"A thing of beauty is a joy forever, 

just like that cool-ass book-box you made for your plastic toy soldier stuff."

- John Keats, a famous poet

Be careful, young Sir, for within this tome is bound the fortunes of your future wars. All their many twists and turns are already contained within, so be mindful, nay, be ever hesitant to open this tome. For the die of Fate may roll this way and that, and the Gods of the Roll hold no allegiance ever longer than a single roll.

                        - Sir Reginald of the Snake Eye, Veteran of the Pre-CoK Second Edition

Hello, fellow wargamers!

I had the idea of making something a little flashier for all my gaming aids, since I became fed up with a clear plastic box always giving the games I played a, well, second-hand feel. Like drinking wine from a plastic cup, or serving Big Macs at a fancy dinner, it always felt a little out of place.

So, I began to reimagine the vessel that should hold my fortunes in all the battles to come.

A box, certainly, for a pouch would be unwieldy and always slightly difficult to fish stuff out of. But what kind of box? A treasure chest? Nay, too heavy and difficult to lug around. An ammo crate? Pha! That's for those degenerates who play scifi games (No, don't look into my cupboard, no those are not Deadzone figures).

A book, then.

Oh yes, a book. A book contains a story, a world, a meaning, ever ready to spring into being with but a glimpse of the pages, ever able to realign itself: as I grew, so too did the stories in the books grow and their patterns gained new, deeper meanings.

This book would contain not a story as such, but the tools for crafting an infinite number of stories.

Book-shaped boxes are surprisingly easy to find online, and looking around for one that suited my needs didn't take long. One should take some time to find a suitable box, as it's one of those parts of a project in which you can spend time to save time. Picking an ill-suited box will force you to cut corners later, or spend oodles of time modifying it to fit your needs. I payed around 20 euros for my choice.

I decided to use dense foamed plastic, the stuff they use in old-fashioned sleeping pads for camping, as it game me a lot of granularity in terms of creating layers inside the box, and combines durability and ease of modifications in a nice package. For this project I wanted a thin sheet as I wasn't going to sleep on it, and multiple thin layers were both easier to cut and easier to form into a different layers for different objects. The box was deep enough to easily incorporate things in the bottom and another item, like the LoS tool, on top of them.

I cut out stencils for every individual layer from paper and used those to mark the slots I wanted on the foam and then veeeery carefully cut the pieces out. I changed my plan twice along the way, as I came up with more clever ways to position the things I wanted to fit in the box. I also found out that foamed plastic sticks to the blade of my hobby knife, so having a file at hand became necessary, so I could scrape off the scrap from the blade. A sharp blade is key, for it makes clean cuts while a dull blade makes uneven tears.

I cut everything before starting to even think about gluing, as I wanted to build a sturdy, non-removable filling for my box. My box took five layers to fill, and that gave me plenty of room for my chosen tools. The gluing was actually a little bit tricky, as I had made some cutting errors and had to fix them at this stage.

I used a contact glue, the gooey stuff that makes elastic bonds and that smells terrible. As foam is veeery elastic and bend readily, any glue that forms hard but brittle bonds such as superglue would be poor choices, I believe. I glued the layers in the box, one layer at a time and let them set properly before attempting to add another layer. That process took the better part of two days.

As I my labor neared completion, I noticed a grave mistake in my set-up. I had left out the most crucial of tools, the Die of Doom. Luckily I had time to make amends and made room for that miniscule, but all-powerful die:

Storms rage as mighty heroes clash and power-hungry wizards unleash words of power that rend the very fabric of reality, but none are equal in power or terror to the Die of Doom. On its worn, pale faces are written the outcomes of every battle, and Woe be unto thee, if thou should fail to defer to its command. The storms of War die down, or rage with renewed fury, heeding the fateful rattle of its roll.

Ask not for whom the Die of Doom rolls; it rolls for thee.

Finishing touches to the box took some pondering, as I was unsure what kind of a finish I wanted. I went the easy way and ended up painting it all black. The foam is relatively easy to paint, as it's porous so regular miniature paint forms a relatively sturdy layer on it.

A tape measure, a turn counter, a LoS arc, a LoS laser, room for thirty-something dice, room for counters, room for objective markers (including Bluff tokens). And of course, a very central place for the Die of Doom.

Next up... Not sure, perhaps a battle report?

Cheers,

AoW