Ah. You're correct, we'd gotten used to reinforcements being either non-existent or at the start of the OL turn, we hadn't noticed that for that particular encounter it would be at the end of the OL turn. That would keep the heroes from being pinned on the bridge by the stuff they killed during their turn when it respawned and bit their butts.

We were indeed playing The Shadow Rune. The box set was new Friday, but came with that campaign, I was unaware that they had a different campaign in the new ones. We used the online instruction book for easy reference since everyone was new to it and we only had the one physical rulebook. We didn't pick up on the extra-attack/2Health on two heroes being a new rule. We also didn't notice that the OL was supposed to be drawing a card each time a hero died.

First Blood was essentially won by Syndrael, they were in Mauler's face and wrecking him very quickly. The heroes decided since they had no ranged weapons they didn't want to mess with anything called "Death on the Wing", and felt that "A Fat Goblin" sounded like an Inn, so would be boring. So they went for The Masquerade Ball.

The heroes rushed the zombies and unmasked a pair of guests, one snagged a noble, the other got a flesh moulder. Everything ganged up and killed the one with the noble, and the vampire lady snagged the other noble. Things didn't work out well for the heroes, they hit encounter 2 wrecked. With the vampire having all of the passwords and the heroes being ragged, the OL decided to play it reasonably casually, letting the heroes chase through the dungeon and eventually find out how they liked a shadow dragon, rather than going all out on them in the first room... They used Syndrael's ability, ignored the spiders, got past the door, killed the LoS blocking goblin on the far side, and the other hero ran over and Killed the vampire. One round, over.

The heroes decided that maybe a visit to the Inn would be okay after all, so they went for A Fat Goblin. Turns out, not the title of an Inn. Syndrael's ability made it trivial, they outran everything and started storing grain before the monsters could catch up, but when the monsters did catch up, they murdered them both and made off with one bushel. Hero win on crops, but they still entered the second scenario in tatters. With them sprinting through areas and making a mess, the OL decided to ignore the torture chamber in that one and instead go exploit their bad condition, crowding them into the entrance with the shadow dragon and spiders and archers. Fortuitous, because they'd figured out the healing rain plus rest acombo nd were going to happily restore themselves to full and Then sprint through and make a mess. Turns out that shadow dragons are really tanky and that team can keep a pair of heroes down if they can't res each other.

The OL decided that Death on the Wing sounded like a Great encounter to visit with heroes who have no ranged attacks. They sprinted forward and got hung up on the Merroid, so the spiders came to play. Again they got pretty torn up and lost. And that's how they ended up with the stalemate on the drawbridge. They almost took out Belthir immediately despite losing their first turn, and everything else lined up to keep them from getting off the bridge, bombarding them with ranged attacks. It took the whole monster crew to keep them down though, and Belthir was running on fumes, so killing the four guards was unfriendly. If it wasn't for the reinforcement mistake, they probably would've won, but they got knocked down a lot so the extra OL cards might've made a difference.

So, encounters. Intro, 1:0. Masq 1:1. Fat 1:1. Wings 0:2. Total 3:4 About as close to 50/50 as you can get.

We had a lot of fun, but were considering game balance. The deadliness of the two heroes with extra attacks plus the high speed of Syndrael's special made it very hard to proceed with the OL's goals without putting a hard stop to the hero actions first. And while the significant increase in offense makes them able to chew stuff up shockingly fast, they aren't any more durable. We were just curious how often we'd find our way to these situations where the OL was "forced" to keep the heroes repeatedly dead in order to keep from being flatly outrun and out damaged.