The Lava Bridge of DOOOOOOOOOOM! Eager to reclaim their realm beneath the mountain, a party of dwarves sets out for ... [Actually, I'm too tired to write a back-story right now. Here's a map, have fun! Some hints below the image.] . . . Hints / Spoilers You can stall the goblins by leaving a character two steps in front of the wave. They'll push forward next to him, and then he can run just beyond their reach. If they're advancing to quickly, you may have to sacrifice a character to hold them back. During the first few turns, unless you're holding more movement cards than you can keep, end the round whenever the AI passes early. The goblins usually hold 3-4 movement cards, and will quickly catch you if they're not forced to discard some. Send your heroes against the troll one by one, otherwise its multi-hits will exhaust your blocks (and health) all at once. You can get to 10 VPs by kills, too, so don't camp the victory squares if the goblins reach the island. You'll die quickly unless you stall them at the narrow passageways.
Interesting! 1) I expected the bridge walls to be Blocking terrain, so felt a bit cheated when massing my forces inside the protective walls did nothing. 2) I won by attacking the troll and then the goblin shredders, largely ignoring the rest of the board. Am not sure if you meant for that to be possible, but it seemed easier than running up the bridge.
The lanterns are blocking terrain. Unfortunately, there wasn't a better "low bridge wall" texture, but I may go back and trade in artistic value for clarity. Heh, that's a valid alternative strategy, although I've found it to be dependent on good draws and an early troll kill. I may make it more difficult to camp by adding an extra fire sprite on each side.
There is a wall tile that doesn't have the heavy black line. There's also the rope railings from the tree fort maps (forest decal palette).
I played the old version. I don't think the map works too well at the moment. I basically had the same experience as Farbs, moved forward, killed the ogre, noticed the shredders were soon going to run onto the bridge, so I turned back to kill them all instead of being attacked by them and the sprites.
In the new version, the extra fire sprites whittle away your health more quickly. I also removed one row of difficult terrain from the end of the bridge, which seem to encourage the burning skeletons to approach the bridge and start casting fireballs.
But that just means I have even less incentive to trek across the bridge right? The AI gets more victory points, I get in range of the frost guys, which can easily shut my chars down and the shredders will catch up with me anyway. Seems beating up some shredders has better odds of winning.
Where exactly are you confronting the goblins? The fire sprites have every bridge square covered (multiple times over), and can toss fireballs to the starting island. The frost sprites can hit every bridge square except the two between the middle set of statues. Thus, you're always in range of the sprites. However, the frost sprites don't present much of a threat because their deck contains only 4/21 Frost Jolts (their only spell with range to the bridge), they draw only two cards per turn (so on average, they'll cast 1 Frost Jolt every 2-3 turns), and encumber gets bumped off by fire attachments and your own buffs. If they get lucky, they might stall one of the dwarves, but that's almost a necessary strategy to delay the goblins anyways.
Since it isn't obvious that running the gauntlet of sprites is not very damaging, I guess I'll move them back towards the starting island.
There's one major issue with this scenario. Those Goblin Shredders draw 10 cards per round which will cause the game to freeze. I tested it once, and it did in fact freeze, right when the cards were being dealt. It has been my experience that custom scenarios tend to freeze sometimes if one or more creatures draw more than 6 cards per round. If you want to see this scenario in MM, you should probably do something about this. Maybe replace the Goblins with something more dangerous that you only need a couple.
