Tannhauser - Custom Box Insert and Game Report

With all of my shiny new Tannhauser toys arriving late in May I had to spend some time thinking about how to organize everything. Those booster box expansion look great and I thought it might be fun to open them slowly. You know, savour the feeling of adding new components to my game over time...but then I realized the sad truth: it'll take me years to get through all of that stuff. In the meantime, I'd be forced to store all of those packages until they were all open. As storage space always seems to be a major concern with my gaming items, I decided to plunge in instead.

Opening, punching and sorting everything was quite the chore, but it was also a lot of fun. Going through all the components reminded me over and over again just how great looking this game is. When everything was finally all opened up I sorted the figures out into four groups:

1. Union
2. Reich
3. Matriarchy
4. Shogunate and Mercenaries

I was happy to see that that "Operation: Novgorod" box was exactly the same size as the core set box. That would work nicely into my plans for doing my first-ever custom box inserts.

What you see above is my insert for the core box. From top left you'll see: Union figures, Reich figures, crate tokens and cards, Union cards and tokens, Reich cards and tokens, Union character sheets and Reich character sheets. I added some blue dice to go with the black ones (they're in between the character sheet piles. On top of the cards you'll see all of the faction counters, map modifiers and smoke/fire tokens. There is enough room to lie the core game board on the top, but once you add the revised rule book, the box doesn't quite close all the way.

I've not yet built one for the Novgorod box, but I'll likely use the same layout for it. Hopefully I'll get the thing properly square second time around...

Now that my toys were more organized, it really needed to be played. So William and I sat down to give the first scenario from the FFG Summer Campaign a try. The scenario had the Union trying to stop the Reich's Blutsturm agent from escaping out the front door.

Long story short...it looked like I had the game in the bag, but Tala took Eva down at the end of turn 3 after surviving four separate attacks. Tip for Reich players: don't bunch your characters up, those Union grenades are nasty!