Iron Dwarf Ambush! Battlelore session

Old Warrior's Human/Goblin Pennant army on top, Young General's Dwarven/Human Standard army below

Young General and Old Warrior continued their long-running series of battles, marching through the Dwarven Battalion expansion at the moment.

Young General has developed a distinct distaste for the Goblinoids and prefers not to play that side of the matches these days, so Old Warrior seems destined to find a way to win with the green-skinned goons.

This battle wasn't going to be the start of that, however.

The Young General's Standard army was well organized and poised to strike at scenario start. As as been his recent policy, he spread his Lore masters evenly around the War Council with Level 1s occupying the Cleric, Rogue, Warrior and Wizard chairs and a Level 2 overall commander.

I want to believe that this vanilla strategy is flawed but in reality it has seemed to work well enough for him. The drawback to this approach are plain enough. He has a small hand of just 2 Lore cards, gives up having any Landmarks and forgoes taking advantage of any level bonuses that cards might provide. On the other hand, he can play ANY card without paying extra lore for it and having so many Lore masters dilutes the impact of a high level master on the other side. The total Lore deck will comprise at least 38 cards of which only 14 will belong to the Level 3 guy on the other side, whereas going with a Level 3 guy himself could result in a Lore Deck that has just 26 Lore Cards with perhaps only 8 that belong to the opponent's guy if the two sides pick different lore masters.

Old Warrior went with his usual Level 2, Commander, Level 1 Warrior and Level 3 other lore master, in this case the Rogue. This still seems like a reasonable selection in my view, providing a large hand of both Command and Lore cards, taking advantage of the many useful Warrior Lore cards and providing a Landmark. On the other hand, the fact of the matter is that this posture came up short yet again.

In this case the Pennant army started off with some decent cards and made some potentially good moves, but seemed to come out on the wrong side of the dice too often. As usual, the Dwarven units were quite dangerous due to their frequent battlebacks. Young General's tactical savvy continues to grow as he took advantage of some fortunate flag results to voluntarily retreat some Bold units that were under attack by multiple units into positions where the second attack was no longer possible.

It ended up being a hard-fought brawl, with the Dwarves coming out on top with a 6-4 flag ratio.

This seems like a more interesting scenario than the Axe and Spear scenario on the flip side of the scenario chart that came with the expansion.