Foam-ing at the Mouth

Hello. My name it Matt and I am a foamaholic.

It started at my high school role-playing games club. Everyone running a game would want to bring in painted miniatures for the session. Some of the older kids had folders of foam-lined cardboard to cushion the transport. They claimed these came from electrical component boxes, but I  never managed to snag one. So, each week I endured the misery of seeing hours of painting work ruined by chips and wear. 

It gave me a fetish for varnish: even now I double-coat all my figures once in gloss and once in matte. But that was easily satisfied. The craving for foam was not.

Fast forward many years. Custom made foam trays for figures are now available online. My entire Warhammer collection is comfortably ensconced in its pillowy embrace and I am happy. Fast forward some more years and I start an X-Wing collection. Even though I didn't paint these models, I'm as obsessive about protecting them as I am about all painted models. Shaped foam for these figures exists, but is expensive and impractical. And I also want to store my ships ready-assembled for minimal setup time. What's the solution?

Re-purposing my Warhammer foam, of course.

That's a custom pick and pluck tray from Figures in Comfort which you can shape to your requirements. But you can be cleverer than that with foam. They also sell trays for card collections with long, tall slots. I used to use them for giant bats. Guess what else looks a lot like a giant bat?

Voila. Now all I need is a way to store all those lumpy, awkwardly shaped Armada ships. Mine are still in the blisters they came in. But I digress. See, foam isn't just for figures. As the previous example shows, they're also quite good at keeping certain kinds of components, like cards, in neat order. So what might happen if you made an insert exactly the right size to fit in a card game box? This:

That's a Netrunner insert from Mini Foam Studio, and it's pretty awesome. It holds a lot of cards and you can customise it to hold different combinations of cards and tokens. You might think it's mild overkill for a card game, but it's undeniably convenient. And it only hints at what else you can do with foam.

After many years of naysaying on Cosmic Encounter, due to Games Workshop's dire edition of the game, I fell in love with the FFG printing. So much love, in fact, that my frequent and lavish attentions completely destroyed my box.

Jeb saw those photos and swears there's a cat hair in one of them. Since I don't own a cat, it must actually be a pubic hair instead. That's how much I love the game.

You can't buy replacement boxes, which is a major oversight on the part of publishers everywhere. And with expansions continuing to appear, the problem was only going to get worse. Tape and glue provided only so much comfort. Every time that box came out, I got worried it was going to disintegrate and send little plastic saucers everywhere.

Enter Mini Foam Studio with their stupendous Cosmic Encounter insert.

This is a thing of engineering genius. It keeps all my components in place while adding rigidity to the box. It sticks to the box base and, for good measure, I glued mine to the sides as well. See the white bits? Those are pieces of foam I've turned upside-down with the sticky bit on the top because I'm not using them right now. But they  will hold stacks of ships or extra cards or tokens as required. The planets sit proud of the insert in the corners and there's room to put the rules in the middle

It's very clever. They've just run a Kickstarter for a Dead of Winter insert, and I'm looking forward to that becoming available too. My lifelong craving for foam is finally paying off, saving my X-Wing and Cosmic Encounter collections. Who know's what's next. Let some foam into your life, and we can find out together.