Citadel Crusade Case Review - AKA "The New Big Games Workshop Case"

Holding up to an estimated 400 figures (of 28-32mm scale, you could probably double or treble that if you go 10-15mm), the Crusade Case is the new big beast from Games Workshop. Is it worth looking at? Well, as I've been looking at a new case to store all my skirmish gaming stuff in (I do realise that skirmish gaming uses a small number of miniatures and this is the biggest case, but I'm a fan of overkill) I decided to pick one up and do a little review on it.

First up, this is the biggest of three cases now available from Games Workshop. They go Skirmish, Battle then Crusade, and are priced at £30, £50 and £75 respectively, I picked up mine from Element Games for £60 plus reward points. Some places might consider an item like this bulky and charge you extra, but Element still let this through on their usual "free postage when you spend £80" deal.

To look at it, it does look a little more like your stereotypical protective gun/ammo crate than the last ones, which looked more like a briefcase (or two briefcases glued together). You get a shoulder strap, molded handle and a couple of clasps, the same as the previous big GW case.

Upon opening it up, two things hit me. First, some of the foam was dented on top and one of the sides of the container sections (more on that later). Not a huge problem, as it was going to get battered at some point, but it would have been nice to have received a perfect version. Some of it may have been damaged due to Element putting the items I ordered to get it up to £80 inside the case (hence why the one of the left looks like it has a blister sized dent in it) so it all fitted into its original packaging for shipment.

Second, notice how the lid doesn't go crashing down? It's not held up by anything, that's a part of the new design - it locks at just past a right angle. It will still fall forward if nudged, but as it is it will quite happily sit there and not move.

After the two thin foam layers, we get to the actual foam. Instead of individual pockets, we now have zig zagged lines of foam that are not fixed - only the edges are fixed to the bottom sheet of foam.

As you can see, these have already had stuff in them - the rest of my order - hence the middle being slightly larger than the rest of it. by not gluing things to the base, you can move the lines around to fit tanks and other big things as well as creating pressure on the minis along the sides to stop them moving. 

The new cases work on a system that involves two layers of foam. There are firstly an insert section, and then a base section which is basically an insert section but with another layer of foam around the outside, to hold the insert layer in place. This means you can either have two layers of storage, or turn the insert upside down to protect something really big.

Without the foam, the box itself is just a big black box.

In the Skirmish case, you get 1 set of two layers, in the Battle case you get two (so four layers) and in the Crusade, you get four, giving you a total of 8 sheets (and since you can get roughly 50 minis in per sheet, that equates to roughly 400 minis - just under double the size of the old double case, which came in at 216 minis).

Moving to the outside of the case, the clasps are quite a bit smaller than the old clasps, maybe only 66% of the size, but they seem to do exactly the same job just as well.

Here is how it lines up against the old standard and large Citadel cases. And remember - this thing can hold twice as much as the large, and four times as much as the standard.

From that, I'd probably say that it is twice as deep as the standard and only a little wider (same height), but a lot smaller and manageable than the large.

Right now it is a little overkill - only my League of Shadows gang for Batman really live in it, but I'm sure my skirmish gaming will grow into it.

Side by side with the large case - much less surface area needed, but probably a little less accessible than the old one - you need to either grab the minis by the head or squidge the foam out a bit to get hold of the bases.

I did get this last weekend, but I held off on writing a review on it until it had been out and about. So, on Wednesday it went off to the local club in the boot of my Micra, taking up maybe 25-35% of the space, so it really doesn't take up a lot of space!

All of the minis in the case survived, despite a bumpy walk around town banging against my hip and some walls, up and down stairs etc so I'm happy to say it passed the test! 

While a thorough test would probably be to throw it down some stairs, I don't know anyone in their right mind who would deliberately run such a test with lovingly painted and crafted minis inside it.

Overall - Would I pay £75 for it? Probably not, but I was quite happy to pay £60 as that is only slightly more than I picked up my "large" case for a few years back. Does the job and looks cool doing it. Definitely a good development from GW in my book.