Unboxing the D-Day Hobby League Box(es)

I recently posted up a picture on our Facebook feed of the contents of the Battlefront Hobby League kit, which generated quite a bit of interest on social media, rapidly followed by the rest of the Breakthrough Assault team asking what I planned to do with it! So, this article is to give you all some more information on the content and how I intend to put it in to action. There is more info in this video from Battlefront about the plans they have.

So what’s in the box?

The first thing to say is it came as two boxes of kit! After opening them, the thing to start with is to review the D-day Hobby League guide.  The guide provides some helpful hints and tips on how to get things set up and running and also sets out how the Hobby League fits into the overall Battlefront Late War journey and how it will feed in to the Late War Global Online Campaign being run by OnTableTop later this year. The guide also explains what all the other items in the box are and how to go about using them.

Next there is the Hobby League tracker sheet/poster to put up in your local store or club. The tracker doubles as an advertising poster and progress tracker. Once you have some participants signed up to, it’s time to gather everyone up and make use of the next group of items in the kit.

A single kit has enough initial items to provide ten players with a branded storage box to keep their unit cards in, a set of gaming tokens, which are an excellent additions for anyone who has just purchased one of the new late war starter armie and, finally, you have the Battle Plan cards allowing players to select their battle stance for use with the mission generator at the start of the game and listing all the scenarios that you can play when the cards are revealed.

The aim of all this is for players to collect and model a 100 point army and participate in some games.

To encourage this, as players progress through the Hobby League they can earn rewards either the branded Hobby League objective markers, you get four pairs in the kit, or Tactical Edge cards (two sets of  20 individual cards), these work like command cards and can boost your force by allowing re-rolls or allowing you to pass tests on lower scores a critical moments in a game.  The Tactical Edge card are rather like the generic sorts of Command Cards in the Mid War Command Card decks. Battlefront make several suggestions about how to give out rewards in the guide booklet.

So what am I going to do with the kit?

I play at a couple of clubs as well as at home so I have decided to run one Hobby League across all the locations where I play, as well as at my local games store, (The Games Shop in Aldershot, even if they don’t stock Flames of War on the shelves at present, there is plenty of other Battlefront products though), this means hopefully I will get a mix of older and newer players and be able to bring more gamer’s together.

For experienced players, they will earn additional rewards for bringing new players into the game whilst the new players will pick up rewards for collecting and painting their new force. Of course, some experienced players will choose the build a new army, or maybe just a few units as well, so have a chance to accumulate rewards that way as well.

To start out I am setting all participants the challenge to collect and assemble a 50 point force ready for mid August. I’ll be helping new players build and paint their models, as well as doing my own, and will be running a demo day on Saturday July 27th in Aldershot for local store members to get a look at Flames of War with the models I did for the Battlefront Open Day Beach Landing game.

Hopefully across these multiple locations there will be enough participants  to run a small 1 day gaming event in September, I’ll be posting updates on our Facebook feed as this progresses. Hopefully this inspires you to try running a Hobby League of your own or if you live in the general Aldershot/Guildford area and want to get involved without running it then feel free to reach out to me here at BtA. 

[There’s a human league joke somewhere to be had in all this… Lee]