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One of the oddities about Advanced Squad Leader (ASL) is that if you want to play the game well, you need to spend more space storing the counters so that you can find them quickly than is taken up by the original boxes the game came in!

See on the left-hand side of the photograph: ASL rules, then modules (maps, scenarios) and then counter boxes. Lots and lots of counter boxes.

So many that the Yanks counters have had to wander down to the next shelf. Eep. And I haven’t even got the British Order of Battle (OOB) yet, which is high on my wishlist. Of course, it’s a little out of print at present…

Anyway, storing the infantry counters is the most important task, as ASL has this nasty habit of replacing counters from time to time. That Elite Squad? It’s just taken Casualty Reduction, so you’ll need to replace it with an Elite Half-Squad counter. That Russian 1st-line squad? It’s just lost morale badly and needs to be substituted out for a Conscript squad. So, here’s my box of German infantry counters (which also has the Support Weapons and leaders in it)… the countermix is almost entirely from Beyond Valor, the first ASL module.

The vehicle counters don’t need to be replaced in ASL, so it’s easier to have more than one vehicle type to a partition. Unfortunately, there are a *lot* of vehicles in ASL. Lots and lots and lots. Especially German vehicles. I was really having trouble finding the right one at the right time. So, I’ve just taken my permanent marker and labeled all the partitions, like this:

The bottom row of counters has the Weapons – Artillery, Anti-Tank and the like – and they’re pretty obvious. Well, that helped. I’ve also finished with the Russians:

That worked pretty well. There are nowhere near as many Russian vehicles as German vehicles, so I could get away with a smaller box.

So, I should have a chance of finding the right counter I need more quickly now…