What's in the box?

I've wanted to revamp my storage and transport solution for my miniatures for a while. While planning that out I reckoned I could fit all my Warcaster stuff in a single KR tray. I wanted to include the rulebook, larger cards, and lots of small slots for magnetised weapons. Initially I tried to plan out a tray with a bunch of large and small slots by hand, drawing lines directly on a foam block. But I've noticed that it's easier to cut clean lines when tracing along a paper template, than when manually trying to follow a line marked directly onto the foam. So I ended up creating a template on my computer and printing it out. I pinned it to the foam block with tailer pins, cut out the unwanted areas of the template while it was attached to the foam, and then traced the template on the foam cutter. Finally I glued the base on.

One thing about Warcaster is that it has a lot of cards, of several different types. liked the idea of an organiser of sorts, that would keep the different types separate. I considered milling or printing a box for cards, but then I hit on a different idea. I had replaced the messy block of foam I used in my earlier experiments with a new one, and initially I didn't think there was anything much I could do with it. But after some thought I realised I could cut out the messy slots to create two large rectangular holes, big enough to hold cards lying on their sides. I could then glue in dividers (which I ended up making from the same pieces I had cut out, so that was nice). This would leave enough room in the middle for some smaller slots, which I ultimately used for storing even more cards, and some small token boxes.

It was a messy job, with lots of false starts and repairs required, but hey: it was a learning experience. For example, I tried to trim the excess off the bottom sheet with my foam cutter, but ultimately found it easier to just use a knife. The cards are a little bit awkward to fit in place as the corners of cards tend to grab the porus foam and pull the card out of place, but it basically works, and that's good enough this time. I might replace it in the long run, but it will do for now.

By the way, I was able to add two 30x30mm slots between all the cards holder slots. While these could be used for miniatures, what I really wanted was room to store gaming tokens. I could of course have just dropped the little plastic baggies I was using to hold tokens into the slots, but me being me I had to complicate matters. So I went and designed some combination scatter-terrain/token-boxes to perfectly fit into the space.

One last little tweak I made was to add risers to some slots. Basically, some of my models fit just about perfectly into the foam, but some are a little short, leaving a lot of room above the model. In theory this could allow the models to bouce around more if the box were to be treated roughtly. It's probably not a big deal, but I figured since I had the original foam cutouts from the slots I had made for the models, I could just cut a small slice off and place it at the bottom of the slot, acting as a riser to lift up the model. So I roughly measured how much space there was above each model, set the gate on the foam cutter, and carefully sliced out some risers. I tried to keep them completely flat and level, and I would say the came out well enough. I reckon though that it would be possible (tricky, but possible) to deliberately introduce a slant into the risers, to allow models to sit at a slight angle; in some cases this might allow a model with overhang to fit into a slightly smaller space. It's not something I plan on doing myself though.

Well, I can now fit everything I need for a game of Warcaster into a single KR tray, which is nice and appeals to my sense of order. Technically there's no specific place for the dice, though I found they do fit well enough on top of the rulebooks. I'm considering making a simple box for the dice that will sit on the rulebooks or in the spare card slots. We'll see how that goes.