Welcome to initiative management 101 or better known as "How to not die as Scoundrel".





Isaac's design of this game is real neat. Because of the way enemies focus players by proximity, melee characters naturally suffer the most pain. To deal with this, each melee class either has a large HP pool (ie brute), or is has cards with impressive initiative numbers (scoundrel, mind theif).

Cool a psychic rat! Wait it starts with how much HP? 6?!

One trap new players fall into is they optimize their move by how much damage they can do or how many enemies they can hit without considering initiative values. This leads to some melee classes taking damage they cannot afford to take. For example Scoundrel says "Woah that archer is totally on her own, I should move fast next round and get my bonus damage on it!". When this is done carelessly, soft melee characters end up taking alot more damage than they should be.











Let's illustrate this with an example.





3 Bandit Guards, a Kleptomanic and the Rock guy from Fantastic four. This is a typical combat situation, kind of similar to the first room in Scenario 1. If this was a 4 player situation, just imagine the two other players fighting some bad guys elsewhere. You are the Kleptomaniac Scoundrel. Your teammate the Pidgeon poop covered rock dude signals that he's going to sit still and prepare to throw rocks at the bad guys next turn ( So how do you exploit initiative to avoid taking damage and nasty wound markers?Let's illustrate this with an example.This is a typical combat situation, kind of similar to the first room in Scenario 1. If this was a 4 player situation, just imagine the two other players fighting some bad guys elsewhere. You are the Kleptomaniac Scoundrel. Your teammate the Pidgeon poop covered rock dude signals that he's going to sit still and prepare to throw rocks at the bad guys next turn ( Backup Ammunition ).





So what's the play?





First things first, check what the bandits are like.









Lets assume these are normal bandits, at level 1 they move 3 and attack 2. If this was a higher player count, one of these would probably be Elite, so they'd actually move less. Great. So unless we pull a Move +1 card, these bandits normally wont make it to melee contact.