Its an interesting thing, that the Dropzone Commander rulebook has missions that give you the go ahead for 3 player games. My past experience with 3 player games has been horrible, so I was rather dreading the game, but I ended up surprised.
Quick Battle Report on a 3 Player Dropzone Commander Game.
(sick family member today, so I don't have time to dig out pics and go into more detail.)
Now we played a Land Grab mission, which meant there many focal points on the field. We fielded a huge armies of 3000pts each, and hit the table with a modified deployment zone (two players on same board edge corners and the other opposite centered to form a triangle.)
There were many things that were interesting about this game. The first of course was the sheer size of the game we had. It was a massive battle, on all fronts. The forces deployed were Shaltari, PHR, and Scourge.
How the game went down was interesting. I very quickly tried to pin down the PHR, which they more than happily castled up, while I went for containment against the Shaltari. Very quickly the battle against the shaltari ended up in a massive close quarter battle inside a single tall building, and it quickly escalated to include very much every single infantry unit the both of us had. It would of been an excellent fight, but the PHR simply took down the building before the battle was complete.
Meanwhile the PHR were attempting to move out of containment and around some buildings to a flank, which I promptly dropped the building on them, destroying 5 or 6 walkers that were too close to the building, putting a huge dent on the PHR advancement.
At that point, every army was dented, and it was a frantic game of taking down focal points, and trying to keep a few units alive to claim them. Going into the top of round 6 (the final round) the PHR were ahead, but lost their last focal point and the victory to early shooting. Then it came down to who was able to gain victory points on the remaining focal points.
In this mission, you gain 1 victory point for having a unit within 6" of a focal point. The player with most points within 6" of a single focal point gains an additional 2pts. This was going to be close.
The Shaltari had a couple walkers (high pt cost) near a single focal point and were attempting to have the most points on a single focal point for the victory. In the last activation though of the last round, I moved my level 6 commander in an Annihilator forward and within 6" of one of my focal points.
Without the Commander on the Annihilator the Shaltari had the bonus victory points by 30-40pts to win the game. So the question came down to a late night checking the rules to see if the commander counted, and if it did, the Scourge had pulled off a last minute victory right out from underneath the Shaltari.
To be honest, it was late, and we just called it giving the win to the Shaltari. The game was a lot of fun, and went back and forth right up to the end. And yes, I do believe commanders count in point cost, which really would give the Scourge the final victory. It mattered not though, as we just had a great time with the game.
So yes, a three player game as the rules have missions for, really does work, and can create some great moments on the tabletop.