During 2018 and 2019 I was slowly working away on a 6mm, fast-playing, big-battle pike and shot rule set. Playtesting was handled with flat paper proxies.
In early 2020, I finally pulled the trigger on actual miniatures from a handful of 6mm suppliers. In an enormous display of “putting the cart before the horse,” I quickly got intimidated by the sheer effort it would require to paint and base not just one but two large armies for this effort, especially when it was a solo project with no other gamers likely to paint an opposing force (plus the echoes of silence I was hearing from my playtesters).
So I shelved the project, moved onto a 15mm skirmish concept in the same era (before buying a ton of minis and terrain and building a gameboard right as Covid-19 exploded).
All of my miniature gaming has been on hold since March, predictably, but I recently pulled out my 6mm parts with an eye to painting up another until or two only to find..
Bendy, bent pikes.
It’s clear I’ll need a better storage solution for armies that will be full of pikes, which are easy to deform… and hard to get fingers and tweezers into to set right.
That will be a project for another day, but I think I may expand on the foam liner approach that’ve taken for storing my primed figure sticks, as seen below:
My hypothesis is that the same idea should work for the common base sizes I’m using for this project: 100x100mm, 100x50mm, and 50x50mm. If build around the largest 100x100mm size, then I should be able to mix-and-match as needed in these plastic Sterilite containers.
But regardless… damn. My poor pike block looks like Gumby now.