Come for the Wargaming. Stay for the Component Storage

A complete and compact (if possibly obsessive-seeming) organization system for Advanced Squad Leader components

(Note: This article first appeared in the Hazardous Movement journal.)

When I think of the ideal Advanced Squad Leader game experience, it typically involves a big well-lit open space in the basement of a split-level American home. There’s a big table in the middle of the room, and the walls are lined with bookshelves, each neatly arranged with dozens of well-marked plastic boxes bearing labels such as “Allied Minors,” “Russian AFVs,” “Finns.” and so forth.

What’s the best way to organize ASL counters in this kind of space? The answer is: Who cares? In such an environment, you have essentially unlimited storage available to you. So it doesn’t really matter how you store your counters, so long as you can find them easily. You can even spread small bowls around the playing surface, each full of commonly used counters, such as Prep Fire and DM (as I’ve heard that some people like to do). It’s a world without limits, so go nuts: You have all the space in the world.

But for a lot of us, that’s not how we play ASL.

In my case, I really only play ASL at tournaments. Yes, I have a basement, but I never use it for playing ASL. Instead, I use it for organizing my ASL counters in anticipation of playing ASL.

I started this article off by describing the ideal ASL gaming environment. But here’s what my own very-much non-ideal environment looks like: I arrive in, say, Cleveland or Albany for an ASL tournament—usually late in the week, after many of the other players have arrived. The best tables (which, for me, are the ones on the periphery, since they allow a player to throw all of his junk up against the wall, and still have it within arm’s reach) have already been taken. So the only table space I can find is at an interior table—and even then, I might get only half of it, as the other half has already been claimed. This would mean I might have only a six-foot by three-foot chunk of table space for all my stuff.

Needless to say, that’s not enough for everything—so I stash all my boards at some random spot against a wall, or perhaps put them up in my hotel room. Since I require access to boards only when I’m setting up a scenario, that’s not much of an inconvenience.

But even then, that still leaves me with all my counters. Where do they go? On the ground—where they can be kicked and (heaven forbid) knocked over? Or do I put my Raacos along the wall, along with the boards…There’s usually space for this, but who wants to traipse back and forth across the room every time the need arises for a new type of counter during gameplay?

This kind of experience (and the associated anxiety) is what convinced me to use my 3-D printer to get all of my ASL counters into a single Raaco RAA136242 four-drawer storage unit—a project I first described on this substack in April 2023. Since then, I’ve refined my kit, so that I can now get all of the counters into just three of the Raaco’s four drawers. I now use the fourth drawer for the ASL rules, vehicle notes, charts, dice, thread, and all other necessary game components. The idea here is that, once you have the maps needed for a game, everything else, soup to nuts, sits in a single Raaco unit that fits on your gaming surface.

Before going further, I will say that all of the 3-D printed components described below were self-designed (or, in one case, adapted from a design supplied by another 3-D printing enthusiast). I employed an entry-level CR-6 SE printer that I got used on Kijiji for about C$225. All told, the depicted components took about two rolls of plastic filament to produce—so about $50 in materials. If you’re interested in printing some or all of these components yourself, please message me though the Contact Information tab at linktr.ee/jonkay, and I will send you the STL files. Those files—and a 3-D printer—are all you will need to produce these components yourself.

One other thing I will add is this: While the STL files that I supply can be used to print the depicted components without any extra work on your part (except the use of slicing software, which adapts generic STL files into printable files whose parameters correspond to the technical specifics of your machine), it might pay for you to invest a little time in learning how the technology works. By use of a free 3-D design program such as Tinkercad, you’ll be able to adapt my STL files in any way you wish (e.g., by making them wider or taller). You’ll also be able to design your own components—including counter trays that fit into non-Raaco boxes.

It’s a fun hobby. And while I originally got into it in order to print ASL storage components, I have since branched out into all sorts of other projects, including storage trays for my 18xx hex tiles. (If you get serious about it, I recommend a software package called Shapr, which is not cheap, but has really amazing capabilities.) And in coming years, I am interested to see what other 3-D storage ideas will get dreamed up by my fellow ASL enthusiasts.

Okay, let’s move on to the actual set. The image above shows what my Box One (of four) looks like. This is where I keep every nationality-specific half-inch counter (i.e. all nation-specific counters except for the 5/8-inch Guns and Vehicles).

As you can see, the counters are organized into seven-cell-by-five-cell cassette trays, which are 15mm high and stacked three to the drawer. (The internal depth of a standard Raaco drawer is 45mm. You’ll see that there’s room for 24 cassette trays of the type I’ve described, i.e. three layers of eight trays).

