In my last review I don’t think I could say enough good things about KR Cases, and I’m here to say even more good things about them. Recently, I left St. John’s on a two-week vacation to return to my family home in southwest Ontario, where I hoped to either get a game of Warhammer in at my old local store or where I could teach my dad or brothers the ropes on a hobby and game that’s taken on a lot of personal significance to me. Keeping my KR case as my carry-on, the flight to Ontario went relatively smooth and there were only a couple of nicks taken by miniatures in transit.

Of course, in the year of our lord 2022 things rarely go so cleanly or easily and I think it was naive of me to think that this trip I’d micro-managed for myself in advance would be any different. Things went south in a pretty bad way, and for a number of reasons (but mostly health and safety) I ended up leaving Ontario and returning to Newfoundland before the end of the first week. Which was also nice, because I got to spend a few recovery days in Deer Lake with XenonMage and got to put my head back on nice and straight. Cancelling and then re-booking flights left me in a hard spot, because the airline I booked my flights with would only allow me to fly with one checked bag – no carry-on, which meant no KR Case.

Flying to Ontario, I didn’t trust Air Canada to check my miniatures as baggage, and I didn’t trust the second airline to check them either, if I paid for an extra checked bag, so I was going to have to do the unthinkable: entrust both of my armies to Canada Post. I made the pyrrhic bargain and paid for insurance and spent the next week while I was in Deer Lake and then driving back to St. John’s stressing out about how many pieces my army would be in when it arrived. The day after I returned to St. John’s, I went to the post office, picked them up, and as soon as I got home I opened up the case in the kitchen to assess the damage.

What shocked me most was the survival rate. Every single one of my Howling Banshees, Guardians, and Dire Avengers survived. Even the metal ones. My psyker HQs and Autarchs survived as well, though Jain Zar had taken some damage to her weapons. My Shroud Runners were intact, and only one of the metal Wraithguard had come off of their base. And the Death Guard army fared even better – I’d recently built some new Plague Marines and a Plagueburst Crawler (galleries to follow) and most of them survived, with only a couple Plague Marines losing their weapons and the Crawler sustaining minor hull damage. My recently-completed Typhus and Myphitic Blight-Haulers didn’t take a scratch.

There were, however, a couple fatalities. The time has come to retire a couple of models, at least for the moment, because to put them back together again right now would mean a full rebuild or rework and more effort than I can put in right now with some other projects I’ve got on the bench. One of them was my pride and joy Fire Prism. It was designed to come apart magnetically, yes, but it broke in places where I’d not intended for it to break, the barrel was pretty mutilated, and to fix it would mean potentially having to rewire it. The other casualty – and I think I feel worse about this than the Fire Prism – was Big Sister, the big goofy metal Wraithlord my friend Gerard gave me which I rebuilt as a rescue project. I don’t think there was a single part on her that didn’t break.

That said, the damage could have been so much worse. If anything, I credit my KR case with the fact that the vast majority of my armies survived, and that the Eldar and Death Guard will both live to fight another day. The last couple weeks have been a whirlwind but my miniatures’ safe return was a real silver lining, something that I’m taking as a win and – if anything – has made those models that made the trip and back even more important and sentimental for me. I still have a new post scheduled for next week, but after that I think I’m taking a brief hiatus while I figure out what to do to fill those empty spots in my army back in.