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!

Firing the blog up again

Having come home from BOYL 2019 all revved up to do more hobby stuff I instead got fixated on the then newly-released World of Warcraft Classic.

I've been keeping tabs on the hobby via social media and hopefully now I'm slowly dragging myself out of computer gaming to proper gaming again...! Social media has been a bit of a roller coaster over the last several years, there are older posts on this blog which reference discussions on G+, now sadly long gone. I had a decent hobby feed on Twitter / X for a while, and now I'm pretty active on Bluesky since Twitter and its owner became unbearable.

The lesson from all of this seems that your own blog (or whatever) is pretty important as a long term record, and also that it's worth using it to make decent notes of stuff that you liked as the originals may go away at no notice. So I thought I'd fire up this blog, and I was pleased to see that a fair bit of my old blogroll is still active (so there's another bunch of stuff that I'd been missing).

Trying to get my head around this tech again. One of my guys from the long-ago Fallout game

I need to work out my actual gaming and painting plan, but back in October I made a start on some Orks, partly for a longer-term project that I have in mind but also to check I still knew which end of a brush to hold.

 

Two fairly basic 40k Orks. Not proper Oldhammer but I had them to hand