A Song of Ice & Fire: Magnetizing and storage tutorial

Difficulty: 1/5
Time: 20 minutes per unit of 12 figures

A Song of Ice & Fire is a game that comes with miniatures, miniatures, and more miniatures. Currently, we own the Starks, Lannisters, and Boltons in our private collection, but we know we will be purchasing more of the houses as they will become available. We like to think of ways to enhance games and in this case, setup time and storage of all these minis and their movement trays was a problem we wanted to solve. The goal was to select army units and simply pick up their trays without having to fill the trays with miniatures one by one.

A good start was to make sure the miniatures didn’t fall from their trays when handled and put away. To make sure of this we attached magnets to the bottom of the miniatures bases and the bottom of the trays. Aside from that, it feels strangely satisfying to have the miniature snap to the tray this worked out to be really handy too. Because now we were able to load the miniatures vertically without them falling out. This opened up doors to new storage solutions.

What do you need?
So how can you make this for yourself? Quite easy actually, all you need is some small magnets, we used small round magnets of 5x1mm (width x height) and Miniature & Model Superglue. If you want to save yourself some time, make sure to get The Army Painter Magic Superglue Activator. It is a pump action spray so simply apply Superglue to the components, press them firmly together and spray over the magnet. It will create an instant airtight bubble around the Superglue which is turn will harden in seconds. Again when you’re doing loads of them (which you probably are) this makes the job so much easier and quicker.

So before you start with the glue right away, make a tower of your magnets and color one of them so you can always remember the pole you use for the top or bottom. The last thing you want is the magnet pushing the miniature out of the tray (you wouldn’t be the first this happened to ;)).

The next preparation step is to get out some small nails (or something the magnets stick to) for easy handling of the magnets while sticking them on. Make sure to always put the same pole side down to the nail to prevent some confusion later. Line up some nails with magnets and you are good to go!

Put some glue on the magnet and press it to the bottom of the miniature base. Then a quick spray of Magic Superglue Activator and within a few seconds, you’re on to the next one.

The same process goes for the bottom of the movement trays and before you know it you’ve got upside down Lannisters.

We didn’t stop here though. We needed even the trays to also be easily accessible and stored away. So we came up with a magnetic board for the trays. We took out a 42x32x0,4 cm MDF wooden board and painted it with magnetizing paint. Now at this point, the minis already stick to the board, but the movement trays don’t as the magnets on the bottom of the tray are positioned too far away. To fix this we glued some bolts to the board with Miniature & Model Superglue. When you do this make sure to line them up correctly so that bolts are positioned under the magnets that are on the bottom of the trays. And that’s it! Your trays now stick to the board which can be stored vertically.