After missing that roll, Mike's luck continued to go downhill. I sent a Chraal to base the Champ in case it rallied, but it didn't. The routing Samurai ran off the board. A skeleton critted the other Samurai, and then the Chraal routed that one too. Overall, Mike failed three rout checks and two rally checks, which is just poor luck. Admittedly, two of the rout checks were made out of command, which might have been avoided. But still, it's bad luck.

With nobody on my side of the board left to attack, the Chraals moved in on Ryld, who had been busy kicking the crap out of my Green Dragon for two rounds.

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I decide to move up a Chraal to breathe on the Samurai and Orc Champ.
Seemed like a good idea at the time! (click to enlarge)
But, it opens up a hole where the Champ can move around to my backfield.
The new position of the Champ is circled in red. (click to enlarge)
The Champ moves up and scores a crit on the Blackguard! Ouch. Note that Mike has
decided not to charge, so that he ends up in a better position. Nice play! (click to enlarge)
But the OOC Champ fails morale, and hightails it for the border. I send a Chraal
after him to make sure the door hits him in the butt on the way out. (click to enlarge)
Things are looking pretty grim for Mike at this point, when his second Samurai routs.
Both the Samurai and the Champ would have made the saves if they'd been in command. (click to enlarge)

Mike's Samurai fails morale, and runs to a spot one square from the exit. That makes me gain some confidence, and so I decide it'd be a great idea to move up my last unactivated Chraal and breathe on the other Samurai and the Orc Champ. The Champ failed the save, and I was happy about that for maybe two seconds, which was the amount of time it took for Mike to immediately double-move the Champ through the hole I'd just created in my defense. He ended up a mere three squares from my Blackguard.

Now, I can't claim I didn't see it coming. I knew if I opened that hole, he'd move through it. But some part of me thought, "Hey, he'll be out of command, and I'll be able to move a Chraal around to kill the Champ pretty quick anyway." This was not smart thinking, for many reasons, but particularly not in light of what happened next.1

Mike won initiative, and made the obvious choice to move the Champ up and swing. He wisely chose to forego the charge, in favor of getting cover from my Chraal's melee reach. Then, he rolled the attack... and it was a 20.

The groan from the crowd was loud and long. I just deflated. At that point, I thought the game was lost for sure. My Blackguard is now at 20 hp, based by an Orc Champion with 60 hp and a bad attitude.

I passed the morale check with the Blackguard, and took a minute to consider my options. My first thought was to heal the Blackguard and move away, taking another AOO and ending up 4 squares away with 5 hp. But I couldn't find a square that would be safe enough to move to, and I had an irrational fear that Mike would crit again on the AOO. My next thought was to move the blue-dot Chraal around the long way to flank with the Blackguard, which would allow a better chance to hit and also trigger the Blackguard's sneak attack. In hindsight, this plan was the best one, but at the time I rejected it because it meant the Chraal would need to take an AOO from the Champ to get the flank. That clearly is no reason to reject a plan that may prevent losing the game outright, but I guess I was rattled. In any event, I decided to simply swing away with the Blackguard and take my chances. The Champ was OOC, and so I was just going to hope Mike failed the morale check. The Blackguard hit twice (thankfully) and Mike's d20 came up 11 — a failure!

Tournament Report — 2005 D&D Miniatures Championship
Footnotes
1 With the benefit of hindsight, I think it was unnecessary to send the dragon to the library on round one. I should have known that facing a CE band, the game wouldn't be decided on points. It would have been nice to have the dragon in reserve when the Champ came in the backdoor, instead of having him halfway across the board acting like a training dummy for Ryld. But who knows, maybe if the dragon hadn't been there, Mike would have moved Ryld up closer before the critical morale save of the Orc Champ. Hard to say. (back to text)