While the table is pretty awesome and everyone enjoys playing on it, I would be remiss if I did not look back on the points where it fell short, or I should say, where I fell short in the design. That fell into several areas.

Height

At some point a firm decision had to be made on how tall the table would be. When looking at this, it seemed that a more controlling factor was related to what chair would go under the table. There were three possible heights that I could choose from. Since I knew what style and vendor I would use, I had a very set value for those possible heights.

The first was the standard chair which had the dimensions of: Overall: 19¾”W x 23¼”D x 40½”H Seat: 19¾”W x 19″D Seat Crown Height: 20″

The next was a counter height: Counter Stool: 19¾”W x 24″D x 45½”H Seat: 19¾”W x 18¾”D Seat Crown Height: 26½” Footrest: 7″H. And the third option was bar height: Bar stool: 19¾”W x 24½”D x 49½”H Seat: 19¾”W x 19″D Seat Crown Height: 30½” Footrest: 10¾”H

This gave me an under the table height of 20″, 26.5″, and 30.5″. Added to that would be leg height and space to move in and out of the table. I assumed 5″, therefore giving me an under table height at 25″, 31.5″, and 35.5″. From there, it was a calculation of top down instead. What was the maximum height I wanted the table to stand? Also planning on storage between the table top and the bottom of the table in the format of drawers. I was limited to how much I could add between the two spaces.

My considerations were that I wanted a table where we could sit or stand at as needed. That precluded the standard table height and put into either counter or bar heights. A normal counter is at 36″, although all my kitchen ones are at 38.5″, and a normal bar height is between 40″ to 42″. Making the assumption that more is better, and bigger is better. I went with the 42″ height and bar stools. That then determined the amount of space left for the drawers as well as how deep the alcove would be to hold a TV.

And there lies the arguments. I am a bit taller than the average person while at least half of my players are female and are of average height or less. This means that the end height I chose is not as optimal for them as it is for me. The chairs that I had selected are fairly tall, and while not heavy, can be cumbersome to move. And almost no one’s feet can reach the floor when sitting leaving everyone feeling a little more lilliputian than normal.

It is hard to make the call if I choose the correct height or if counter height would have worked better. With our iPads and character sheets on the table, the current height works very well while sitting or standing. Counter height would have been lower and had more bending over, but – more of the table would have been reachable to those with T-Rex arms. The end result is mixed and that is almost completely driven by the height of the person. I am happy about where it is.

Drawers

This is one area where I had the most failure. In planning the drawers I had thought there was plenty of space based off the depth of the table top and the amount of desk space left over. What I did not figure in for was the thickness of the table top, bottom, and how much space was lost due to the soft close drawers.

I started of with 5.5″ of space, but once constructed my drawers only had 1.75″ of height inside the drawer, and 2″ before hitting the insides. That was tragic mistake in that my wonderful storage drawers became almost useless. To fit any type of useful boxes or normal items inside the drawers, I really needed 3″ of space and I am woefully short of that.

To fix this, I could have easily added an inch to the height and stolen an half an inch of the leg space while still providing sufficient space to sit. Also, if I had gone with counter height, I could have added a little more space, although everyone sitting at the table would have felt more like a child than normal as the table would sit very high from normal.

The other issue with the drawers are the length of them. The two sets of three drawers on the long side of the table really needed to have 12″ of space within them to allow a full size sheet of paper to fit in. You can see from this image how well standard paper fits into the drawer. The biggest limitation to making the drawers much deeper was the maximum size of the room and the larger TV size that I selected to eventually be placed into the table.

Generally the side drawers were an almost complete failure, while the end drawers are much deeper, they also fail on the height as all the rest did.

Alcove, AKA the TV Pit

The design issues and concerns here are a mixed bag. Since I was not sure about what TV would be in place I did not really plan appropriate holes and conduits for cables and power. The reality is that almost all the flat screen TV’s would have been similar enough to have allowed me to have better planned for that eventual insertion.

This would have allowed for a more graceful install later, as well as allowing it to be reversible since the planned infrastructure would have been part of the plan and been directly incorporated into the table. Instead I can only go forward and embrace having the TV there because the amount of damage to the table is not recoverable. In fact, it would be better to just have the entire table rebuilt at this point if I am not happy with what has happened to it.

Overall

The table is very nice. Most of the issues, besides the drawers are mostly minor as long as we are happy with the current final form. It works well, and I expect many more years of game playing on top of it.