Some nations, such as Sweden, get only half a tray, because there just aren’t that many counters. Others, such as Russia and Germany, require two trays. But in all cases, getting everything to fit means stacking the counters in neat columns (you can get about 13 counters stacked per cell in one of these 15mm trays—so a maximum of 455 counters per tray, or 10,920 counters per drawer). It also means that you need a suction tool to get the counters out. So unless you have the right personality for this kind of project, the whole thing may feel too delicate and fiddly for you.

But if you don’t mind the fiddliness, the space efficiency is fantastic. Like I said, I can get every nation-specific half-inch counter into a single Raaco drawer—major powers, minor powers, Japan, China, Korea, Finns, Swedes, you name it. And I even have a few trays left over (see the bottom right corner of the photo above) in case MMP comes out with, I don’t know, like a South American module or something.

A Shapr-generated image of the self-produced 3-D files discussed in this article.

One detail I will add here is that in the case of nations whose half-inch counters require two trays—U.S., Germany, UK, and Russia, most notably—I try to make sure that all of the counters required for in-game use are in one tray. i.e. hero counters, vehicular squads that pop out of wrecked vehicles, leaders, and different squad/half-squad types that may be required on an ad-hoc basis due to deployment, battle hardening, or ELR failure. The idea here is to minimize on-table clutter during actual game play. Better to have only one tray required for gameplay than two. (Once play starts, all of the trays I no longer need to access during the game—such as the ones containing support weapons and such, go back in the Raaco.)

Drawers Two and Three are for AFVs. I’d originally organized my AFVs in trays that have a 9-by-13 cell layout, but found that the tolerances were too small: If a counter wasn’t properly clipped, or had expanded due to moisture, it got stuck. So now I use an 8-by-12 layout, which is slightly less efficient, but more robust and easy to use. These trays each tile half of a Raaco box interior surface, and stack six to a box (being only 7.5mm in height), with each cell storing four counters. So in theory, you can get 12 of these trays in a drawer—for a total of 1,152 cells, or 4,608 counters.

The four-counter capacity of each of the cells is more than enough for most AFV types, though in some cases, more than one cell is necessary. e.g. T-34s occupy several cells, since it isn’t unusual to have five or more of them in the same scenario. The same is true for the commonly used German halftracks.

As you can see here, I also 3-D printed little plastic blocks that fit neatly in the cells, which can be used as label guides for the various types of AFVs (e.g. BT, BA, and Sled-type Russian vehicles, as in the image below). These blocks can be moved around if you reorganize your vehicles.

In some cases, it’s possible to get a whole nation’s vehicle/Gun mix into a single 8x12 tray (as with Japan, for example). But in the case of Germany and UK, it takes three trays. And the United States and Russia each require two trays. In order to keep these trays bundled together, I printed out open-face boxes of 15mm height (for stacks of two trays) and 22.5mm height (for stacks of three), which allow me to securely combine a single nation’s AFVs together in a brick-like elastic-bound stack. The downside here is that the extra space requirements for these bundling boxes means that I can only get 10 trays (two stacks of five layers) into a Raaco drawer, instead of the unbundled dozen.

So that brings us to the fourth drawer. Here’s a picture of that one. I custom-printed that red side tray (on the right) to the precise dimensions permitted by the ASL rules/vehicle-notes/charts stack that takes up 80% of the drawer. (I have the STL file for that side box, too, if anyone wants it.)

“But wait,” you say. “What about status counters? First fire? Turrets? Fortifications? Boats? Planes? Bridges?!” Where are those?

The answer is that they are on top of the Raaco, in a series of trapezoidal boxes that fit neatly into the cavities that tile the top of your Raaco unit. (See images, below.) The blue trapezoids are for half-inch counters. The grey ones are for 5/8” counters. (There’s also an extra grey box without internal dividers, which houses some of my smaller gameplay accessories.) Some of these are two layers deep (as illustrated in the photos that follow), with a thin tray below covered by a larger tray.

All of these come with fitted covers. So if you hit me up for STL files, don’t forget that in the case of these trapezoidal boxes, the STL file will include two structures—one for the box and one for the cover.

In all cases, my design/usage philosophy is that on-table clutter should be minimized, so I tried to get all of the most commonly used counters into the same trays, while relegating obscure and seldom-used counters to other boxes. Ideally, using this system, you should be able to get through a whole scenario with only about a half dozen small counter trays on the table—one each for the personnel of the two sides in question (as described above), and one or two each for status counters, smoke, acquisition and such.

Is this system right for you? If you’ve read this far, I’d say, yeah, probably. If it weren’t for you, you’d have stopped reading a long time ago.

And just in case you’re wondering: Yes, the feeling of getting all of these counters into such a small space is immensely satisfying (again, for a certain kind of personality). Think of it as the ultimate form of solitaire play.