Before deciding on a particular evaluation board, check how far they are supported by the "free" (as in beer) synthesis tools. The high-end chips are almost alw

Before deciding on a particular evaluation board, check how far they are supported by the "free" (as in beer) synthesis tools. The high-end chips are almost always excluded, but sometimes random low-end or retired parts, too! Also: Advanced features (support for high-speed serial (SATA/PCIe), embedded CPUs or advanced embedded logic-analyzer) are often subscription only. If in doubt, download and install the tool (several GB) and try to make a dummy project. Don't start with a complicated board (including DDR-RAM, digital video out, high-speed ADCs, ...) for a few 100$ but try a very simple one first for <$50 off eBay. Your first projects will be very simple. (Mine were and still are.) Try to learn the command-line tools as early as possible, so that your VHDL (or Verilog) sources are well structured in a source-control repository -- and builds are reproducibly created by make or maybe some build shell-scripts. The integrated development tools (with graphical configuration wizards for everything) are great for exploration, but a nightmare for proper configuration management, they produce way too much undecipherable junk.