Do You Have a Travel Player's Kit?

I'm going to come right out and admit it.....I don't game enough.

Now I don't need to roll dice every day, but once a week would be nice. In more than one of my previous jobs I've had to travel....a lot, like a hundred nights a year a lot. The job I'm in now has me gone for two-weeks a go. Frequent travel makes having a home group, well at least a weekly game-having home group, damned near impossible.

Now that the internet is available in even the crappiest location and we have things like Zoom, having an online weekly game is an option.

Before, not so much.....so I had to be prepared for pick-up games as they became available. Back when I played HackMaster (I know, not another HackMaster story) I was also a member of the HackMaster Association, which gave me a nation-wide group of people I could reach out to for a game while travelling. Normally I was too busy....the travel was a business trip after all, but a couple of times when I was in Nashville I did manage to make the couple-hours drive down to Chattanooga to take part in one group's Monday night weekly home-game.

I also had a player or two driving through Boise stop in for a game at my house (I was the GM so the sporadic game schedule was on my terms).

The thing is I had to be ready for a pickup game, so I had a travel game kit. I actually had two, one as a player and another one as a GM, but I never used the GM kit and ended up cannibalizing it for convention games.

I never liked the dice I had in my play kit. Kind of cool dice, but waaaaaay too tiny. I'll have to post pics sometime. Anyway I was in my local game store and they had some small dice and I figured I should update my kit and make it ready for an upcoming trip next month.

Here's my player's kit....which is housed in a fancy gift card tin. I did take the liberty of spray-painting the tin in prep of some future decoration plans. The lid is lined with thin craft foam, making for a small dice tray (got to have my DRZ.....designated rolling zone). The actual contents of the player's kit:

• Two sets of dice
• PC Sheet(s)
• Note Cards
• More note cards (graph-paper)
• Pencil
• USB Thumb Drive

Whenever possible I keep PDF copies of my PC sheets. Hand-filled sheets are great, but don't necessarily travel or store well. I print these out multiple pages (2 in 1) and then at 60% size, which makes it small enough for the tin and is still legible. The note cards are standard 3 x 5 cut down to 3 x 4.75" and then rounded with a simple punch. The pencil......it's a fricken pencil. It's actually the same size as I found it, basically a golf pencil with an eraser, but no reason you couldn't cut down a regular pencil and/or use a Fisher space pen (well, but the price!). The thumb drive I use to hold PDFs of my game rules, which I rarely use because of things like laptops and tablets that are ubiquitous these days. What I use it more for than anything are copies of my PCs. Usually the hotel has a printer I can access and I'm able to print off bigger sheets before the game. The tiny one is a back-up...just in case.

So that's it....that's my travel game kit. I do have a couple meeple minis I could toss in, but I don't really see me using a mini 'cause either the GM has them or the game is online.

I can't help but to wonder if I'm the only one with a mini/travel game kit and if not, what do other people add in that I don't?

Monday Afternoon Edit: I went ahead and took a pic of some of my dice. The big dice are my beloved d30's (well, two of my Gamescience d30's), the next largest would be my "regular" Gamescience d20s. The purple ones are the new travel dice pictured above and the tiny ones.....those are the "big" metal d20's from my tiniest set of dice. I kept more than two sets in one of those emergency pill bottles you'd keep on a keychain.