The missus and I played the opening quest, First Blood, and it took about 1 hour 15 minutes to play. As I read the rule book I chose to be the Overlord and gave her complete choice over which heroes she wanted to use and how many. She chose 3, Avric, Jain and Widow Tarha. To say that the game was one sided is an understatement It was lot's of fun though.

Please feel free to correct anything wrong in the following explanation with regards to rules.

The way I played the Overseer was to just run my Goblins as fast as I could to the exit, that meant using 2 movement actions per goblin for a total of 10 movement points each. The Ettin 'Mauler' was brought down to meet the heroes in the crossroads and try to put the hurt on. As it turns out this was a big mistake as Avric can stun which meant that at the start of each activation turn for the Ettin all he could do was remove the stun card. So he became chain stunned for the entire game. (We know not to stack a condition on a single character/miniature).

The reanimate ability proved to be very useful, giving the heroes an extra body to attack passing goblins and put the hurt on the Ettin a little. Despite having no defense dice he managed to stay up for the entire game.

Overall this was a fun game, a good game that I feel has not been a waste of money. I can not wait to play it again, and if I can pry the missus away from Skyrim I am sure that a fun campaign is on the way.

Thanks for reading and leaving a comment if you do so

Note that First Blood favors the heroes: it is an introductory encounter, and the OL has quite a hard time to win it.
You were right to double move your gobs to get them out of the exit asap - and then spawn new ones.
But, usually, heroes rush to bash the first goblins, then have time to hit Mauler - who, you are right, should not seek confrontation (but, when cornered, well… he has a nasty club).
I really like this game too : it is fast, brutal, but has quite a lot of depth.
The quest objectives are varied, which also is interesting: heroes who are obsessed by killing monsters will lose, as that is not always their objective-

TooNu said:

First off, I think you mean Ashrian (Avric has only healing related abilities). Second, note that Ashrian's Heroic Ability Stuns minion monsters, which are the white ones, with three heroes Mauler is a master (red) Ettin and unaffected. Lastly, Stun does NOT take both actions to remove, you get 2 actions, use one to remove Stun, you still have the second action to bash the heroes (Stun says removing the card is the only action you may take "while you have this card", but once you remove it, you don't have the card anymore and its restriction doesn't apply).

First Blood is very hero-favored, I've seen the OL win it once when the heroes went on a X-streak, but since the reward in XP is the same win or lose, its outcome only decides which side chooses the first Act 1 quest to tackle.

Dam said:

Avric's hammer does have a surge to stun ability I think.

Yes, but requires A) a surge and B) that the attack does at least 1 dmg. Blue + Yellow vs 2 grey defense dice doesn't equal auto-stun each turn from what I've seen, even with two attacks. But even Stunned, playing Stun properly, Mauler can hit back.

Dam said:

Yea less likely that he could be stunned continuously.

I normally put mauler in as a roadblock that the goblins can run through (but players cant since its a hostile creature) and then play whatever cards that keeps him alive the longest or speeds the last goblins up the most.