How does someone repel an attack in Dota Underlords?

I've been playing this game for a while now, and when there are two of us left, me having 30 hp and the enemy having 32hp, I won the attack thrice but instead of getting the victory the status keep saying "XXX repelled your attack".

Anyway I won the game me having 1hp vs the other player 2hp in the last round. But how does someone repel the attack thrice? It's impossible the other player has 3 aegis!

Solution 1:

On each PvP round, meaning not a loot round, every player faces a random opponent on their own board. In any given round, your units are fighting on two boards: defending your HP on your board, and attacking a random player on their own board.

The outcomes of these fights are not tied to each other in any way, other than using the same pieces. When a message shows that a player repelled your attack, it means that that player won on their own board, regardless of what happened on your board.

Repelling an attack causes no HP damage to the attacker, and the game only ends when all but one players have ran out of HP, it does not use a single-elimination format. When only two players are left, if they both manage to repel the enemy's attack, neither of them will lose HP and the game can keep stretching until one of them eventually loses.

Solution 2:

The other answer is now outdated. After the last update, August Update (#213), players now face each other head to head:

Head to Head
- Players are now paired off to fight directly against each other, and both take part in the same shared combat.

That means that your team isn't fighting two fights anymore at the same time.

Two players are paired off together now and they share the same combat, the player who wins will be the one who "repelled" the attack, although we're not seeing this word anymore. The player who lost will lose HP.

Update:

When the number of players not knocked out yet is odd, someone will be paired with a clone of another player. If that clone lost, there's no HP lost, and if it won, you'll see that "Player X has repelled an attack from Y". Where X is the clone.