Hi Brian,
Good to hear you figured it out. The output of your Boson simulator was indeed that it was unable to connect so this didn’t have anything to do with your AAA configuration 
Boson is nice to practice commands but it’s only a simulator so you can’t really test things.
If you don’t add anything to your VTY line(s) then it will use the default AAA group. If you want to use RADIUS / TACACS+ authentication for some things but not for your VTY lines, then you can also create a second group and use that for the VTY lines. Something like this:
SW1(config)#aaa authentication login VTY local
SW1(config)#line vty 0 4
SW1(config-line)#login authentication VTY
Also, when you are messing around with AAA…I like to enable debug AAA authentication:
SW1#debug aaa authentication
AAA Authentication debugging is on
It will show you when it’s trying to reach the TACACS+ server and such, it’s pretty useful.