Who am I?
I’m just a regular guy, husband to the best wife on this world and proud father of two boys and a little girl. I was born in 1975 and I’ve been a boardgame fan as long as I can remember. Furthermore I have a hook for graphic design and typography, even though I’m not a professional at all. I’m working in education and furthermore as a freelancer for Heidelberger Spieleverlag. And that’s pretty much it.
Why am I doing this?
Short version
Because it’s fun!
Long version
It all started somewhere around 2005 with a bunch of cards from a game (don’t know what it was anymore) that kept zooming around the game box. I needed a quick and easy solution and it was shortly after this that I discovered one of the most useful and most inornate websites I’ve ever seen: Craig P Forbes “Super Deluxe Tuckbox Template Maker“. Perhaps the name won’t win any award, the content really deserves it. With this page, some basic Photoshop experience and a lot of learning by doing I managed to set up my first big project, the “Battlebox” project for my beloved Battlelore, 1st edition. My wife was pregnant with our first son at the time and we played the hell out of it every evening. A fantastic game with a great community, where I first met DarkPadawan.
After Battlore was cancelled by Days of Wonder (boy, I was really heartbroken) I set aside this little papercraft hobby for some years. Until 2012, when X-Wing appeared on the scene. Even though I hadn’t any buddys to play with I bought everything, the system and the miniatures where just too good. Soon after this I designed the first tuckboxes for the countless cards and somewhere around wave 4 I ran into some serious storage issues. Even worse, I really disliked buying expensive solutions out of foam, plastic (honestly, you don’t get a plano in europe for a reasonable price!) or whatever. I wanted to buy more games! DarkPadawan saved me, because he’s actually the one who invented the MicroHangars in the first place. It was such a great idea, but sad enough he stopped supporting the game. Since I knew him from good old Battlelore times I contacted him and asked him, if I might pick up where he left, and he was OK with this. This is were disaster took it’s course…
The rest of the story in short form:
I designed additional MicroHangars, invented the GearBoxes and a somewhat crazy dice box, designed the dispenser box at a request from a german X-Wing community member, bought Armada and made MicroHangars and GearBoxes for this game, engineered the Armada Command Bridge and transferred the concept to X-Wing and Battlelore, which I’d added to my portfolio in the meantime, bought Imperial Assault…
Things got really bad when TKundNobody from german MER community casually mentioned that I’d need my own website to host all my stuff and he was kind enough to grant me some webspace for free.
By now I spend far more time on box design and website maintenance than on actually playing most of the games in my collection, but I’m still having a hell of a good time. There are always different ways to pursue a hobby, I think, and if you havn’t tried it yet: the banal folding, cutting and glueing of cardstock is a really great way for stress relaxation, especially when my wife and the three kids are sleeping (and I’m able to use my wife’s vast collection of cool papercraft tools without danger). And the process of designing new boxes is always a very fulfilling task, even though every now and then I wonder what people with REAL problems are doing…
Thanks for reading this far, and happy gaming and crafting to all of you,
Christian aka SirWillibald