Happy Canada Day and a question!

Good morning!

First off, Happy Canada Day to all! It's unpleasantly rainy here today, which means most festivities may end up being postponed - hopefully you're having more summery weather!

Quick post today, mainly centered around a question I have. I acquired a copy of the old board game NATO : The Next War in Europe relatively recently, and have been really looking forward to playing it. The concept, a strategic-scale wargame of the first days of a Warsaw Pact offensive into Western Europe, with rules for nuclear and chemical warfare, really appeals to me. The counters are nice, with good NATO symbology, and the rules, while long, are comprehensive, and it seems to me like they would be fairly intuitive to learn if I could just start the game.

That's the thing, though. I haven't managed to start the game yet, because sorting through the hundreds of counters to just start the game is so time-consuming and, frankly, daunting. I get most of the way through the US forces about a half-hour in, look at the remaining NATO piles and the tower of WP markers, sigh, and pack it up because I need to do something else.

Now, I don't expect a strategic game like that to be a pick-up and play title, over in an hour, but I'd appreciate any tips anyone has on organizing the game materials or something, so that I can get the game started in a reasonable time and set it back up later if I need to take a break because I have a life.

The box comes with a cute plastic rack, but besides the cover needing to be weighed down at all times to prevent counters fleeing their assigned spots, there aren't enough spots to subdivide the counters in any useful way. You can split each country off (with 3 spots for WP forces), and put all the game counters in the two remaining spots, but you still have to sift through multiple handfuls of counters to find the right ones for setting up each nation. I've considered Ziplocs, but I'm not sure what the most efficient organization would be.

Thanks for your help if you have any ideas at all, and thanks especially for coming by this blog! I hope you've found something you like, and I promise to get something with pictures posted up again... eventually!