Games Workshop has a new approach to its packaging for Warhammer Fantasy Battles and Warhammer 40,000 plastic miniatures. This new method combines all variants for a particular figure into one box, reducing the number of purchases required for a player to acquire all the variants of that particular figure.

The Warhammer 40,000 Imperial Guard Sentinel (May, $22 MSRP) is an example of the new packaging protocol. “We’re trying to reduce the line so there’s more versatility in every box set,” said Games Workshop’s VP of Sales for Trade and Direct Chris Woodward. “You used to have to stock four to five different box sets. If you wanted to actually stock them so that you’d have a squadron of them, that would be 15 different box sets you’d have to stock for one entry in one book. What we’ve done with our new plastic technology…is now we can produce a Sentinel that’s [all in] one box, has even more versatility than the old ones, because now we can have six different variants with all the different weapons and all the different options, all in one box.

“It allows somebody who’s really selling our product to stock one box, not five, which shrinks down that shelf space and overhead…What that does for the customer is they’re able to purchase one box, get all the bits they could ever want, build any type of Sentinel they currently want,” Woodward said.  In addition to the Sentinel, several other WH40K box sets are also due to be released in May.

Coming in June will be three new plastic box sets of Empire models for Warhammer Fantasy Battles, also utilizing the new approach. “Empire’s going to be the first Fantasy army we have where you can build every single entry in the book in plastic,” said Woodward.