The definitive MESBG scenario tier-list

 

Pictured: Maelstrom deployment landing the Balrog in the corner far away from anything relevant, where I will kite it all game

As anyone who’s played more than a handful of MESBG games can tell you, the scenarios in the Matched Play Guide were not all created equal. That’s true on many levels: some favour hordes, others elites; some shooting, some mobility. That’s perfectly fine, and a great way to introduce tradeoffs in listbuilding. What is an issue is that some scenarios are less reliably fun than others, and it’s that issue that I’m ranking today. With a tier-list, of course, because this is the internet.

In particular, I’m going to be ranking them in terms of how reliably they produce an enjoyable game for both sides. Obviously no scenario always produces a good or bad game: a great opponent can make Contest against the Balrog feel enjoyable, while a scummy one can ruin even Fog of War. And of course, all scenarios have some matchups that just won’t be great fun for anyone. If you’re fielding the Fellowship against Goblintown in Domination then life will probably be pretty rough for you, but that’s not entirely Domination’s fault. However, some scenarios produce good games more often than others, and it’s where scenarios fall on that metric that will determine their placing today.

Starting right at the top, with scenarios that just make good games:

S-tier: I will veto to get this even when I shouldn’t

These scenarios are the ones that everyone loves to see in the tournament pack, and there probably shouldn't be any surprises here.

A lone Orc has snuck through to claim my terrain piece and secure the win in Fog of War

At the very top, we have the absolute gold that is Fog of War. This scenario has everything: fun mindgames working out who to attack and defend, enough incentive to move forward that sitting back and shooting is a trade-off, and a setup that doesn’t really favour any particular army. It’s good to have tougher secondary heroes, but more fragile ones can also be okay if you play them defensively. Games are kept tight by the fact that you don’t necessarily know who’s winning until the very end, and the terrain feature aspect tends to spread out armies and lead to tense mini-fights over certain terrain pieces. I’ve literally only had one bad game of this scenario, and that was because I’d brought the Vanquishers pre-nerf and hadn’t realised how oppressive they could be in some matchups. Absolutely perfect scenario, no notes.

My brave Orcs sacrifice their lives to destroy an enemy supply marker in the Queensland GT finals

Next up is a newer contender, but another great one: Destroy the Supplies. This has some of the same highlights as Fog of War, in that the deployment incentivises a shooting-focussed approach but the objectives want you moving forward and threatening the enemy. Shooting shines most in MESBG when there’s a legitimate trade-off attached to it, and that’s definitely the case here. There aren’t as many fun mindgames as Fog of War, but the six-objective structure means that every fight feels like it matters. Do you push forward early and try to burn a couple of the enemy supplies before they can retaliate, or do you play defensively and hope to sneak a couple fast models past them? There are a variety of different strategic options available, and all of them produce tight and interesting games. The one strike against this scenario (and the reason it’s in second place) is that there are a few armies like Defenders of the Shire and Goblintown that can produce non-games here. If 10 Goblin Mercenaries plus the Scribe’s Goblins start popping up in your backfield then you’re probably losing some supplies, and it’s unlikely that you can chop your way through the horde in time to retaliate. Still, a great scenario in any other matchups.

The objectives are nice and spread out, so my Spiders will get to zip all over the place

Finally, rounding out our top tier we have the classic Domination. All three objective games are pretty excellent, creating dramatic last-minute plays and allowing wins from behind, but Domination takes the cake for its flexible objective placement. That lets a player adopt more varied strategies than the ‘start on the centreline and brawl’ approaches of Capture and Control and Breakthrough, and again there are real trade-offs however you play it. Do you fight it out for a central triangle of three objectives, or spread out to contest them all? If you try the former then all it takes is a couple of enemies surviving in the wrong spots to put you behind on points, while the latter opens you up to defeat in detail. There’s no one right answer, and that’s the way it should be. This scenario does drop slightly below Supplies, however, because there are (in my opinion) a few more adverse matchups that can lead to non-games. Elite armies can win Supplies, in my experience, if they push forward aggressively enough to get amongst the enemy objectives early, but if you’re outnumbered by 30 models in Domination then it can be exceptionally hard to pull out the win. Still, the scenario is a classic for a reason, so it beats out its two neighbours in Pool 2.

 

A-tier: The good shit

These scenarios are still great, and I’d play them any day of the week. They may be slightly less reliable than the S-tier scenarios, but you’re generally still going to have a great time.

