Smoke and Mirrors

The Smoke & Mirrors scenarios has a has a nice bluff element. Each player has five objective markers worth 2,1,1,0,0 victory points which are deployed face-down in the enemies half. Both players reveal one per turn that the enemy placed. So room for bluff and psychology.

I placed my 2 and a 1 fairly wide on my left with the other 1 on my right, all fairly, far back. I placed two 0's in the centre looking to bait the enemy and exploit my faster units. It later emerged that the Undead stacked the middle with their 1's but placed the 2 on my right.

The Undead army saw a very nasty centre of Vampire and Mummies with various skeleton units filling up the space on the flanks.

I deployed my resilient Paladins in the centre whilst stacking my attacking units (Knights and Ogres) on left left where they could hopefully grab 3 VPs before turning to the centre.  

We both pushed forward on our lefts looking to grab VPs and turn the enemy flank.

I attacked first charging all the Ogres and Knights on turn 2 - all the assaults were nicely lined-up with a juicy double from the Knights on some Zombie Trolls and my Ogres getting stuck into the Skeletons and Wights. My devastating attack wilted under a barrage of bad dice meaning the whole lot bounced off.  

The Knights were both deleted in the enemies turn 2 leaving the Ogres to spend a further 3 turns cutting through to secure 3 VPs on the left.  This was not helped by the Devastated Zombie Trolls hanging on for an additional turn after a double 1 for the nerve check to rout them.

Centrally the Undead's scary centre clashed with my Paladins and began to wear them down as I had expected. The slow progress of my flank attack meant by the end of turn 5 the Undead also had 3 VPs. One of mine was out of range so it all came down to a 1 VP objective on the Undead's currently unattended in the centre.    

I was able to grab the objective but moving second the Undead were able to propel their Mummies into range using magical Surging of the shambling bodies and so grab a 4-3 win.  The abject failure of my attack on the left doomed me from early on, as they would never be able to contest the central objectives. So a 4-3 loss with even amounts of  dead was a decent result.

The last move with the unclaimed objective at the top  

This secured a third territory fpor the Undead and opens up optins for the next game.