Regular readers will know I have a bit of a foam fetish. I’m sure it started when I discovered a hand-painted figure I’d slaved over had worn, even through a coat of varnish. Now I’m not happy with anything painted, no matter who painted it, unless I can be confident it’s cushioned in acres of sweet, soft foam.

This proves a bit of an issue if you start collecting Fantasy Flight’s pre-painted Star Wars miniatures or, indeed, miniatures of any kind. For a lot of games regularly-shaped foam pockets are sufficient. They’re great for storing X-Wing fighters on stands, for example, ready to pull out and put on the table for play. But if you want to store large ships, or Armada ships, or anything from Games Workshop’s increasingly complex and spiky figure range, you’re out of luck.

For these you need foam trays with shaped pockets. And here you run in to two problems. First, you normally want to store something alongside the figures: bases, tokens and whatnot. But what you can actually store in the tray is down to the whim of the producer. Second, shaped foam is often phenomenally expensive.

So imagine my delight when I discovered German company Feldherr. They make shaped trays for a variety of games, including two that were causing me problems, Armada and Silver Tower. And their trays are astonishingly cheap. Surely, I figured, there must be a catch?

And there is a small catch. When you get their trays it’s clear they’re using a lower grade of foam than most of their competitors. Other trays I’ve had from other manufacturers stand stiff and proud if you lift them unsupported. Feldherr trays flop limply instead. Indeed with the thinner trays you have to be a little careful that the droop doesn’t spill your precious contents all over the hard, harsh table and floor.

 However, this is a pretty small catch, one easily remedied by simply making sure you lift each tray with two hands. And in return they’re not only cheap but have another overriding quality. They’ve been designed for maximum flexibility and convenience for the gamer.

One of the best examples of this is an Armada tray for the Wave 3 flotilla models. It comes with space for four of the ships. Because that’s what most shaped foam does. It’s designed for the convenience of the manufacturer, who wants to design as few trays as possible and sell you as many as possible. So trays tend to come in tandem with release waves, or to hold multiple models of the same type. And they often don’t hold much apart from the models themselves, forcing you to find storage solutions for other components.

This tray, though will hold two different types of flotilla, both the Imperial Gozanti Cruisers and the Rebel Transports. And it doesn’t just stop there. It’ll hold CR-90 Corvette models from the base game, Imperial Raiders from wave 2 and – at a push – you can squeeze in an Imperial Light Cruiser from wave 5 too. For maximum convenience all the models stay on their stands and there’s room for bases, dials and tokens too.

This flexibility extends through a lot of the trays they sell. There’s an Interdictor tray that comes with an insert to make it store a Gladiator-class Star Destroyer too, for example. They do no less than three different trays to fit an Upsilon shuttle for X-Wing, all taking different supporting models alongside it.

This is probably starting to sound like a shill in exchange for some sample trays. But here’s the thing. I was so impressed with the samples they sent me that after having used them to transport ships to combat one night, I went out and bought set and box to keep them in right away. I’m waiting on their Armada wave 6 solutions with bated breath. These are just really good trays at really good value. If you’ve any interest at all in storing components in foam, I strongly suggest you take a look.

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.

One of the unexpected effects of regularly reviewing games is how jaded I've become. It takes an enormous amount to impress me nowadays. And even for titles that make the grade, it's rare that they grip me for a long time. Readers demand novelty, so the old makes way for the new.

Sometimes a game still gets its claws in me and demands play time in the face of all competition. The last video game to achieve that was Hearthstone, early last year. The last board games were Wiz-War and X-Wing back in 2012.

It's even rarer, though, that an unreleased game grabs my attention. Years of exposure to marketing hype has given me a tough crust of cynicism. The advent of Kickstarter and the ensuing failed promises have just made it thicker. Nowadays, I take nothing about a game at face value until I've played it and confirmed it for myself.

I can't even remember the last time I was dizzy with anticipation about a game.

So it's remarkable that over the last couple of months, one title has managed to break through. That game is Bloodborne, the spiritual successor to Dark Souls from the same design team. 

