Dropzone Commander... Demos and starter box..

One of the first demos that I was able to find at Smogcon was Dropzone Commander. Honestly, I have seen this online a lot over the past couple of years. Since there was a demo table up and running, I figured why not give it a go?!?!

So under the guidance of Louis, I got to try out the starter boxset and see what all the fuss about this game was about.

Taking the Scourge as my army ( not that I had a choice! ) I was able to get to grips to the game. I found these guys to be like Dark Elves. Hitting hard, and moving fast, but very fragile. While my opponent took the UCM which are more like Dwarfs. Slow, but heavily armored.

Mission for the game was to grab or hold the objectives within the 3 middle buildings. All of which had to be searched by infantry units.

It is interesting to see that it is not all about killing the opponent ( though that doesn't mean you can't :) ), but that it is pretty objective based overall.

Things that I found really interesting were the dynamics of the units and how they activate in groups. Each group activate as one unit, but can act independently from there. Even models within a unit can split up their fire and shoot at different targets. The hardest part of all of this though was trying to remember which pieces belong to which unit for activation. As the game gets into it more and more, it begins to get harder and harder to remember who is with what transport etc. More so when the default boxset painting jobs for the demo are all identical. Something I need to be wary of when painting these up.

In the end I lucked out a lot in this game. My anti-air units were able to take out his transports quickly, while my infantry in the middle tower was able to hold off against his own units. Though all my transports were chasing after his APC which held an objective in the end.. trying to kill everyone carrying the objective. This failed of course, but I was able to get back into the game in other ways.

While we did focus fully on the one objective that had been found, I did have both my infantry units within the other 2 buildings still searching. And with a last turn find, I was able to capture, and transfer the items away before he was able to react. Thank you super tall and large buildings against units that can only move 4 inches.. woot woot!!

From here, well I was pretty much hooked! Call me a sucker or take it as winners remorse, but yeah. After all the convention items were finished, demos played, conversations had, I went back to the booth and picked up the starter box and Ruinscape boxes. Heck the guy even threw in a bow of resin objective markers for free along with the order! Super Cool!!!

Yay more things to wait for the brush.... but on the bright side my son is looking forward to making cities from the Ruinscape and playing with his lego cars around them! I think they might get more use that way also ;)

Unboxing the starter box shows me the main sprues and rulebooks. Pretty cool that it comes with the full softback regular sized all color rulebook! I know a few other game systems that would charge you more than this starter box just for the rules.. let alone providing 2 teams, scenery, and a battle mat.

One of the buildings with a 28mm model in front of it for scale :) Nice cardboard buildings, though will be not as much fun to put them all together.

And the sprues... yes.. those are the models.. the infantry models... dammmmmn they are small... This is going to be quite interesting to paint them.. especially after seeing the pieces that we played with and how well they were painted!

The Scourge infantry above, and the other pieces that were around and on display...

I definitely have my work cut out for me here ( oh and those last buildings are all resin casted ones. Sooooo cooooolll! ).

Yeah.. let's see when I get a chance to paint these, let alone play it. But I am really into the rulebook at the moment an pouring over the colors schemes!

Yay for new addictions... one more Smogcon article forthcoming before the weekend! Enjoy!