My beleaguered Breaking of the Fellowship desperately trying to get to the enemy relic against Erin's Spiders. They do not succeed

Retrieval is my first pick here, and it’s maybe a bit unexpected. But even putting aside nostalgia for childhood games of capture the flag, this scenario has a lot to recommend itself. There is an inherent tension in it between defending your own relic and attacking your opponent’s, and that tension makes for really interesting moments in games. This scenario often sees big clashes of both sides across the front, with each side manoeuvring to try and sneak a couple of fast models back to the opponent’s objective. Once that’s done the opponent then has to balance sending models back to head them off, while still putting pressure on the enemy relic and without stripping too many models out from the central fight. It’s a great dynamic, and produces some excellent games. The only reason this scenario fell from the top tier is that it suffers from a lesser version of the ‘Storm the Camp problem’. That basically means that in some matchups, a slower-but-shootier list might decide they’re best off just camping their relic and trying to Break the opponent with shooting. That’s a lot more incentivised here than in something like Destroy the Supplies (where it’s hard to reliably defend all your objectives), and it drops Retrieval down a tier on its own.

Warbands join the fray from all sides in Divide and Conquer

Next is another new one, in Divide and Conquer. Like a lot of the best scenarios going, this forces armies to adapt to unusual situations and really makes players think about their positioning. Players are generally torn between trying to consolidate their forces and taking advantage of their opponent being split up, all while considering the central objectives and the need to keep pressure on them. Shooting is often useless for half an army but excellent for the other half, and mobility is great for everyone. That last point does end up being a bit of an issue for the scenario: if your opponent has the mobility advantage then it can be easy for them to concentrate their whole army against half of yours, leading to some brutal wipeouts. It’s generally not totally a loss – if they’re fighting half your force in the corner then your other force should be holding all the objectives– but it can sometimes swing games enough that it’s a write-off from there. Even so, this is a solid scenario that reliably produces good games.

The game ends just in time for my Witch King/Sully list to eke out a win against the Bears in Capture and Control

Rounding out this tier we have the last two objective scenarios, Breakthrough and Capture and Control. There are both great for all the reasons that Domination is great, falling behind a little only in that they tend to force early aggression more and weaken other approaches. That’s also why I put Breakthrough narrowly ahead of Capture and Control, as it’s easier to come back from an early score deficit in that scenario. That allows players more flexibility in how they engage, and also makes the first few turns less critical. In any case, these are both great scenarios, favouring larger forces but not so overwhelmingly as to be unplayable with elites.

B-tier: Could be worse I suppose

Feeling like we’ve had a bit too much positivity so far? Don’t worry, that’s unlikely to be an issue from here on in.

Some bad rolls for Maelstrom deployment sees the Spider Queen cut off from her allies and taken out

This tier is dominated by Command the Battlefield and Hold Ground, two scenarios that I think are actually quite good but which suffer from a single, critical downside: Maelstrom deployment, and the dreaded roll for first-turn Priority. Whoever wins Priority deploys all (or nearly all) their warbands first, then their opponent gets to counter with everything they have using perfect information. That’s a massive swing, and immediately creates the possibility of some bad deployment rolls locking you out of the game. Command the Battlefield pulls ahead slightly here because that’s less of an issue: if a warband gets left isolated all on its own then it can spread out and claim a couple of table quarters. Hold Ground, on the other hand, really wants everyone to come in together to then March for the centre as fast as possible. If you can do that and your opponent can’t then it’s often very hard for them to come back, whereas in Command the Battlefield you still get interesting little skirmishes across the map for the different table quarters.

It turns out I don't even have any photos from tournament games of Assassination, so here's another Fog of War shot instead

The other entry in this tier is Assassination, which is basically just a worse Fog of War. The sneakiness of hidden targets and assassins is fun, but the removal of any location-based points immediately removes any downside to sitting back and shooting. For me, this makes a scenario worse because one player is always having a bad time: I challenge anyone to say they really enjoy slogging forward and getting shot repeatedly. It also can skew badly if you’ve got a vulnerable secondary hero, especially at low points when they might need to be your assassin as well. The hidden targets (and the fact that everyone can start on the 24” line) save this from C-tier, but it’s a narrow thing.

All three of these scenarios are quite a lot worse than Capture and Control (the worst A-tier scenario), and honestly I was tempted to shunt them down to C and leave B-tier blank. But as we’ll see in a moment, these two are definitely more reliable than the next tier down, so they get this spot.

