The Board Is Set: How to Play To the Death

Good morning gamers,

We're starting our fourth round of scenario analysis posts and we're tackling Pool 4 for the next three weeks. When I got started playing MESBG (LOTR SBG back then), the scenarios that eventually made up Pool 4 (the precursors for To the Death, Lords of Battle, and Contest of Champions) were the most straight-forward and our gaming group played them a lot. We also learned a lot about how powerful archers could be (especially back when volley fire was a thing), how great being D6 was, and how important the amount of terrain on the board was. These are all good things for new players to learn . . .

. . . but it can also be unfun if you don't know how important all of these things are and your opponent does know. So today, we're going to begin by looking at what the distinctives of Pool 4 are (you can skip this summary section by clicking here if you want) and then get into what I consider to be the least fun of the three scenarios: To the Death.

Pool 4: Killing Lots of Models

The previous three pools have mostly involved controlling certain points on the map (Pools 1-2) and having enough speed to get to an object or set of objects (Pool 3). While your killing power has value in these scenarios (either for holding or securing objectives - or for punching a hole through the enemy to get to their objectives), there is no pool where your killing power is more important than in Pool 4.

In two of the scenarios (Lords of Battle and Contest of Champions), players have to do a bit more recordkeeping than normal and have to keep track of the wounds they deal to their opponent and the Fate points that are spent by their opponent's heroes (Lords of Battle) or the number of kills their army leader gets in melee (Contest of Champions). Both of these scenarios also allow the armies to start up close to each other if they want to, so things can very quickly become a blood bath . . . which some armies welcome gladly.

Both of these scenarios also give 1-3 VPs for breaking the enemy army, but To the Death gives a whopping 3-5 VPs for breaking the enemy - and an extra 2 VPs if you quarter the enemy! If your army isn't able to break the enemy in any of these scenarios, you're going to be hurting . . . and particularly so in To the Death.

Whether you break the enemy matters very little in Pool 2 and only has moderate value (1-3 VPs) in the other two pools we've viewed so far, but in Pool 4, breaking the enemy is a must. Not only is it worth a lot of VPs in To the Death, but an army that doesn't break the enemy probably hasn't killed a lot of models, which means your opponent is probably beating you in the kill count categories . . . the VPs can stack up pretty quickly.

As a result, some of the themes that make armies good at this particular scenario pool include the ability to do mass damage to the enemy (usually with shooting, but don't sleep on things like impact hits, cavalry charges, and mass Heroic Combats), really high defense (mostly to mitigate these mass damage attempts), army-wide speed boosts to enable you to get into battle quickly (Heroic March and War Drums for infantry-heavy lists), and elite profiles (so you can win close match-ups). You don't have to follow these archetypes, but they happen to be pretty effective.

The greatest advantage of this pool is you can explain it easily to new players: kill things. Kill all the things. Don't stop killing the things until the things have all been killed. Actually DOING this, however, can be quite difficult and can make skew lists (armies that lean hard into shooting, impact hits, D7+, and all-cavalry armies) more appealing than balanced lists.

Okay, let's take a look at the first of these scenarios, To the Death.

To the Death

This scenario is old - like, it's REALLY old (going back to the One Rulebook and the Legions of Middle-Earth days). The scoring VPs are really simple - 3-5 VPs for breaking the enemy, 2 VPs for quartering the enemy, 1-3 VPs for wounding/killing the enemy army leader, and 1-2 VPs for having a banner (yes, this is the third and final scenario that rewards you for having a banner).

To state this a little differently, 7 of the possible 12 VPs are tied up in quartering the enemy . . . so you need to be able to kill things. If you want a slice of the other 5 VPs, you have to kill off the enemy army leader and have a banner present - which means the lists that like this scenario the most have army leaders that are hard to kill (either because they can be tucked in a corner without loss or because they have high Defense/Wound stats and are just difficult to beat up) and have a banner (either on a hero that's hard to kill or on a warrior who can be spared and tucked away). If neither side can break each other, a team with a banner alive that can kill the enemy banner will win 2-0 - and if both armies tuck away their banners, both sides have a 1-1 draw.

Now this leads to my biggest critique of the scenario: forces that fear being broken by the enemy AND have a banner are incentivised to not play the game and hide the entire time. It's an honest strategy for winning 2-0 or drawing 1-1 when you would otherwise have a best outcome of 2-5 (if you're broken and keep your banner/army leader safe) and a worst outcome of 0-12 (if you're quartered, your army leader is killed, and your banner dies/flees). It makes total sense to hide behind the fattest terrain possible and shoot with whatever bows you have from safe-ish positions rather than make a contest of it . . . and there's nothing in the deployment that helps either side get to each other quickly, so about half of a To the Death game can be spent just GETTING to the other army . . . or not.

The other two scenarios in this pool don't have this conundrum - you can deploy on the centerline in both of them and honestly, it makes both of those more of a game in the end. Either side (or both sides) CAN deploy in the rear of their deployment zones if they want to in Lords of Battle (as we'll see next time), but you can choose to deploy forward if you want to.

