If you build it they will game?
Okay, so last week I was talking about how to build a gaming table and going over some of the things that I'd like to include. I noodled over the plans a bit more and figured out what I needed and what was feasible and I got a start on it this week.

Space, the final frontier
Something like that anyway. Right now the room I have set aside for gaming (and Taekwondo and my computer) has a bunch of boxes and bags taking up the center of the room. At a rough guess, more than half of it is gaming-related materials. Most of the gaming-related material is actually terrain or pieces of things that are intended to become terrain on that distant future date when I have some free time! Since that stuff is taking up the space where I want my gaming table to be, I need to figure out what to do with it. Fortunately, I had planned on including storage space underneath my gaming table for terrain and other things, so it fits right into my plan. A secondary concern is that I want the bitz that will become terrain to be visible and readily accessible. That way, when I do have time to make terrain, I can quickly see what I have and what I can make, and I can get started right away. Since I'll be having 12 small cubbies and 4 large ones, it should provide me plenty of space to store all the terrain bitz that I want. In addition, with that many different compartments it'll make it much easier to have the bitz sorted by type so that I can easily find them. It does mean that space will be cramped while I build the table, but that once it's built I'll free up a lot of room.

I drew up some plans so I could make sure the table would look the way I wanted it to. The mind's eye does not always see things that reality puts in the way. I drew up my basic shape so that I could make sure it was correct...

Next I drew in the cubbies on one side so that I could make sure they would be correct and I could count the parts I'd need.

Measure once, cut twice?
I knew roughly what I needed, but there are few things worse than going to the store, getting your supplies for a project, getting home to start and realizing you forgot something. From the plans I had drawn up, I counted all the parts that I would need. I realized that I'd need 2 4x4 sections. (Top and bottom of the table.) I'd also need 2 4x3 sections (the interior walls that support the table top and provide backs to the cubbies so stuff doesn't just fall into the center of the table.) I also needed 4 1x3 sections for the end supports of the table and the ends of the cubbies. Finally, I'd need the cubbies themselves. For the 4 large cubbies, I'd need a 1x3 and a 1x4 (vertical and horizontal dividers, respectively.) For the 12 smaller cubbies, I'd need 2 1x4 sections and 3 1x3 sections. 2 4x4, 2 4x3, 3 1x4, and 8 1x3 sections. I then noodled a little bit to figure out the best way of getting all those board sections out of pieces of 4x8 plywood. While I did buy a circular saw while I was there, I knew that they'd be able to make the cuts more accurately than I could, so I wanted a diagram to show them how to do it. Below is what I came up with. The guy at Home Depot was impressed.

Counting the cost
The table hasn't been very expensive so far. The three pieces of plywood were supposed to be about $9 each, and each cut after the first two was supposed to be $1. (They actually charged me a higher price for the plywood, but didn't charge me for the cuts. It worked out to about the same amount of money, so I didn't sweat it.) The screws were about $5, and so was the rope. That puts me at about $50 for the table so far. Admittedly, I did pick up a fairly cheap circular saw as well, but I'll be using that in other projects, so I don't consider it a cost for this one. I still have other parts to buy, namely the wheels and the flaps and whatever I'll be using as the supports. I will probably also need to buy something to cover the top with, and I'll want to get some trim or something to provide an edge around the gaming area to keep models and dice from falling off the edge of the world. Still, I can't see the whole thing costing me more than about $80.

Tie one on
I got it all cut and paid for it and took it out to my car. Then I realized I had a problem. I drive a small sedan. The 4x3's and 4x4's wouldn't fit in my car! I didn't want to have them cut further and then reassemble them later, so I went back in and bought some cheap rope and tied them to the top of the car. I kept reaching out the window and putting my hand on them all the way home to make sure they weren't going to slip or break the ropes and go sailing off. My knots held and I got them home safely. Once I'd carted all the parts up the stairs and into the room (I'm building it in the room it's going in, because it will be too big to fit through the door after it's assembled. If I move I'll have to take it apart to get it out. Ah well, I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.) Below is what it looked like piled into a corner.

Getting it together
I started to assemble the table. One thing that I had a little trouble with was how to make my angles square. I hadn't thought to buy an L or a T-square or a level, so I had to sort of eyeball it. I ended up propping one piece against a dresser to act as a support and to keep it close to a 90-degree angle while I screwed a cross section into the other piece. While it wasn't perfect, it got it close enough that I could fix it when I screwed the other end in. I didn't think to take any pictures at this point, but I'm not sure they would have really showed much anyway. One problem I had was turning it over to get at different angles so that I could put the screws in properly. It was definitely awkward to drag around and turn over, especially in the limited space I have. 4x4x3 doesn't seem like much until you are trying to manhandle it in a small area. Eventually I managed to use the rope that I'd bought to tie it to the car and that helped a lot. In the image here, you see the basic box of the table turned up on one end so that I can finish putting screws along the interior walls to support the top of the table. This is the stage the table is in as of this writing.

The next step
Now, the next thing I need to do is to make the cubbies. I'll be notching one side of each support beam so that they can slide together and overlap each other. I want the horizontal beams to be more solid, since they'll be taking the load over unsupported areas, while the vertical ones have more rigidity in their direction of load. I'll be using that saw I bought to make cuts about 4" into the horizontal beams and 8 inches into the vertical beams, so that they have full overlap. I decided that the horizontal supports would need more strength in the front, rather than the back (it's easier to reach stuff at the front, so that's where things usually get placed.) With that in mind, I'm planning on notching the horizontal supports in back and the vertical ones in the front.

Keep on Rollin'!
Once I've got the cubbies assembled, I'll be at the end of the parts that I've already got, so it'll be back to the store again. At this point, I'll want to put the wheels on it. I want to be able to roll it around and reposition it. That way I can have it in the center of the room during any gaming or when I want to use it as a workbench for a project. When I'm not using it, I can fold the flaps down and roll it into a corner to provide more room for other things. Between folding down to half it's size and rolling out of the way, it'll be nearly a virtual gaming table, there when you need it, not when you don't!

Further along
I still need the extension flaps so that I can extend the table out to 8 feet if necessary. I'll also need to figure out how to support those flaps and get some hinges for them. No sense having a 4x8 table if you can't play on the sides of it! I'm thinking I'll put a couple of sliding boards in the central space under the table so that they can slide out to support the flaps, but I'll need to play around with that idea a little bit so that I can come up with a good solution. It has to be stable, yet be able to move out of the way when it isn't needed.

Here be Dragons
Long, long ago, people used to worry about sailing off the edge of the world. This actually happens in games. Mostly it's just dice that bounce too far and go overboard, but once in a while it's a model that got too close to the edge and was brushed or knocked off. I'm going to put up some kind of small border around the edge of the table to prevent that from happening. I haven't decided if I'll use some trim or simple 1x2 inch board. We'll see what it looks like and how much it costs when I get to that point. It will go along the cubby sides of the table and around the extension flaps. Of course that means that if I'm using it as a 4x4 table (flaps down) it won't have any border on the non-cubby sides. If I can work out an easy way to put a border there, but remove it when I put the flaps up, I'll do that. Otherwise, I'll just have to settle for a partially guarded board.

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