C-tier: Losing at list-building

As Lords of Battle incentivises, the Uruk-hai camp in a defensive position and shoot me. Fun...

Lords of Battle has some similarities to Assassination in that it encourages camping in your backfield while at least allowing their opponent to start on the halfway line. It also has a cool rule around recovering Might with heroes, and generally has a consistent theme of killing stuff. The downside? It’s very easy for this to become a near auto-loss based on matchup alone. If you’ve got a classic Orc horde and your opponent has Elves, then you’ll be forced to walk forward for two turns while losing a handful of models to shooting each turn. Once you get there you can slog it out, but just by playing the game your opponent will be earning more points than you each turn. In short, to win against an elite list you need to dramatically outperform them in combat, and any kind of close contest will inevitably translate to a win for the Elves. And don’t get me started on all-hero lists, which break this so hard it’s hardly worthwhile playing. This scenario has its saving graces and can create enjoyable games, but if the two lists aren’t similar enough then it very rapidly becomes an unenjoyable time for both.

And now To the Death, where the Elves are the ones hiding between terrain and kiting me. Yay...

Remember how I defended Lords and Assassination because at least you could start at the halfway mark? What about if you had a scenario similarly focussed on killing, but with 12” deployment? And what if that scenario also created extra incentives to turtle for whichever player has a banner? Put those two things together and you get To the Death, famous for how consistently it plays out. If you have a banner and your opponent doesn’t, then you turtle. If you have more shooting than your opponent then you turtle even harder, peppering them as they slowly cross the field. If you happen to draw a bad matchup in To The Death then it can be an absolutely miserable time for all involved. 

In one particularly gruelling game at this tournament, a Goblin Town list had to cross the board against my Serpent Horde/Mordor force. I had a banner and they didn’t, so they walked forward for 5 turns while I hid in a corner and shot them again and again. Then they made it to my lines and bounced off my Black Númenóreans for another few turns, before Breaking and running away. No one had fun that game, least of all my opponent.

No tournament pics of Recon, but here's one from a fun game of Lords of Battle. It's a much more enjoyable scenario when no one has many bows

Close behind To the Death is Reconnoitre, a choice I found really difficult. On the one hand, Recon can be even more shooting-focussed than To the Death, with armies like Laketown often choosing just to sit back and shoot you while putting a wall of bodies between your troops and the board edge. It also introduces an element of randomness in the deployment that can completely throw games, makes slow armies (or anyone facing flying models) cry, and generally just takes ages for anything exciting to happen.

In saying all that, Recon can produce really interesting games when both players know how to play the scenario well, and armies that sit back and shoot are somewhat punished for doing so. If it was just 12” deployment then I think I’d really like Reconnoitre (it’d basically just become off-brand Destroy the Supplies, which is no bad thing). However, the random deployment feels like it doesn’t add anything to the scenario for me, and that ultimately knocked it down below To the Death.

Still, while these scenarios can produce unpleasant games with the wrong matchups, at least they have some fun matchups. The next two scenarios, on the other hand…

 

D-tier: A coin toss is balanced, right?

Do you like Heroic Move-offs? In particular, do you like them deciding the game every time? What about if the scenarios also have heaps of very skewed matchups? Would that help things? It wouldn’t? Well, then I guess I know what scenarios are going in this tier.

Angmar managed to pick up the prize with Gully in the first turn, and are now just chilling while they wait for a turn that they lose Priority. Riveting stuff

As you may have guessed, Seize the Prize is slammed straight down into D-tier. To start with, if you have a slower army and your opponent has the speed to wall you off from the prize, then that’s basically the game at deployment. Even if that isn’t the case, this game so frequently comes down to Heroic Move-offs in the first couple of turns. If you win, then you can get the relic and hide it behind your lines, bringing it out only when the way is clear for a gridiron-style end run. If you lose the Move-offs, then your opponent does that instead. In either case, the game is almost always over after the first couple of turns, and almost always decided by who wins the Move-offs in that time. The only time it isn’t is when someone rolls awfully to dig up the relic, which is just replacing one fifty/fifty roll with a different one. Bad times.

