Well this is an exciting piece of news as a New Year treat! We not only have the official announcement of Golden Demon at Adepticon this year, but also some changes to the categories and award format.
When you consider we got the official announcement about the 2024 Adepticon Golden Demon in the September prior to the event, having the 2025 event announced in January – five months later – feels like it has been left a little late. Thankfully Adepticon had spilled the beans on it being part of the event some time ago – which is good as you really don’t have a lot of time to get tickets for the event and most entries take multiple months to paint up.
Please can somebody get over the “nothing more than three months away” for Golden Demon announcements – I can understand it for miniature releases, but once an event like this is in the calendar isn’t not going anywhere and announcements in advance will mean more people attending.
Gripes aside, last year we saw a large number of changes to the categories which many painters didn’t like. I’m happy to say that we’re seeing a couple of tweaks this year which solves the vast majority of those items. I’m really happy to see that Dual has once more been separated out as it’s own category, out of all the changes this was the item that caused the most amount of frustration last year because Diorama and Dual have very different focal points. Next up we’re seeing the Underworlds warband be merged back into Age of Sigmar unit – it was always a strange choice to split this out into it’s own category (Warcry was still part of unit) and I’m happy to see it back with it’s fellow Sigmar units. Sadly vehicles appear to remain stuck alongside 40k Large Miniatures – because an Imperial Knight and Mortarion are clearly very similar?
Lastly we have a change to how some of the awards work. Golden Demon remains a best in show competition with a Gold, Silver and Bronze demon being awarded for each category (minus Young Blood and Open). Underneath this we’ve had a quite strange mixture of finalist pin badges, commended cards and more recently notable entry cards. It’s been confusing if you didn’t understand how it worked – however this year we’re seeing this moved around!
Outside the top trophies we now have Notable, Commended and Finalist awards – given out in that order! Finalist will be the final cut of the category which makes so much more sense to explain to people. Now what we don’t know is if we’re going to see a different kind of award be given out? Is this the end of the finalist pin badge in it’s current guise?
