[fxfan]

And how does one get a cheap FPGA board out of it? China? Any recommendations?

[TD-Linux]

Verilator is only a simulator, once you want to run it on a fpga you use yosys + nextpnr. The icestick is a popular and cheap choice to get started, there is also the TinyFPGA BX and iCEBreaker if you would like a few more features.