Progress continues very slowly on my mini Battle Masters game. As I’ve said before, I’m in no rush with this one, so I’m not afraid to scrap anything that I decide isn’t good enough. But first, some good news, the first unit is complete:
I’m pretty happy with the final result here. As you can see, I’ve decided on a red and yellow theme for the Imperial army. This model was assembled and based then painted as a whole. I’m still not convinced I want to do it this way — the other option being to paint the models individually, then mount and base them. Though that has its own problems. This one worked fairly well, so I’ll probably stick with this method until it becomes an issue, then swear at myself for mounting models that are impossible to reach with a brush.
The flag was made by simply printing it out on my inkjet printer, then glueing it in place to the metal rod used for a pole. The flag was then given several coats of gloss to shine it up and give it some stiffness. My sole reason for including a flag was to have the number of dice on the unit somewhere, and I figured the unit icon that is used for placement in the rulebook would be nice to include.
And now on to the less good news. I completed the interior of my first unit box, which you can see here with all the imperial units placed, plus some dice and a few cardboard hexes from my copy of Battle Lore as stand-ins for cannon tokens (actual cannon tokens I expect to be much smaller). It may not be obvious from the picture, but the right column of cubbies is narrower than the rest. This was done intentionally, as the box was not wide enough to admit three columns of forward facing units. I figured I could place the right-most column side facing since the box is so deep. Unfortunately, I failed to allow for the thickness of the felt, and thus the units in the left two columns also don’t fit forward facing. This works OK for the imperial units as you can see here, but simply won’t due for the chaos army, which numbers 15 total units. There are simply not enough cubbies. My plan had been that since many would be forward facing, I could make an insert to use up the depth of the box and thus have a few cubbies that were essentially storing two units each. Obviously, this will not work.
So it’s back to the drawing board. Ultimately I think my problem here is the boxes I chose. The interior of these boxes are very deep, much deeper than I require, but don’t have enough surface area. I need wider, flatter boxes. So back to Michael’s I went, and discovered the box I wanted was not there. So I bought all the kinds of boxes they had, and then ordered the box I wanted on Amazon. Here are some images of all the boxes collected together. The current box is the left-most on first picture, and on the bottom of the stack in the second:
Newly acquired from Michael’s we have the box with rounded sides, and the box that is in the shape of a book. The latter is cute and ultimately the largest of all the boxes. Plenty of room in this one, but I’m not terribly fond of its closure, which is a pretty weak magnet. I imagine that going pretty quickly, and models spilling about inside the main box and getting all banged up, so it’s right out.
The box with the rounded edges isn’t bad. It’s shorter, but wider than the original. The interior of the original was 7.875″ x 4.75″, while the interior of the rounded-edge box is about 6.125″ x 6.25″. It will work, but will require using the side-facing method I used above to fit all the units of the chaos army, with very little space left over for other stuff. Keep in mind that the chaos army box must also contain the ogre cards, while the imperial army box must include the cannon markers, and if possible I’d love to include a set of dice in each box.
So that leaves the classic cigar box, the one that was missing from Michael’s collection and I had to order online. It’s in the middle bottom in picture 1, and second from the top of the stack in picture 2. It has a very generous 8.125″ square interior, plenty of space to put all my models forward facing. The depth is very shallow though, and thus there is not room for the chaos army’s ogre cards to fit in a vertical stack. Still, it’s my favorite of the group — I’d really prefer the presentation of all the models facing out of the box when it’s first opened up. Perhaps I can mount a pocket of some kind into the lid for storing the ogre cards of the chaos box.
This means for the boxes it’s back to square 1 – cutting out new dividers, felting them, and gluing it all together. I also did a little research online about felt. The craft felt is OK, but it’s shedding a bit more than I hoped. I understand pool tables use a much higher quality wool cloth, which still has some fuzziness to it. Perhaps I can buy scraps of that somewhere? Or maybe it’s worth a trip to a fabric store to see what other options I can find. Of course, the main purpose of the felt is to offer a little extra padding for the models when the box is moved about, so I may be willing to deal with the shedding of the craft felt if nothing else is available that offers the same amount of cushion.
