community page on Facebook. This concludes the start of my solo variant. I’ll be designing more scenarios as I go but the will likely be more specialized as I incorporate some of the special terrain features like the Orbital Laser, Underground Hangar, and Monorail.

Some scenarios may go even further off the norm with custom terrain features I’ll be printing like this massive Bulk Lander I’m printing from a crashed model of a Gozanti Cruiser (Star Wars Legion). I even scaled it down a little but it is still a huge model with the picture only showing the completed left wing…

In addition to some custom pieces, I’d like to mess around with some of the old Beta rules for 2e that featured some interesting alternative structures. The beta rules had some concepts like “Attack Runs” that were unfortunately cut from the final version so I’ll have to mess around with them some more but the concepts seemed fun.

Finally, 1st edition also had some interesting things I left alone like different atmospheric settings, weather, and earthquakes or even surviving orbital bombardments.