Seamus vs Wong

Played a game the other day with Seamus vs the Gremlin's Master Wong. It was still a loss, but I managed to get a decent amount of VPs (6), unfortunately, I could not prevent my opponent from scoring 9VP's.

It was an interesting game, and I had fun. It was my first time facing Wong (and his assistant), as well as 3 little pigs that go boom. I had to laugh when my opponent told me about the pieces... the one model that I have the hardest time with (Pere) the one that explodes, my opponent basically built an entire army that explodes.

As usual, I made a bunch of "mistakes" with this game.
In my defense, I was faced with several new models that I had never heard of, so it was a huge learning curve. My biggest problem, was that Wong tore up my models on turn 2! He had some ability (or the assistant did, I can't recall), that brought all models within 6" into base to base contact with my Izamu. At which point, he unleashed a series of about 5 attacks that all did 2-4 damage to everyone. At first, I thought, 2-3 damage isn't too bad, so didn't bother cheating to defend against, but then I found myself cheating on the damages, whereas I SHOULD have cheating on the 'to hit' instead. I think at the start of turn 3, most of my faction was destroyed. All of those back-to-back small damages added up quickly.

Another mistake (I think?) is that I realized after playing this game... almost all of these games that I'm losing are against ranged attacks. I'm finding that I'm usually able to move 1-2 models up to half the board (to get schemes/strats), while the rest of my models are usually within 6" of where I initially deployed them. I think the two games where I won (against Lilith) were when I was actually engaged in melee more often. There's got to be a connection here - am I playing too reserved? should I concentrate more of getting my models further up the board? That sounds dangerous to me though, because basically, I too have a ranged army.

Lastly - a bit of good news... I FINALLY got my hands on the new full sized RULEBOOK!!! It's taken months of patiently waiting, but it finally arrived via UPS last night. NOW, maybe I can start to learn more about what my opponents are capable of and can think a bit more as to how to defend against them.