Tuesday, January 5, 2010

WARNING ... WARNING ... DANGER ... DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!


Ok ... my first rant of the year. I will preface this by saying that hobbies are expensive. Whether gaming, antique cars, hot rods, maintaining hot women, vintage clothing, beer stein collecting, taxidermy, hunting, bird watching, hiking, etc. etc.  ... all hobbies are expensive in some way or another once you really get into them. Miniature games, RPGs, Video Games, Board Games, CCGs, etc. etc. can all become rather spendy. But if one is mindful of their spending and they target their spending ... one can really maximize what they get for what they spend (trust me I'm still working on this, but its logical ... remember attack the argument not the person ... that's logic!).

The DANGER DANGER ... rant is against army transports. Now I will not deny that BATTLE FOAM is an improvement over some of its predecessors, from the looks of it ... awesome stuff. My question is simply, do we need battle foam or any army transports? Or are there perfectly acceptable alternatives, that are much cheaper. Are these fancy carrying cases simply (and I've owned my share of spendy army transports people ... just posing the question) another status symbol? I know if you spend 1,000 hours painting an army its your baby and you want to protect it, yes indeed. If you have a golden demon quality painted army with tediously done, super fragile conversions ... ok ok ... maybe for you a $400.00 carrying case is in order. However for the average hobbyist out there ... come on people ... admit it ... the vast majority of us are not in the catagory of needing such an extravagance. There are alot of options that would do the job just as well yet cost 1/10 as much ... ranging from magentizing all the bases, to tackle box trays to cheap gun cases, to just buying the foam and making the trays and using an old suitcase. Are these alternatives as pretty or as trendy ... well depending on the amount of time you want to put in ... probably not. But even here if you want to get creative ... you might come up with an even cooler way to protect your minis and transport them ... yet at a much lower cost. Just food for thought ... before you take the expensive plunge into designer mini transportation.

5 comments:

Caliban said...

Hear hear! I've just grabbed a reasonably large folding box trolley from a Staples office store for £10.00. That will let me carry any of my armies anywhere and it has wheels. Okay, there's no lid, but I can live with that, since everything I have is magnetised and will be in empty biscuit tins. Maybe I'm being a bit on the cheap side, but £10.00 compared with several hundred does have a certain attraction...

Cheers!
Paul

Tigerstyle said...

I have to agree with you. I'd love a Battle Foam case but for the cost of one I'd could buy a new army. My army moves round in boxes protected by cheap foam, air packing bubble things and bubble wrap.

Alexander Man said...

Last time I "went to war" I just stuffed my High Elves to boxes filled with pieces of foam and some other "soft stuff" that I could find... I got tired trying to fit my High Elf mage with dragon in to a shoe box, so I threw it in a plastic bag and got going... I use lot of time painting my minis, but I don´t mind if they get little damaged. You can always fix them :)

Bodlar said...

"I'm a middle aged hobyist with way too much money I need another way to spend it!" I just perused their website. Dear god, as if the hobby wasn't expensive enough. Now I can spend $400 on a case too! The regular pop out modular foam trays were expensive enough. I will stick to a demon in a coffee can filled with paper towels. I would imagine he is still living in a can eh LOE?

Will said...

First of all I will add that what comes to mind is not just the monetary cost of said hobby, but those "hidden costs"- space consumed in house, hours spent learning a new trick, wife tired of hearing about it, etc :) On the transport side I found a compromise a few years back by buying foam on clearance at Joann ETC and digging out the spaces myself (messy but so much cheaper). I have the main carriers I use and just switch whichever stored army into them I want.