A question came up in a game with my kids on the weekend. My son was the Overlord and had Brilliant Commander in play. When revealing a new room he wanted to upgrade one of the demons in the final room to boss, but there was already a boss demon. Is he allowed to do this anyway since there is no boss demon model available? I know he couldn't if he was spawning new monsters.

(This was further complicated by the fact that it was the scenario where the final room has three demons - one boss, two minions - and you are supposed to us a minion giant model as one of the demons. To which my son cleverly declared, well then there is a boss version - the red giant - to upgrade it to.)

Fang

howlingfang said:

Normally I would have said no, but I think your son has you there!

By rule, I believe you can't upgrade a figure if there are no available figures. However, I'm pretty sure that rule exists only so that players aren't forced to improvise figures in order to avoid handicapping one side, and not for any particular balance reason. And it is complicated by the fact that the base game quests were designed before they finalized the figure counts and so several of them already use more figures than are available and you do have to improvise something for those cases.