BOYL 2019 - some thoughts

BOYL has been and gone and I've finally found time to catch my breath. Given nearly two weeks have passed there's not much point in a pics and appreciation post so instead to cover that off I'll link to Asslessman's review on his Leadplague blog and an overview of the Saturday on Shadowkings (the only day I was able to attend this year).

I wanted though to set down my main impressions of the day. It also set off some broader thoughts about the games that work well and not so well at BOYL but that's a topic for another post. First to mention Warmaster, which I'm sure most people reading this have heard of, as indeed had I. Seeing it in action on this magnificent table was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. I'm increasingly becoming convinced that I want to treat WFB as a large skirmish game so I'd be keen to give Warmaster a go at scratching the "ranked up units" itch.

The thing I actually played though was the Realm of Chaos table, which was a good game but not the one I expected. There was lots going on on the table, with warpstone lumps bringing in extra mutations, shrines and other landmarks to interact with and civilians to capture.

Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves with fun goings on, outrageous dice rolls but mostly just a background for admiring little lead people and generally sharing the hobby with other like-minded gamers. My regretful conclusion though is that Realm of Chaos isn't the game for me... I love the extra detail and background the books bring, and the warband generation and advancement aspect is undoubtedly fun. However the battles are what sink it for me - with the small size of the warbands and the relative power of the champions after even a couple of rewards or mutations it very much fits into the Herohammer mould, which just isn't my thing.

Rather than ending on a negative note I wanted to mention in passing one magical aspect of BOYL which is that of having the creators wandering the venue. Tony Ackland was there with some of his portfolio, John Blanche judged the painting competition, Rick Priestley and Nigel Stillman watched games being played with their rules (sometimes several editions at once!), Kev Adams was sculpting for charity and of course the Ansells host the whole thing. It makes for a slightly surreal but very special day.

Are we the baddies?

One of the warbands I rolled up for BOYL has a dark elf champion. Since he gets chaos armour as a reward I needed to find an elf-type figure in heavy armour which was a bit of a struggle. I settled on the rather lovely Evil Knight from Midlam Miniatures. He's slightly too tall which I'm doing my best to get over, a bigger issue was the theatrical raised fist which I resolved by repositioning it slightly, drilling through it and giving him a halbard to hold.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to paint a classic Khorne colour scheme - usually I try to go for generic schemes to give me flexibility but I can't see me using this figure for anything else, as a non-Khorne elf champion (without chaos armour) I can represent with the figure on the left.

I don't think I've put him up on the blog before, I finished him off after BOYL a few years ago but forgot to post about him when I got back. I see dark elves as embittered exiled sea / high elves so he's a standard elf warrior with gloomy, but again generic, colours, and a shield design out of the high elf list in Warhammer Armies.

Let's see how my new Khorne champion fairs tomorrow!

Four human followers of chaos

So I did manage to finish these in time for BOYL... now I have just one champion to complete and I'm ready!

Comparing the Slaves to Darkness and Lost and the Damned followers tables is interesting. For humans the former gives the option of light or heavy armour, a spear or a bow, and a shield. The latter table is "slightly different ... and better reflects the current range of Citadel Miniatures" or, to put another way, better reflects our setting.

Previously when I've generated human followers I've gone with the heavy armour option so I could use my chaos warrior miniatures. I wanted instead to get some bow-armed figures painted to give me more tactical options, as running a very small warband can be a bit dull.

The only humans I have with shields and bows are Khan on the right from the C01 Barbarians range, and a chaos thug which I didn't want to use as he has a near-identical posture. They're a bit of a mixed bag but I think that's fair enough for the collection of followers who might end up in a champion's retinue: the Marauder thug is clearly headed down that path while the two Renaissance archers are probably more recent converts from one of the backgrounds that the Lost and the Damned table provides - brigands or unemployed mercenaries perhaps.

They're very different sizes - the classic Citadel / Marauder figures being much bulker and the Front Rank archer (third from left) noticably skinnier as well as slightly taller. The Foundry (ex-Citadel) archer on the left is really quite tiny, after I first bought these my feeling was that actually they were too small to use but I'm coming around to the odd sizes being natural human variation. He's been modified with a dark ages warrior head to make the historical figures look less orderly, of all of them I think I'm happiest with how he's come out.

Now to try and finish my spare champion...