Quirkworthy

Having cleared some painting space I assembled enough of the DzC boxed sets to get a game on the table. Just baby steps really, with half-built models and whatnot. This was just a way to get a general idea of the flow of the thing rather than an attempt to play a proper game of DzC in all its glory.

The following isn’t a full review by any means. Instead it’s just a few thoughts based on actually assembling some of the models and then trying them out on the tabletop.

Assembly

• The resin Hawk use is lovely to work with. It’s texture is smooth and soft and it cuts and sands beautifully. Although I am very much not a fan of superglue I’ve acquired some industrial strength stuff and used that to assemble the pieces. Seemed to work fine.
• Mould lines and flash are present on some models and some are in slightly awkward places right next to details (eg on the side of Neptunes). They are easily removed although you have to be careful to avoid trimming too much away because the resin is so soft.
• Assembly of the models is an odd mix of carefully considered joints (Neptunes main hull) and the abysmally ill-thought out ones (Juno hulls). The Neptunes went together smoothly and just took a  bit of care removing the casting stubs. The Junos were a bit of a faff as one pair of halves didn’t want to align the sides properly and took some persuading. I now have the job of making the seam line disappear on both vehicles – a task I’d rather not have but without which they will be spoiled.
• The stalks on the flight stands need a bit of work to go into the holes in the bases. Nothing major, but you need to do something or they won’t fit (and you really do need them in DzC).
• Overall, nice resin to work with, good looking models, but a few choices in the design of moulds and breakup of parts that could have been improved.

First Game

• We needed a QR sheet. Mostly this was for unit stats which we kept having to refer back to the book for. A single sheet would have done it. I expect there will be one somewhere online – I just haven’t looked yet. Bob thought that there should have been one included in the army boxes.
• We did some stuff wrong. This was kind of expected, and wasn’t that important as the aim was to get a general idea of how things worked which we did.Bob didn’t much care for the Shaltari and cared for them even less when they died in droves (not helped by my failing to realise they had a save – sorry Bob).
• It was obvious that the game would move along at a fair pace when we knew what we were doing.
• I don’t think that this size of game (smallest of the three army boxes) is going to keep people amused for very long, and it’s plain that it’s on the cusp of being unplayable or at least missing out on a lot of how the game really functions. Really want at least twice this amount on the table. Apart from anything else, only infantry can go into structures, and that’s where objectives often live. There simply isn’t enough infantry in the smallest set to last long.
• The game has an encouragingly different flavour to most whilst remaining familiar. The mechanics are straightforward enough, it’s the style of play that is different. Foot and vehicle units are very slow and need the dropships to cart them about. This makes for a fun change of pace as units are deposited, do a job and then get picked up and redeployed.
• The 6 turn limit to almost all scenarios seemed perhaps a little short and I thought failed to really capitalise on the whole idea of the dropships repositioning things. The process of dropping, doing, picking up, moving, redeploying, etc takes too many turns to really do it more than 2 or 3 times in a game and if this is one of the USPs it should be allowed to shine more. If that makes sense.
• Other than the turn limit the scenarios were a nice mix and the rules for objectives and so on well considered.

I’ll keep other thoughts for later when I’ve played some more. For now let’s just say that it’s a promising start with only a few reservations.