HMS Gaming Table

At the end of 2019 we moved house and sadly this table had to be dismantled and I was sad 🙁 so was my brother 🙁  But because I am a thoughtful, considerate big brother, I managed to save the pieces and we decided to reassemble it in the garage at the new house 🙂  However it wasn’t all plain sailing

The garage is a much more enclosed space than the attic at the old house meaning that it needed a small amount of redesign.  This is what we managed to reasonably assemble after the move.  The trays that were on the edges of the old table made it too wide to fit in the garage so they had to go.  There also wasn’t a great deal of room for seating but the playing surface was too low to stand at.  So I put my thinking cap on to assess how exactly I could solve the two issues

The problems:

1. Playing surface too low/No Seating

Obviously I couldn’t make the garage bigger so to get around the seating issue I decided that it would no longer be a table at which you sit – simple.  By raising the playing surface it would become a standing table, which I actually think is OK for wargames.

2. Loss of the storage trays

In order to raise the table, instead of just extending the legs, I could create a second 8×4 surface above the existing one.  The lower surface could then be used as a storage area and be a lot more useful than the original becaus it would be large enough to store all manner of things.  Model carry cases, models that are either waiting to be brought onto the table or have been removed from play, drinks, snacks, books, laptops, phones, tablets, the kitchen sink and all the other paraphernalia that wargamers tend to carry with them.

Obviously, being an engineer when coming up with these solutions I naturally thought of other ideas I felt would be entirely necessary and in no way constituted over engineering the product.  Ideas like

1. Coating the surfaces in some kind of material to give it a luxury finish
2. Adding built in power supplies so that players could charge phones or laptops or tablets
3. Building in some PC Speakers so we can have a musical accompaniment to the games
4. Adding lighting to the lower playing surface.
5. Making those lights colour selectable so that players can pick a team colour

My brother, who is not an engineer disagreed because he didn’t understand but I quickly explained that basically it would totally unusable without them.  Plus, I was paying so he should stop worrying about budget…

And with that we set to work

Now, I should point out that a lot of this work was undertaken last year during the lockdown.  Seeing as we couldn’t have people round to play games it seemed like a good opportunity.  However photos got lost and even when most of the work was complete, the table kind of just sat there, unused 🙁

I am posting these updates now because, well, one I found the pictures but also because not only has the game table been officially launched but it is only a few weeksaway (hopefully) from the final finishing touches being added – I am currently weighing up options for building in the sound system