Thanks for the fun at L&L!

Whew! Sorry for the late reply, but travel & catching up with work this week kept me busy.

We played 20 point armies (supposedly you can do 25 points too). No large bases. I don't think anyone ran with light jacks/warbeasts either, but that is a possibility. You are not supposed to mix mercs in with other factions (although many people did that - we were doing a fast-and-furious demo, so some of the details were not quite clear). I ran Bane Knights (min), Hellslinger Phantom, and a Warwitch Siren for 20 points.

You nominate one of your models as your captain and he gets a card with some special rules. I took the card that gave +1 CMD and Unyielding to the captain (I don't remember the name of the card, sorry). I chose my Bane Knight leader as the captain to boost his armor further. Another card I thought about was one that would give +1 CMD and Concealment to the leader (I thought of making the Hellslinger my leader here). Speaking of the Hellslinger - incorporeal models get all of the movement bonuses of incorporeal, but they can be shot by non-magic weapons, but I believe those attacks lose a die on damage rolls (a little foggy on this - my opponent had magic guns with Thorn Gun Mages, so it didn't come up).

You get a hand of 5 cards at 20 points (maybe more at 25 points), but depending on your units/solos your hand size is lower. So the Hellslinger and the WW Siren both cost me one card, so my max hand size was 3 cards. You get to draw up to your hand size at the start of a round. My opponent ran 2 points down (18 point army) and didn't have fancy units/solos, so he got a hand size of 5. And for running points down, I believe he got to draw extra cards during the draw phase and discard back down to his hand size.

The cards have 2 kinds of effects one at the top and one at the bottom. The ones at the top are more powerful and you can only use one per turn. They do things like let models in your captain's command range ignore the firing into melee penalty for the turn. At the bottom of the card you get various abilities that you can use as many times as you have cards. Some of the effects available on the bottom of the cards (each card allows only one of these) include: bonus die on attack or damage roll, reroll (you can use these multiple times for one roll), "recovery" (my favorite, as I'll explain in a minute), and shake effects (I don't remember all of the abilities). Anyway, I found that while the abilities on the tops of the cards were powerful, I really liked the flexibility of using the abilities from the bottoms of the cards. My hand size being limited to 3 cards didn't give me as much variety to choose from, so I ended up focusing on the bottom abilities.

Why did I like the powers on the bottom of the cards? Well, when a model takes damage you roll 1d6. On a 1-2 the model is destroyed, on a 3-4 it takes a wound token and is knocked down, and on a 5-6 it is simply knocked down. If you get a second wound marker you are destroyed. This makes your infantry survive a little longer, which is nice. When a model is knocked down it gets cover from ranged attacks. So, what I decided to do was to protect my Hellslinger Phantom. My opponent would shoot him, and if I rolled a 1-4 on the death die, I'd play a card with the "recovery" ability on the bottom which let you change the number on any casualty roll to a 6 (merely knocked down). That was cool. Shoot my Hellslinger (DEF 15) and if you hit, I can play a card to make him knocked down with no damage and suddenly he has +4 DEF against your shooting - DEF 19 pretty hard to hit in most cases. That meant that if my opponent wanted to shoot him again, he'd need to play a card to get +1 die, and he was still shooting for 12+ on the roll. On my turn the Hellslinger stood up and kept going - you can see why I was -1 card to my hand size for bringing him, he was pretty annoying.

The scenario had attackers and defenders. He won the roll and chose to be the attacker, so I was given two objective markers that I placed (10" from my edge and 12" apart as I remember). The attacker got 6 bomb tokens, which he could distribute among his models. Attacker needed to place 3 bombs on the objectives and defender needed to stop him. It is a free action to pick up a bomb token (dropped by a model that is destroyed), but it takes an action to place it as a bomb. My opponent sent 3 bombs to each of the objectives and nearly dropped 3 on one of them. He got two on the marker (basically sacrificing guys to do it). In the end, he had one guy knocked down, with a wound marker on him, suffering from corrosion (another casualty roll, if it didn't go out), but with the last bomb marker near him and the objective. Assuming he survived the corrosion roll, he could have stood up, moved to pick up the bomb (free action) and move next to the objective and then use an action to place the bomb. The leader card he'd taken allowed one model per game to get an extra action, which would allow him to do all of this (I think it also gave +3 CMD). Anyway, corrosion didn't go out, he rolled a 1 on casualty and the model would die, so he played a reroll card (2-3 times I believe) to reroll the casualty roll and kept getting 1-4, which killed the model. Game over.

It will be pretty fast (once you know the rules). It's subject to lots of die rolls, which may turn some people off (too dicey to be "competitive"). My opponent had some bad streaks of die rolls, whereas I kept rolling 5-6 on casualty rolls for my models (knocked down, but no other effects). Anyway, I enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to seeing the full rules.

Good question. I'm afraid I didn't ask, and if an answer was given I didn't hear it. I suspect so, but perhaps with some kind of modification. Given how tough it can be to kill things, the Bane Warrior unit attachment bringing back a bunch of Warriors might really swing things in these low point games.