Enough critique though - this is one of two scenarios that gives an army 5 VPs for breaking the enemy without being broken and is the only scenario to give an army additional VPs for quartering the foe, so on some level, if you like smashing things up, this is a great scenario for you. Understand that it rewards the player who does it better than the other, though, so while you might have a world-thumping army, if your opponent can thump you first/better, there's not much recourse for you.

Okay, let's talk strategies . . .

Strategy #1: Banner-Gunline

This is ALMOST as boring as it gets, but since you know you have at least 24" of gap between you and your opponent, taking a lot of shooting weapons and at least one real banner is a great way to approach this scenario. Most gunlines aren't actually all that dangerous - I covered in a previous math post that to expect 1 wound/turn, most armies will need 12-18 bows . . . and at most points levels, a lot of armies are going to just barely get the minimum of 12. If you don't move and shoot, a lot of armies can expect to deal one wound/turn with their shooting . . . but that's not going to deter a super horde from getting to you (nor will it break the enemy on its own).

Having the banner makes the biggest difference - if your opponent has an army that can't take a banner (like Goblin-town) or chose not to take a banner (either innately in the list or with an alliance), you can not only start with a 2-0 victory in hand, but you can also force your opponent to do the walking and come to you. If you have 10-12 bows in your list (not hard to get once you have 35-40 models in your list), you'll need to decide if you can win a "shooting war" with your opponent. If you can, stand and shoot (leaving some room to slowly retreat - often referred to as "kiting" - to buy yourself an extra turn of shooting).

You'll also want to focus your fire on one part of the board - four wounds in four parts of the enemy's battle line isn't really going to change anything, but four wounds all in one part of the battle line can threaten to break a part of the enemy. Shooting very rarely breaks your opponent's force on its own (though I know from experience that it can . . .), so you want to use your shooting to make breaking your opponent easier once you get into melee. Reducing a small hit squad to nothing so it can be quickly cleaned up and you can then turn to flanking your opponent's other formations is a really good strategy.

But if you can't win the shooting war, you have two options: advance and hope you can close before getting shot to death or hide. That's it. If you want to do the former better, you'll want to invest in . . .

Strategy #2: Speed and High Defense

Some armies don't have great shooting (like Easterlings, whose archers are fine) - and others don't have any real shooting at all (the Army of Thror only has 6" range throwing axes). If you're playing one of these armies - both of which have high defense and access to Heroic March (and Easterlings have War Drums) - you might say, "Hose it, full steam ahead!" If you can close with the enemy fast enough, most armies are not going to be able to fill D6 Easterlings or D7-8 Dwarves with enough holes to make a difference before they hit. And since most shooting models can't reach D6, when you finally DO hit, all those shooting models will either be hiding behind their melee friends or they'll be pretty easy to wound (4s or 5s).

Heroic March is the simplest way to do this strategy, but keep in mind that it's quite hard to fit your entire army within a 6" Heroic March radius (though you can find two formations that try to maximize on this radius here and here). Most March heroes only have 2 Might points (some have 1, others have 3+), so if you know you might draw To the Death and don't have a strong shooting corps of your own, you might very well want to have two March heroes so that you know you can close the distance quickly (or if you want to make sure you don't have a hero who's depleted of Might).

Some armies don't have great shooting and don't have high defense or speed, and if you happen to be one of those factions, you can try . . .

Strategy #3: Hiding with a Banner

While the banner/gunline strategy is almost the most boring strategy, this one IS the most boring strategy. Your plan is literally to hide from your opponent. Yes, this isn't going to be satisfying for your opponent, but I'll tell you right now: if you have to run to the enemy with lightly-armored troops and they have the superior shooting firepower . . . it's not going to be any fun for you. So instead, use terrain to your advantage and mitigate your losses as best you can to avoid being broken. Avoid being charged by the enemy unless you can get a numerical advantage on your opponent and charge one section of his force.

The biggest thing I'd communicate to your opponent if you feel like you've been backed into this corner is the following: you want to have a game too - so he needs to come to you and give you one. If you both have banners, you can shake hands and say, "It's a draw", tell the TO so it can be recorded, and then you both charge with reckless abandon, knowing that your scores are secure. No one needs to get mad . . .

Of course, this strategy also works best if you have an actual banner, since you can have a 1-1 draw if you both have banners - and can actually sit on a 2-0 win if you have a banner and your opponent doesn't. If your opponent wants you to come out, you can simply say, "I'm currently winning - you'll need to come get me if you want a win." There's nothing wrong with this plan at all - even though it seems cheeky. If you don't have a banner . . . I'd highly recommend telling your opponent, "Okay, I would stay away from you as best I could to avoid being broken - so instead of playing that out, how about you get a 2-0 win and we just throw down. Sound good?" It'll be a loss, but it'll also be more enjoyable for both players . . . and that's kind of the goal of MESBG (and tabletop gaming in general).

Conclusion

If that last section left a bad taste in your mouth, I don't blame you - it's why I don't care for this scenario that much. Next time, we'll be looking at a similar scenario (but one that I think is much better): Lords of Battle. It's still very much a slugfest scenario - and it can even be very one-sided - but there's a lot of agency for scoring points in it and it's much harder to get a cheesy win/draw from it (though that does exist). Find out how the strategies change for this scenario next time - and until then, happy hobbying!