After a longer-than-expected hiatus to deal with some of those pesky real-life issues, it’s time once again to start getting this thing back on track.

Very soon I’ll have some sort of report from The Big Table. That’s right: For the first time since the Christmas-season arrival of my son’s new electric train set, I have managed to recapture my prime gaming space. The train set – which is miraculously still functional, by the way – now has been mounted on a big sheet of MDF that conveniently slides under the kid’s bed for storage and slides out into his bedroom floor for play.

Real rough-tough guys are happy when they get a new boat or a custom-engraved pool cue or a new beer keg cooler or other manly stuff. Me? I’m just damned happy to have my Big Table back.

Now comes the tough question of what to put on it. Well, as most wargamers understand, just because game play gets interrupted it doesn’t necessarily follow that game acquisition has to be equally thrown off. As a consequence, there are a few new candidates for the Big Table since our last meeting.

1. Fields of Fire. I still need to get farther into this game. I was just at the point of seriously diving in when All Heck Broke Loose and the cards and counters (and my time and brainpower) had to go back in the box. It’s very likely that this will be the first game into the landing zone.

2. Ship of the Line. I pre-ordered this expansion for Flying Colors last year, IIRC. While it does include the latest, greatest ‘core’ rulebook for the game it is really just an expansion with nothing really revolutionary. Not a priority in the Game Queue, but it’ll get there next time I’m in a ‘naval mood’.

3. SCS: Bastogne. I’ve always liked The Gamers Standard Combat Series. This game takes a direct look at the defense of Bastogne and its environs at the company/combat team level – which seems to be an interesting scale for SCS (I thought ‘Fallschirmjaeger’ was pretty good). So this somewhere toward the front of the line.

4. Panzerblitz: Hill of Death. Even though I really didn’t ‘need’ to find another platoon-level tactical system, I figured I’d give this much-ballyhooed title a close-up look. Back in the day, the original Panzerblitz and Panzer Leader got quite a workout at the Foster house. The guys at MMP usually produce a pretty fine game, anyway, so I figured it was worth a look.

5. Tide of Iron: Normandy Expansion. TOI is fun and not too shabby for a game from the ‘bits n pieces’ side of the wargaming family. I’ll confess that I haven’t played the original more than a handful of times to date, but this expansion intrigued me. I don’t have Days of the Fox, but I’m a sucker for Normandy. It will require the entire table, no doubt, so it will have to wait until a few side projects finish and I can clear off all of the space.

6. Warhammer 40k 5th Edition Imperial Guard Codex. Yeah, the addiction continues. The new 5E rules and units for the Guard are fine, but overall I’m a bit disappointed with this book. I suppose if you didn’t have all of the previous iterations of Codex: Imperial Guard it wouldn’t seem so much like overkill – but this book is 95 percent fluff, IMHO, and a lot of it just isn’t that useful. The color graphics are entirely model photos (which are done well enough, I suppose), but there are no color guides or other useful painting resources included. If you were a noob trying to figure out what colors to use for your Cadians, you’d be hosed if all you had for a reference was this sub-par tome.

OK, there it is. Think of it as the summer blockbuster season for wargaming. Lots of new stuff in my personal pipeline, and a Big Table just looking for some action.

Enough of the digital nimrod-ity! It’s time to peel my eyeballs off the computer monitor for a few hours and engage in some good, old-fashioned, analog tinfoil hattery.

Wargame storage. There’s hardly a topic more appealing to the tinfoil-hat-wearing game-nerd crowd in all of Christendom, is there? How wargamers get all of each game’s gear into a box is both deeply personal and highly revealing.

(Please note: I’m not touching the topic of counter-clipping today. Oh nooo. That’s a different subject entirely. Today I’m writing ONLY about how game widgets get put away after whatever gets done to them has been done.)

Conflict of Heroes fits, sort of

The subject popped into my head the other evening as I was contemplating the ‘just barely’ squeeze of fitting the generously-sized counters from Conflict of Heroes into a standard, old-school counter tray. When I realized that the game’s ‘hit’ markers weren’t making it into the tray, my mind suddenly veered off down the dusty road of contemplating the changing nature of wargame components.

Conflict of Heroes, Tide of Iron, Memoir 44 – all games from the past few years that have required a radical re-thinking of the Old Ways of game storage. I made allowances for ‘block’ games years ago – remember the original version of Columbia’s EastFront hails from 1988 – so GMT’s recent new wave of block games caused me no problems.

But games with giant counters and/or lots of plastic bits – those have given me a work-out. For all of my real-world sloppiness, I like my game boxes tidy and organized. And some of the newer games really cause me grief.

Barbarossa. Life was simple.

Back when I was a boy, organizing a game box was simple. My first two wargames were SPI flatpacks (“Tank!” and “Barbarossa”). Even a teen-aged shaky goob could keep those organized – neither one of them had enough counters to overrun the compartments of the flatpacks.

Then came a couple of Avalon Hill games (the iconic “PanzerBlitz” and “Tobruk”) which – gasp! – had no counter trays. I managed to make do with an assortment of simple mailing envelopes, though. Eventually the organizational system for ‘no tray’ games graduated to plastic sandwich baggies and, later, to ziploc baggies.

Still, I’ve always favored counter trays of some sort. In the mid-90s, when The Gamers were still The Gamers, I bought a not-quite-lifetime supply of their counter trays. Note, please, that my CoH counters are stuffed into one of them. I have ONE MORE left. Occasionally they get re-cycled – games that don’t hit the table any more get their counters off-loaded into baggies, freeing up the precious trays for games in the ‘Active’ pile.

Tide of Plastic. WTF?!

But as game components grow and/or morph into jumbles of plastic doodads, what am I going to do? I’ve used those little Plano tackle boxes in a few instances (and big Plano tackle boxes for ASL – that’s canon, isn’t it?), but that’s like doubling the cost of the damned game just to keep the grunts from breaking their rifles.

I appreciate the general industry shift away from every game using old-school half-inch counters, but it’s a trend that sure does make it tough on all of us old counter-tray fanatics.

Oh yeah. Recently comes word that Art Lupinacci of L2 Design is injecting some of his signature games like Russia Besieged with some sort of recombinant gene therapy that’s going to produce nearly double-sized packages with 1-inch counters, 8-foot maps and play aids the size of Rhode Island. I think the man is tempting the laws of God, nature and North Carolina with a game package that size – it could cause a rupture in the very fabric of space-time.

Madness. Sheer madness.

And waaay too big for my counter trays, dammit.