Saturday, November 11, 2006

ASL Storage

I managed to put together a decent travel kit when I attended the recent Intensive Fire tournament in Bournemouth. Here's the current setup:

The whole core system fits in this one bag, a Ralph Lauren Polo Sport bought for £50 at the local TKMAX!

The main bag

All of the core nationality boxes plus my dice tower sit tightly packed in the bottom.

Bottom of the bag

And the two Raaco boxes storing game markers, dice, pens etc., the folders with laminated maps, scenarios and my rulebooks all fit in the top.

Bottom of the bag

Basically the whole kit looks like this.

The whole kit

Last year I decided to go for the spiral bound rulebooks. I have Chapters A-E in one, F-G and the HASL stuf in another and Chapter H in the third.

Bottom of the bag

However, this year I decided to get a reduced version of the rules for handy travel use. At first I just did the main rulebook but then decided to do Chapter H and a small supplement with Chapters F and G and all the charts. Size was reduced by half and done justin blacl and white. This seems to work fine. The text is a wee bit small, especially the Examples, but it's still readable.

See what you think.

Bottom of the bag

Bottom of the bag

Bottom of the bag

Counter Storage

The ideal counter storage system for ASL is really a dream. There are so many options, so many little tweaks you can make that it's a never ending process.

I looked long and hard at different options and finally settle on a range of tackle boxes done by Ron Thompson. I think they're UK only and the ones I have were bought from Billy's Tackle SHop in North Shields. Fortunately, I bought loads as I went back a couple of weeks ago and the manufacturer has withdrawn my model and replaced it with a different size. Billy's trying to get hold of some for me but I've still a few spare and so should be OK.

Basically, I have one box for infantry and another for vehicles for each nationality. Some, like the British, German and Americans need two boxes for vehicles. Others, like Chinese and Italians only need one box for both.

Boxes

Squads are usually mixed in with half-squads excepts where there are a lot of that counter e.g. German 4-6-7s when I split them up. I've recently had a bit of a reorganise and split a few more types down to make use a bit easier.

Vehicles - I first started sorting them by movement type, then movement points, and then gun size. What I found was that if you're looking for a particular counter and they're all 76mm 15MP then what you're looking for is the really small text on the counter. So I changed to roughly Chapter H number order. I made sure similar types were grouped together and grouped some of the odds and ends but the general idea holds. I'll try and post a few examples when I can sort out some images.

Counter Clipping

Two years ago I decided to start clipping my counters. I'd always swore I never would but I tried it on a few old SL counters and decided I liked the look and feel. It has been a long and slow process and will form the basis of another blog entry when I have time and images...

2 comments:

  1. Very Nice Andy. I have taken a lot of inspiration from your presentation especially your spiral bound rulebooks in large and small. A question though. You show a folder with the maps. Now since they are laminated it was the unmounted version of the maps, right? Pardon any storage ignorance :-)

    Henrik Stromberg
    Copenhagen, Denmark

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  2. Hi Henrik,

    Thanks for the comments. Yes, the maps are the unmounted ones, split down the middle and then laminated with a matt finish - avoid glare. I'm waiting for the new style mapset and then I'm going to start enlarging each half map to A3 and laminating them. I really like the extra hex space it gives. It's just going to be a costly process.

    I'm hoping to expand the sections on storage and clipping soon :-)

    Cheers

    Andy

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