The game begins with a showdown against the prologue White Lion. There are four survivors, 2 male and 2 female, who are equipped only with loin cloth armor and sharp chunks of rock called Founding Stones.

The first thing to do is to name my survivors. I suppose I could leave them nameless, but giving the survivors a name gives them a point of survival. I named my men Krahl and Derro and the women Sierra and Jaqueline.

Setup for the prologue fight puts the White Lion in the center of the board with the survivors 6 spaces away from it. I concentrate all the survivors on one side, hoping to gang up and overwhelm the lion before it can kill anyone.

The prologue lion always goes first and its first move is always to move forward and claw at a survivor. Since all of the survivors are in front of the lion and at an equal distance, I get to choose who the lion attacks. In a game with more than one person playing the role of monster controller gets passed around and choosing to attack your own character gives you a point of insanity, which is brain armor. The lion moves to attack Krahl and rolls two d10 to hit. The lion hits on a 2+. It's annoyingly more powerful than the survivors. Krahl is, unsurprisingly, hit twice and the location die shows that he's hit in the chest and the groin. Fortunately he is wearing his trusty loin cloth with gives him 1 armor in the groin, so he only takes a light wound to the chest at this time. The armor over his groin is gone now.

I open up my counterattack by having Derro throw his Founding Stone at the lion. Normally Founding Stones are melee weapons, but they can also be thrown once and do an auto-crit on the location they hit. This is a one time use, however, so Derro is left without a weapon. But the prologue lion's hit location deck always has his Strange Hand on top and a crit at this location allows the person who crit to spend a survival to tear the hand off and gain +1 permanent strength for being so awesome. Derro's crit with the Founding Stone means that he spends his survival and is now at 1 strength.

Krahl runs around the lion to get in its blind spot so the lion is easier to hit. He hits the lion once but fails to wound and the lion reacts by turning around to attack him. Krahl is hit two times and is knocked down by taking a second wound to the chest. It's not looking to good for Krahl.

Then Sierra steps up behind the lion and hits twice. She pulls the Fuzzy Groin and the Gut hit locations. Then, in a display of showing who the boss is, Sierra rolls two 10's making both of those hits critical. The critical hit on the Groin tears the lion's testicles right off and Sierra gets to keep them as a resource. Wow! But it also pisses the lion off and he now gets +1 damage on all his rolls and will only attack Sierra until she dies. Not so good. The crit to the gut causes the lion to vomit all over Sierra and she gets another basic resource from the sludge and +3 insanity because it's awesome. That's what the card says.

Sierra is on a timeline now, so Jaqueline moves up and attacks, not able to get into the monster's blind spot. She gets one hit and wounds. The lion is down 4 wounds from it's initial 9. Not a bad first turn.

Then the lion draws Terrifying Roar. No one has any courage at this point in the game, so everyone takes a point of brain damage from the roar (yay insanity) and flees 6 squares directly away. That's not good. The lion has a move of 6 but my survivors only move 5. Looks like it'll take an extra turn for most of them to get back. Then the lion targets "the furthest survivor in range" to make an attack against but says "screw that, this one chick tore my dick off. Let's kill her instead," and targets Sierra. In a great die roll, one of the lion's two attacks is a 1 so Sierra is only hit once. I use her survival to dodge the hit and she is now out of survival but gets to fight another round.

The way everyone ran and the lion chased, only Sierra and Jaqueline can make it back this turn. Sierra runs around to the lion's blind spot and misses twice. No bueno. But Jaqueline helps by running up and slashing the lion for another point of damage. 5 down, 4 to go.

Here's where it get's rough. The lion turns and pulls a massive attack that knocks Sierra down, breaks her armor and goes through to do a serious injury. Rolling low on the injury table here will kill her. But I rolled decent and she takes 2 blooding tokens and a penalty to accuracy for the rest of the fight. The lion's attack also gave her a bleeding token so she's up to 3 now. At 5 she bleeds out. And she also can't afford to get hit any more. And she's knocked down and doesn't get to fight this turn. The other three survivors rush up to the lion to try to save Sierra but after a lot of misses, only two wounds are put on the lion.

The lion reshuffles his AI deck and draws out claw again. He rolls and hits Sierra twice but these attacks are only 2 damage each and she hasn't taken damage to most of her locations. He hits her in the body and the feet, which are untouched so now both go to heavy damage. Sierra is pretty full of damage at this point though with 4 locations heavily damaged. The survivors need to take out the lion.

Sierra stands up and attacks but misses twice. Derro rushes in and without a weapon has to use his fists and teeth. He misses. Krahl slashes with his Founding Stone and gets one hit, which ends up as a wound. Finally, Jaqueline steps into the lion's blind spot and gets two hits, both of which end up wounding!

The prologue lion dies and Sierra is safe.

I get my regular and lion resources to start my pool of crafting materials and the survivors move towards a strange light in the distance, looking for safety.