The latter game transformed my understanding of what a role-playing game should be. It was a blend of genres I'd always wanted to see, a game that felt like real-life fantasy combat combined with the salivating skinner box of experience and levelling up. It was brilliant, but often the deliberate difficulty curve got too much.

Early reviews of Bloodborne make it sound like it's solved that problem by giving players more information and an easier time early in the game. Then ramping up to the more brutal levels expected once players have adjusted. It seems an excellent solution. Plus, the rich graphics, emphasis on offense over blocking and obvious horror theme had me hooked.

The trouble is, I don't have a PS4. So I can't play it. And there's no way I can justify buying one when I've still got Gears of War 2, Halo 4 and Red Dead Redemption I want to finish on the 360. Not to mention Dark Souls, which I'm only half-way through.

So I'm left hanging in a trap of my own construction. It's something I remember well from my teenage years when I just couldn't afford most of what I wanted. There's nothing for it but to knuckle down and carry on, trying to ignore that awful itch of desire. That's what being grown up is all about.

I understand all that. What I didn't expect was to find that wanting could be so much fun.

It's the same principle as the ascetic. In denial, one learns to find satisfaction in self control. Except that this is a thousand times better because I know that at the end there will be a sweet reward. There will be a time that I can cave in, get a new console, and enjoy my game.

And when I do, I'll enjoy it all the more for having waited.

Finding this unexpected pleasure made me yearn for the days when it happened more often. Because make no mistake: this isn't just about being a games writer. Fans and commentators alike have been decrying the lack of innovation in big-name titles of both video and tabletop games for years. That's what's at the root of the malaise lingering over the current console generaiton, at least until Bloodborne came along.

While there's plenty of creativity amongst independent designers, arguably it takes a big game to engender a big sense of desire. It takes overwhelming production values and an enormous potential play time. It takes a certain level of marketing polish, too.

Other media have already been through this. Blockbuster cinema was floundering a few years ago. That empty space summoned forth white knights to fill it, and alumni like Peter Jackson and Christopher Nolan answered the call. I'm not sure who their equivalents might be in the video gaming world, but I'm confident the increasing interplay between big studios and small developers is going to throw up some surprises. 

Who, though, is going to break through the tabletop barrier? If my money was on anyone, it'd be Rob Daviau or Vlaada Chvatil. But we've heard nothing big from either of them for ages. I hope one of them, or someone else, delivers soon. I want to feel that sharp hope of hype about a cardboard game at least once more before I die.

A slow-moving wargame that's often as much history lesson as game experience.

Looking back at one of TSR's minigames from the early 1980s

The definition of what a deckbuilder should be.

What was the next generation in globe-spanning, six hour wargames, Supremacy is rarely remembered.

I spent a recent column trying to take a different view of what it is that unites us all under the banner of "Ameritrash". But there's one particular unifying factor that I forgot, and while it wasn't really important to the argument I was trying to make there, it's interesting in its own right because it marks a near-universal point of agreement amongst AT fans. The point in question is simply that games need to have a good, solid dose of random to make them interesting. It's something we nearly all agree on - whilst some of us might have more time for abstracts or low-random euros than others, and whilst our tolerance of the degree to which random factors eventually influence the winner of a game may differ, we're united in believing that random factors lend too much fun, excitement, drama and dynamism to a game to be squeezed out in the search for some mythical perfectly balanced game.

One thing that has often perplexed me about gaming culture generally is the attitude to cheats and, more specifically, to games where the set-up makes it very easy for cheats to prosper. Take Fury of Dracula for example: the original Games Workshop game made is really, really easy for the Dracula player to cheat and apparently players felt this was a poor aspect of the design. So much so that, as far as I can tell, when Fantasy Flight republished the game they put a lot of effort - and a lot of extra administration time and rules overhead - into solving this problem. Gamers, on the whole, seemed satisfied. But I remain baffled.

A little bit of fun directed at Msr. Barnes- it's his bag, I'm sure.

Game Freak #13