Dropfleet Commander just released its second edition. It’s best known as “That space ship game with super pretty ships.” I once tried a demo of the first edition and left halfway through, abandoning my very kind demo-ist in a manner I’ve felt bad about ever since. The game had so much going on it was hard to really process.

Second edition looks to make the game more accessible (does it ever not?) and reduce the barrier to entry in terms of rules learning. I will say I found the rules overall pretty easy to understand and the motives of the game similarly easy to understand. Either mission accomplished or I’ve simply gotten better at this in the intervening 3-4 years.

I had the benefit of an excellent demo-ist who really knows the rules inside and out. He was able to outline both the basics and the advanced thoughts as I asked for them. This allowed me to see the depth of the game, especially in list building and faction depth. This is, for me, a bit of a yellow flag. There’s a lot to chew on here with many special rules that can interact with the core rules in interesting or often times un-intended ways.

The things that draw me to Dropfleet are threefold:

1. The ships are pretty.
2. The game has a system of “Spikes” where as a ship performs dramatic actions (like going Weapons Free) it gains “Spikes.” These extend the range at which the ship can be shot. Most of the time, ships can only be shot within around 6″. But each spike (up to four) adds three inches of detection distance. I had two ships that could “Detect” an enemy vessel, which immediately places four spikes on it. This is a cool idea and genuinely neat on tabletop.
3. The focused setting of the battles is great. You don’t just shoot each other in space. You’re trying to drop troops onto a planet’s warzones to win a battle. This gives a great focus to the battles that helps frame them–you need ships that drop off troops and ships that help those ships get to where they need to be.

Let’s get this out of the way: I had fun. Again, great demo-ist. He set me for victory in many ways and built a list that can do everything. I got to see how fighters, bombers, and torpedos worked. I got to see how the spikes worked. I experienced ground combat (which is deterministic and dead simple, intentionally). It was a good time.

That said, you’ll notice from my photos there’s a lot of dice on the battlefield. This is tracking how big the wings of fighters and bombers are. Fighters are defensive tokens deployed into the big black sky. They provide rerolls to ships and can shoot down enemy bombers. Bombers bomb… your big space ships. They can damage your vessels and float around as token promises of small damage that adds up. There’s also fireships, which are just big slow bombers, and torpedos, which cannot be intercepted.

I like what this does. You have a big busy battlefield full of small things aiming at you. It’s cool and makes for an interesting game. It’s also ugly as all get-out and harms the look and feel of the game. It’s clunky to have so many dice floating around. The tokens basically need to be tokens because your ships can co-occupy space with them. As a result there’s not much in the way of a manner of making it prettier. I’ve designed 3D printable tokens that will hold dice to at least reduce how many dice get lost or totally cover up their own tokens but it doesn’t solve the underlying issue: that’s just a lot of stuff on the board. I started with 24 dice and at one point I only had 2 of them available to me for rolling because the remainder were on the board.

But again–I had fun. I like the effect of this system and I hope I can clean it up some with 3D printed tokens. It allows for a layer of complexity that isn’t hard to understand and I wouldn’t want to cut it out. Right now, I have ships that execute the mission (drop off troops), ships that launch assets (carriers), ships that blow stuff up, and ships that do some mixture of the above. Then, I have the fighter/bomber/torpedo game layer to consider. This actually isn’t all that hard to understand. Beyond learning what your enemy’s ships do, this is possible to keep in your head.

So now we hit some problems. The game is oddly big. Each of the factions has dozens of ships each with small differences. There are a fair number of special rules (graciously, all universal) and they aren’t hard to understand but with each ship having 2-3 capabilities it can add up pretty fast. This is probably a necessary conceit of the design and is for some people utterly neutral. I made ship cards and didn’t struggle to track my vessels and their capabilities. It’s just a thing to consider before jumping it. The ship listings are free, as are the rules, so take a look on the TTCombat website and see if it’s too much for you.

The next issue is the focus on tournament play. This will vary area to area but there’s definitely a desire to see a tournament scene for the game. TTCombat, in personal opinion, isn’t great at balance. They write fun rulesets and intend the players to read with their good-boy hats on. Unfortunately, players don’t do this and it leads to people finding exploits in the rules. When playing with friends this isn’t a big deal–just don’t be dicks to each other. When playing with strangers at a tournament that could be a deal breaker. I’m unsure how they’ll do in terms of balance updates and can’t really comment on it beyond saying they certainly seem active. A new balance pass is due out soon (or indeed may have come out before I release this post).

For now I’m content and look forward to my next match. With my upcoming Canada trip I won’t get to painting anything until I return. I’ll likely interrupt my Irish project to bang out enough ships for a small list. My paint scheme will be simple: blue, grey, black, with white stripes. Quick and easy. Thankfully, the models are so darn pretty they’ll do the work for me.

And gosh, worst case, at least I’ll have a beautiful fleet of ships to… apply to some other space combat game. Not that I’ve found any I truly like. Dropfleet second edition is the closest I’ve come, so I hope my opinion stays high.