Aragorn gets eaten by Gully a couple of turns later, making this an even less interesting game of Contest than usual

Contest of Champions is perhaps a little less determined by coin tosses, but it’s still a truism that the way to win it is generally just to win the first couple of Heroic Move-offs. If you can do that then you can bog down their leader fighting something they can’t kill fast, while you pick up a half-dozen early kills, and the game is almost certainly decided. Moreover, the reason that this scenario falls behind Seize the Prize is that it can be absolutely miserable in some matchups. If your opponent has Azog and you have Galadriel then your best realistic outcome is losing something like 7:2. It’s not always quite as determined by who has the scarier leader as people think (many players don’t seem to realise that they can screen off their leader to avoid having to duel the enemy leader), but it’s still very easy to skew based on matchup. And as mentioned above, even when both sides do have similarly-powerful heroes it probably comes down to Heroic Move-offs anyway. Not ideal.

Still, at least these scenarios get started right away. That’s in stark contrast to our final category, right at the bottom of the pile…

 

E-tier: 2 hours of boredom and 3 minutes of fun

Oh no, the Relic happened to be right next to Sauron. Guess I'll probably lose

Heirlooms of Ages Past is undeniably the swingiest scenario in the entire game. To start with, it’s Maelstrom, with all the opportunities for uphill battles that entails. If you win priority on the first turn then your opponent is deploying with perfect information and you aren’t, simple as that. What then follows is a brief interlude of movement and interest, punctuated by opportunities to lose or win the game instantly as both sides race to dig up the various sites. Mobility and player skill factor in here (as well as the luck involved in good Maelstrom deployments), but ultimately if either player picks up the relic in this stage then it’s probably game over. If you roll that ‘6’ then you can generally just run the relic away while feeding your troops into the slaughter, and there is almost nothing your opponent can do about it. Fun for all involved.

Finally, even if the stars align and no one has lost at deployment or instantly won by picking up the relic, what then happens is that both players sit on one site each and don’t dig it up. At that stage the player without the banner has to trudge across the board and get shot to pieces in the hopes of getting a model to touch that last objective. If they succeed then there’s still a 1/6 chance that they lose anyway by digging up the relic in the middle of their opponent’s lines, and if they don’t then the relic pops up at the other site and they win.

Still, at least someone normally wins Heirlooms. That’s in stark contract to our final scenario, the very worst scenario in the entire game. Give it up for Storm the Camp!

The last game of Storm the Camp I played was on this board. Absolutely hellish

To start with, this scenario makes you deploy in opposing corners. In the absolute best-case scenario (where neither side has any significant shooting), that immediately guarantees a solid slog of 4-5 turns of crossing the board in which nothing happens. If you’re lucky your opponent will agree to just do 4 turns of movement at once to let you both effectively start from the midpoint of the board, but that’s very opponent-dependent.

And of course, that assumes that both armies are moving towards each other. In practice, if one side has a shooting advantage, then they will normally try to leverage that as much as possible. So as you slowly slog all the way across the board, from one corner to the other, you’ll take anywhere from 3 to 6 turns of shooting, being slowly whittled down to the point that you have no realistic way of breaking through to their camp. Things get even worse against proper gunlines, and worse still against siege weapons: playing against Assault on Helm’s Deep in Storm the Camp has to be one of the worst experiences possible in all wargaming. At least a classic 40k ‘I got tabled turn 1 before I could move’ experience ends quickly!

So eventually you make it across the board to them, with your army either shot to pieces or just very bored. At that stage you get to confront the exciting realisation that it’s nearly impossible to take an opponent’s camp from them. Defenders have the advantage of just needing to keep you out, they win ‘ties’ for the number of models in the camp, and they even auto-pass Courage tests while within the camp! So after all the slog to get here, what happens is either: if you got shot to pieces doing so, then you probably get slaughtered once you arrive; or, if you didn’t, then you both probably hack at each other until you’re each broken and then you get a draw.

That’s how things play out if you actually attempt to take your opponent’s camp. But if your opponent outshoots you then you’ll probably realise how unlikely that is, and that advancing forward just guarantees you get shot to pieces and lose. So your best option in any tournament game is in fact not to do so, but to keep your distance and play for a draw by running down the clock at range.

The outcome of this is that if one side has shooting then they both sit back and end up with a draw, while if they don’t have shooting then they both press forward and probably get a draw anyway. Any matchup in this scenario makes a draw the most likely outcome, and that is why I think Storm the Camp is the worst scenario in the game.

Yet another shot from a game of Fog of War. It's apparently a popular scenario for a reason!

Agree? Disagree? Think Storm the Camp is underrated, or surprised that Lords of Battle ended up so low? I’d love to hear from you, in the comments or on social media.

Until next time, may you always draw scenarios that are actually enjoyable!