My BOYL 2025

 A quick BOYL post, if nothing else so that I can more easily remember which ones I've attended (it looks like my last was in 2023 2022, according to a bit of a camera photo search).

My gaming for the weekend was the Siege of Praag (Mordheim) where I played in the morning and evening scenarios. As with so many of the demonstration and participation games at BOYL it looked fantastic. The guys running it had learned from games they'd seen running previous years and worked out how to keep things flowing and actually get to a conclusion in the allotted time.

And my enjoyment was helped by my minotaur having a blast (and somewhat riding his luck) in the first scenario.

My minotaur happily facing the majority of a warband as it tries to cross one of the bridges. Meanwhile my actual "heroes" are having less luck nearby.

As is so often the case when playing a game you've not played in a while, game one was vaguely getting my head around the rules. For game two I thought I knew more what I was doing, but the dice were less in my favour and my tactical brain deserted me. My Norse got bogged down and eventually all but wiped out.

My Norse cross one of the bridges into Praag. What should have been an objective-winning position...

Another highlight was seeing the reproduction of the table featured in the WFB 3rd Edition rulebook, complete with the old plastic Fighting Fantasy ogres. The amount of work that must have gone into it is incredible, not just the modelling but sourcing the figures, and is indicative of the efforts that people make to have BOYL be such a success.

I've a rather tatty cardboard original of the Maisontaal monastery and have long been intending to make a new and somewhat more robust version, so I took plenty of reference pictures!

View of the "back" corner of the monastery, which gave Geoff some creative license for adding an extra breech

As always the Foundry display cabinets give new things to be discovered. The original Bagrian stood out to me this time for some reason!

The original Bagrian from The Vengeance of the Lichemaster

Looking forward to next year already!

Orc- and goblin-tober

Despite my grumbling about Mordheim in my last post the game did give me the motivation to get an orc painted in time for Orctober, as well as a goblin sidekick.

After my pasting last time I decided to try a fresh orc warband, and since armour is reassuringly expensive in the game I went hunting through my collection to find some unarmoured figures to bulk out the group.

As far as I can tell Citadel have never made an unarmoured orc archer so this chap with a crossbow got drafted in. I love the variety in the heads of the C16 orcs, and also their "everyday" quality, so I've pulled a few more to the front of my painting queue to give me more options for reinforcements or more to the point replacements... in true tradition of newly painted figures he didn't survive the battle, and my poor luck with the serious injuries rolls continued meaning he won't be back next time.

I particularly enjoyed painting the goblin, to me this era had just the right balance of sinister charm. I'm going for a brighter skin tone and more colourful clothing with the goblins compared to my orcs, I maybe could have gone with slightly brighter clothing but have erred on the side of caution. It'd be good to get one and or two more of these done as well, but realistically I don't think I'll get around to more for a while and frankly I find the prospect of painting a whole Fantasy Battle unit distinctly offputting. The fact that this chap was undercoated with the aim of going to BOYL '13 gives an idea of just how offputting...

Small, easily attainable warbands are definitely the key selling point of Mordheim to me!

Mordheim, in the springtime

Back in April (I said my next post would be late!) I got to try out this new-fangled Mordheim game that people seem to be talking about these days.

The attraction is obvious - I got to field a warband with just these guys:

And I must have enjoyed myself, as I only remembered to take one picture:

The carnival comes to town

But overall I think the game isn't quite for me.

The real sticking point in my mind is that the metagame just doesn't make sense. It's the same issue as with a Frostgrave campaign, or trying to play a linked series of Realm of Chaos games - it's suspension of disbelief-breaking that these warbands (or a subset from a small sample of warbands) keep on bumping into one another and fighting for the same old reasons. I mean, say they were really exploring and battling over one small-ish area, then surely the bigger, tougher warbands would just go around to the weaker warbands' bases, wipe them out and steal their stuff, and then go back to looting the city?

I'm over-simplifying a little of course, but this gives the idea of what's going on in the back of my mind while trying to get into the campaign.

In a similar vein, the wilderness supplement looked interesting at first, but the scenarios seem a bit off - to me they came across as something you might present to an old-school D&D group (with a full set of henchmen and bag-carriers) rather than a warband out to make their mark on the world.

So, much as I love not having to paint many figures, the game's a bit too small-scale for me.

A few things also bothered me about the rules themselves, which probably not surprisingly I viewed through a WFB lens.

One being the comparative weakness of armour: no different from WFB at its basics, but the relatively larger number of modifiers (from critical hits, to a character's strength, and from "normal" weapons such as axes) means that often it's negated.

The other being the lack of penalties for fighting with two weapons, meaning it's foolish not to go for the extra attack (although I did out of stubbornness). It ought to be something that only a "manic warrior" would do (to quote from the rulebook), and given that these are treasure hunters (who ought to value their hide) you'd think armour would be valued above hitting power. Given that the game world is vaguely early 16th century shields may well be going out of fashion, but to be replaced by body armour along with a long and pointy weapon, or expensive but extremely effective plate, not with a whole bunch of people taking the manic warrior route. But from a warband selection perspective two weapons is instead the "correct" choice.

Still, I will be back - the chance to roll some dice while pushing (a small number of) figures around the table calls for that. But I'll be pining for something larger-scale...