Dave Lewis might be the most multi-talented designer in the world of wargaming. Lewis spent three years developing his first game Dropzone Commander before it launched in 2012, and he worked on "everything: painting, sculpting, photography, background writing, rules, the whole lot". Featuring an original sci-fi IP and detailed miniatures in the then-neglected 10mm scale, it was the ultimate passion project - and a big enough hit that the game's third edition is coming out at Adepticon this year. After taking a break from rules writing for second edition, Lewis is back at the helm - Wargamer caught up with him at Adepticon to learn what's coming.
Although Lewis sold Dropzone Commander to its current owner TTCombat in 2017, he has always stayed involved with it: the deal freed him from the commercial demands of running a game studio so he could concentrate on the creative aspects. "I've always done all the sculpting and all the background writing", Lewis says. But he's "been doing nothing but rules for many months now". "I feel like the rules are my baby again", he adds.
For the benefit of anyone who isn't familiar with Dropzone Commander, here's Lewis' elevator pitch. "Dropzone is 10mm scale tactical miniature wargame played with dropships and tanks", usually on a four foot square board with plenty of scenery. The most common mission goal is to extract objectives, which are hidden inside areas of scenery: "You'll be dropping your infantry inside a building, they'll be searching for that objective, finding it, potentially fighting enemy infantry that are trying to stop them", and then "if you've managed to organize things properly, you can then extract it and fly it off the board".
Speed and mobility is key, but that comes entirely from dropships, which can fly tanks as well as infantry into position. "If you're just rolling on from the back, you're not going to achieve very much", Lewis says, "so keeping your dropships alive is very important".
Weapons are specialized for just one target, either anti-tank, anti-air, or anti-infantry, so getting the right gun in the right spot is critical. And then there's the "really big stuff, the Behemoths, which only come into play in really huge games" - colossal figures that are about the size of a Redemptor dreadnought.
So what's changing for third edition? "All sorts!", Lewis says. "It's got bits of first edition, bits of second edition, and lots of things that are wholly new". The main thrust has been to make it "more efficient to play in general so it's a slightly faster game with slightly less hang-up moments… there's a million efficiency improvements, a lot of tightening up of wording in general".
Infantry have been retooled. Light infantry weapons simply can't hurt tanks anymore, and infantry "don't even have an armor value anymore": solid hits simply kill them. They do gain a new defense stat, "which works in Close Quarters Combat inside buildings, which is where infantry do most of their fighting".
The ubiquitous urban battlefield that has defined Dropzone Commander might be about to change in third edition. Terrain is now divided into zones, and as well as classic buildings this can also include "ruins, forests, barricaded redoubts, boulder fields", all of which are fully integrated into the rules. And "you can put features on buildings, like turrets, shield generators and stuff like that", all of which can be blown up mid-battle.
Then there's "the whole new faction, the Bioficers", which are landing after a successful deployment in Dropzone's sister game, Dropfleet Commander. "They use a lot of molecular deconstruction weapons", Lewis explains: if you "kill your opponents with those they turn them into a kind of cloud of molecular smoke that their APC equivalents will suck in, then use those raw materials to print new biological drones mid game".
It's a relentless recycling army with a lot of flexibility: "various creatures can come out of an APC, and your opponent doesn't know what". "In Dropfleet the background has always been there for that, but you don't see that because it's big spaceships - in Dropzone, you will see their biological horrors".
As if overhauling the core rules wasn't enough, Lewis has "been redesigning almost the entire range in plastic". "Most of your army, the vast majority, will be plastic in third edition with the new stuff, which is great", Lewis says. He points out some new plastic Resistance models: "there's never been any plastic Resistance before, they've been an all resin faction up until now".
"It takes me about a month per sprue sometimes, for the complex ones". I'm struck by the absurdity of the idea that, once again, this man is designing both the core rules and the entire model range for this game. When does he sleep?
If you already collect Dropzone Commander, we'd love to see photos of your army in the Wargamer Discord community. We're eager to see how the new edition plays when it releases this August.