Ed and Joe Drop into Warboar

We've selected Bettys new hair do.

Dropfleet has just had an official tournament in the dark grey area of London town known as Bromley. The tournament was held as a way of seeing how players were playing the latest work of the Hawk chaps, but it was also held to playtest the new command cards for Dropfleet.

So being the lover of Dropfleet that I am, I scabbed a lift off Joe and we went to have a day of playing with spaceships. I did some filming to give our impressions of the event and how the games were going. I also had a bit of a chat with Dave Lewis at the end of the day about his impressions of how the meta was developing and how the day went.

The Warboar venue was a really great place for the tournament, the staff were friendly and there was some lovely food available and they were happy to bring it to your table which was really nice. The shop itself is rather hilariously two doors down from the local Goat Whisperers shop, which I remember going to staff meetings in years and years ago. Hands down Warboar is a better shop.

Here is a map for it if you want to go along, a local NCP carpark had plenty of spaces to park and just nextdoor as well. Can't recommend the place enough, if you're in south east London get your bum down there and play some games, you should always support your FLGS!

Warboars site is here and Facebook page here

So how did the tournament go? It was a lot of fun for me, I do like floating around, I was a little disappointed with my results, two draws and a very minor win, but I feel that may have been down to just getting further into the games, none of my games went beyond turn five. I'm not naturally a very fast player and I'm still getting used to this game. Playing Dropzone I'm much faster at making my decisions but Dropfleet is naturally a game that requires precision of movement and also possessing a certain predictive ability of how this and the next few turns will play out slows me down a fair bit. But I'm getting quicker and the impressions I got from the Hawk team are that there will be a 'fast play' version of the rules system, streamlining some of the nittier grittier parts of the Dropfleet mechanics, with particular emphasis on the ground assault phase and a rejigging of how locations score.

Below are the tournament results I got sent afterward and the table makes for some interesting reading:

Player	Faction	Game 1 TPs	Game 2 TPs	Game 3 TPs	VPs for	Vps against	VP diff	Total TPs
Jon Chaddock	Shaltari	20	20	20	117	14	103	60
Alex Barton	UCM	12	13	18	65	34	31	43
Hawk Andrew	PHR	11	10	15	77	60	17	36
Matt Duran	UCM	9	16	10	89	63	26	35
Ed Scullion	PHR	10	10	14	39	29	10	34
Hawk Liam	UCM	8	10	15	53	47	6	33
Hawk Sean	Shaltari	16	0	16	47	43	4	32
Hawk Dave	UCM	10	12	10	62	61	1	32
Ian James	Scourge	4	10	16	69	68	1	30
Chris Lubodzini	Scourge	6	8	16	53	56	-3	30
Azad Nandoo	Shaltari	14	16	0	30	58	-28	30
Neil Harris	PHR	11	7	11	38	38	0	29
Xavier Lindsey	PHR	10	8	9	42	53	-11	27
Daniel Brown	Scourge	10	15	2	44	62	-18	27
Hawk Darren	Scourge	7	12	6	36	48	-12	25
Chris Pratchett	Scourge	9	10	5	45	59	-14	24
Joe Whiddet	UCM	13	4	5	41	58	-17	22
Rob Wallace	Scourge	10	5	4	24	48	-24	19
Tony Brown	Scourge	10	4	4	43	83	-40	18
Mike Tamiolo	Shaltari	0	10	4	56	98	-42	14

From this we can see that despite Scourge having the most players the highest they got was 9^th, now part of that could be put down to players or maybe other reasons but it does still surprise me to see that many scourge in the bottom half. But much like the Scourge in DZC they are a very refined army to play as, both fragile and yet merciless on the attack so this could explain their rather poor placing. UCM had a very strong showing in the tournament having the largest faction presence in the top 10. PHR did pretty solidly considering their small numbers, and the Shaltari players had some of the largest points games under their belt. The final game top table game was between Jon Chaddock and Azad Nandoo, and Jon Chaddock battered the player who previously had had a very strong showing in the other two games. Showing Shaltari to be a very very good faction in the game, one of those factions much like the scourge that are tricky to master but once you know their advantages you can really push them hard to make up for their factional weaknesses. Also Jon Chaddock's list had 21 Glass in it which were throwing out 105 shots a turn which was clearly not to be sniffed at, and prompted some raised eyebrows in the Hawk team.

The new Dropfleet Command Cards were a lot of fun some very fluffy things in there and they all very much fitted within their respective factions play style and thematic background. Especially the scourge deck, which got a few grumbles just because of how much it messes with the opponent! The PHR deck had a strong showing and really pushed the toughness of the faction in a fun way, the decks bring in some of the rules that so far hadn't had a ship attached to them so that opens up some cool possibilities for the future. I'm really excited to get my hands on the full production decks when they come out.

Anyway I really enjoyed the event and I'm looking forward to seeing the deveolpments in the near future. (Fingers crossed PHR get all the linked guns in the world!)

Let me know what you think in the comments below about the tournament results. 
Any surprises  there? Or has this confirmed some suspicions of yours?