Eric: If you’re like me, some days you want something small and cozy, an intimate exploration of a few characters. Other days, you want something big and brassy.

Some days, though, you just want to flatten a building with your opponent’s soldiers still inside it.

Today I’m talking about the sweeping Dropzone Commander by Hawk Wargames. DzC (as we’ll abbreviate it for time and acronyminal sexiness) is a large-scale science fiction game set in the 27th century. As you all know, in the 25th century humanity was driven from its core worlds, including Earth, by the invasion of the parasitic Scourge. Now, 160 years later, it is time to TAKE THEM BACK!

DzC is a game about combined arms – the necessity of diverse units fulfilling specialized roles. On a given turn, you will have squads of infantry searching high rises for precious objectives and engaging in running close combats through their halls. You will field tanks and walkers unleashing massive firepower into each other and those high rises, causing them to collapse. Your aircraft will zip across the whole table at supersonic speeds while blowing up said tanks and bombing high rises as well (in the 27th century you really don’t want to be a footsoldier) and your anti-air firepower will hunt down these aircraft.

And you will have dropships – lots of dropships. We’ll come back to them in a minute.