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100% GMing
Treasure Tables is dedicated to game masters, offering GMing advice and ideas since 2005. I'm Martin Ralya, and I've been GMing since 1989 and writing for the RPG industry since 2004.
Storing Your Gaming Counters
Mon. June 19, 2006
I’m a big fan of counters as an alternative to miniatures, and I’ve gone through a number of storage and organizational options before settling on this one.
It’s a plastic craft cabinet, and I paid less than $30 for it at Target. (You can find similar cabinets at hardware/home improvement stores, too.)
It holds over 4,000 counters, with plenty of room for more.
I bought a pack of sticky labels to go with it, and then spent the better part of a day sorting them into categories and labelling the drawers. I left a few drawers empty to give myself some wiggle room.
Here’s a larger image that shows my categories. They’re not the most logical, but they fit the counters that I have.
It doesn’t travel well (the counters fall out of the drawers), but that’s the only downside — I love this thing.
How do you store your counters?
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10 Responses to “Storing Your Gaming Counters”
Oh does that appeal to the Type A personality in me. I am going to be investing in some counters this GenCon, and now I will make sure I stop at Target afterwards and pick up a way to organize them.
Nice quick tip.
I prefer minis to counters. Not only are they easier to move around the battle grid, but if for nothing else (because I despise the D&D Miniatures skirmish game), they’re nice to look at (and they’eve gotten even nicer to look at with each expansion set that’s come out). I got lucky and found a Stanley canvas toolbag with a hard plastic bottom that’s big enough to fit all of my unique figures, and then a big plastic tacklebox from the Container Store (don’t know if that’s a chain or not, but there’s one in Paramus, NJ) to hold all my duplicates.
Target also has individual cases in various sizes whihc are quite inexpensive, and have compartments which are just about the right size for minatures. My heroclix are currently gathering dust in a set of these, and but thye traveled very well back in their day.
So yeah: Target’s hardware and storage section for the win!
Jennifer stores her miniatures in a case from target– it’s one layer thick and folds open/closed, so there’s no migration from space to space.
I don’t have the exotic counter sets; I have a package of letters (A-Z) from a wargame [Dirtside] that I carry in a small ziplock. It’s nowhere near as nice as your counters, but it gets us through.
I haven’t completely embraced the artwork counters yet, so this green box is still my primary counter repository. I have larger divider boxes that I use for a variety of other counters. I do have some artwork counters from the AD&D Battlesystem box (and a couple modules that came out with Battlesystem compatible counters in the same timeframe), and some counters from the Titan boardgame. The ones I use are stored in those larger divider boxes, along with furniture (from the Yaquinto Swashbuckler game and a couple other places), and various modern bits. My Fiery Dragon Productions counters that have been used (and mounted on thicker cardboard for durability and easier handling) all fit in a 4″ diameter cookie tin (which you can see in this picture. From that picture, you can also see some counters are in baggies (oh, looks like the furniture is in a baggie). You can just barely see one of the divider boxes in the upper left (the orange and purple splotches you can barely make out are Titan counters).
There is a drawer of humanoid/PC type miniatures. And two drawers of monster miniatures with each general type in a baggie (goblins/kobolds, orcs, animals, undead, etc).
Mostly, I find it easiest to use my decade counters (counters in a few colors, 2 sets 1-10, 1 set 1-20, 1 set 1-50) for monsters. For D&D, I did appreciate using artwork counters for the larger creatures. In my early D20 days, I blew up a Titan Behemoth counter to 2″x2″ for use for large “monsters.” I also blew up a Rodin counter from the FDP AU set to 2″x2″ for Skurgs (overgrown Rodin who are large size).
The biggest complaint I have about both artwork counters and miniatures is not having representatives of all creatures I use (or enough quantity of some).
Frank
I’ve got two similar sets of drawers for storing my minis. They differ in that they are all the largers size drawers. I do have a few odd larger minis that don’t fit even on their sides. But these drawers do keep the minis clean. I also use them to organize the minis (by genre mostly) and prep them for the game.
I don’t play any games where I would need something like this.
MDK
I have a cederwood toolcase with 4 shallow pull out drawers which I lined with the soft foam liners from some old boxed sets to keep the minitures from bouncing around and a flip top storage compartment on top large enough to hold larger minitures or some model landscapes.
Alternatively I have a small storage case from the dollar store filled with mini poker chips, glass beads and some game pieces from old board games for nights I know I probally won’t need minitures for much.
Minis/counter storage seems to be one of those areas where gamers like to improvise. I wonder if there are more improv mini cases out there than “official” ones?
Honestly, I’ve never met a counter I didn’t dislike. But, if you like them, and are going to want to store them findably, I can’t really see how to top that. Short of getting it cheaper elsewhere. $30 seems rather pricey to me, especially if it’s US money…