Next Upgrades

Where else would I go with this? Well everything else would be focused on the TV. What I really would like to see is a full multi-touch screen. This would would allow much a much more close experience for the players. I will be waiting for the price of those to drop quite a bit more before I replace that current TV.

Oh how everyone will be happy with the new table. No longer playing on plastic CostCo tables. No more having everything spill over on the edges. Now we can have a game on a real table.

The table is ready to be installed and brought to the basement. Hmm, oh. The high turns and limited space… we did measure for the size of the top? It is in a single piece after all… And yes, it fit. Only a few small scrapes and gouges out of the wall. A small repair for a future of glory!

And there it is. As you can see we also added in some RGB LCD lights on the inside. The entire table has been coated with the same of clear coat that is used for commercial bars. The inside of the table should be able to hold water assuming a keg somehow blew up in the basement. It ended up being an absolutely beautiful table and fits in the man cave better than almost any other furniture here. I am so very excited to play our first game on the table.

Do not expect a long montage of pictures for this. I’ll admit I failed almost completely here, and did not get very many as it was being constructed. So you will have to enjoy the small set that I have here:

As you can see a few design changes were already incorporated. Instead of the large wooden cross beams that I had in my drawings, we were able to instead use two large pedestals. This allowed two things. The first a much easy way of hiding all the cables from the floor up to the table, and the second, provide a some hidden storage space with drawers.

I was pretty excited to jump in and start drawing up something. I quickly realized several things.

• I am not an artist
• I am a poor draftsman
• I suck at drawing
• I can use a ruler and measuring tape somewhat competently.
• And to make sure, I am not an artist

Yes, I quickly went from many pieces of mangled graph paper to a basic graphics drawing program. No, I did not spend the money for AutoCAD. While useful, I knew that I really only needed a rough drawing for the planned table since I was commissioning someone else to build it for me. My competence is in other areas than woodworking. I needed fairly accurate measurements, but even those would change over time as the design would update during the build to deal with real world physics as well as the actual size of the room it would be placed within.

I started with something simple:

The first design was really to start figuring out the features and basic size of what I wanted. I wanted something that was bar height so that my group could sit or stand at the table. It was important to future proof by providing a deep well in the middle of the table to either hold 3D terrain features or better yet, a television for virtual table top play. Deciding on which size TV would go in it controlled many of the future measurement decisions.

From there, there would be a need for drawers and storage and a fine tuning of where the total design was going. It was also at this point that it was decided to go with a 65″ TV in the future. Putting a little extra space on all the sides, this is what I went with:

Admitted there were a very large number of revisions between each of the images that are shown, but these do represent the major revision points. Continuing to think about the details, it was also clear that power would be needed not only for the eventual TV, but for all the players, as everyone has a multitude of electronics for gaming but just because.

And finally, the almost completed design. Trying to be complete with all the design pieces all on one piece of paper. This was the final drawn design that was created.

Admitted, there were still a lot of assumptions on my part and the design itself. I was concerned that there would not be sufficient stability of the table considering what would be the tremendous weight of the top. It seems I overthought this too much and there was a much more simple solution once we started building this beast.

The dream of many gamers is that moment when you have enough space, cash on hand, and a burning desire to put it all in together into the perfect gaming space. Especially getting the table to end all tables to work for the next 40 years of gaming. I, like many middle-aged somewhat affluent gaming enthusiasts, decided that splurging on the ultimate gaming space was much better than some sex kitten half my age and a suicidal crotch rocket. Even better, I even had my wife’s permission!

I now had several items I needed to research as well design a space to hold my ultimate man-cave. I decided to start on the table part first since at the time, the house part did not really exist. There were a very large amount of DYI tables as well as several commercial ones that even made me drool and whoop for absolutely no reason at all.

First were a bunch of the DYI ones:

This lead me to the ultimate expression of a commercial version of a gaming table. Topping up over $15,000 the Sultan Gaming table and it’s brethern were awesome to behold:

By Loki’s twisted teet! Of course it was going to require me to rob a small bank and wait 18 months to receive that monstrous piece of cherry heaven. The company making them is completely out of business because they could not keep up with demand. I never knew that there were that many gamers with that much money burning a hole in their pocket. Maybe I should get out more and start convincing them that I need that money.

Then there was this wonderful DYI model which took a lot of the nice features of the Sultan table and even provided a model:

I think I now had enough information to get started.