Hey there.

At our last session we had a bit over a fight about a rule which comes down to this:

Does a Lieutenant gets his minions automatically at the begininning of the encounter?

The "fourth" rule on page 16 states that he can reinforce with those creatures.
On the other hand, the "first" rule states, that his card should be used as the encounter card and any minion on a encounter card is used for that encounter as per standard rules.

Any ideas, opinions or official rules on this?

Page 16 details the extra rules that apply for lieutenant encounters, but you also apply the rules for normal encounters.

Page 13 says "The leader's force of minions is a group of unnamed monsters that assist him...". So, you have to treat Lieutenant minions as minions in normal encounters and they do start the encounter on the board.

Sam_L said:

As Cogollo said, you do start with the minions named on the Lts card.

You also get to buy reinforcements form the minion types named on the Lt card (no masters).

Both rules apply and do not clash with each other.

Note that a Lt with 2 skeletons as minions can reinforce as many skeletons as there are available models through an encounter and is not limited to the starting numbers. He could easily have all six skeletons of the board after several turns, should the encounter last that long!

Corbon said:

Also- the OL can "reinforce" as many minions as he wants/can afford in a single turn. This is NOT limited by the 1 spawn card per turn rule. Spawn cards play in LT encounters ARE limited by 1 spawn rule and are spawned off the board like reinforcements and can be brought onto the board on the following OL turn.