Whether it’s a boardgame, a wargame, an rpg, or a makeshift operating space for harvesting the internal organs of drifters a good tabletop is important. Back at the beginning of the year when 2015 seemed bright and new I returned to a perennial issue. Finding or making a good playing surface. There’s a lot of options and they all have their pro’s and cons.
At the standard end is simply ensuring you have a decent sized table, if there’s enough room for people to fit around it and for the stuff to fit on top then you’re good. But some girls (and boardgames) are bigger than others and you’re going to run into trouble if you try squeezing, say, Twilight Imperium 3 with a full set of players, around a normal table. You could buy a table specifically for gaming, but you run into two issues there, price and space. Price isn’t necessarily an issue. If you know a carpenter you could put one together fairly cheaply. But this cheapness is going to come at the cost of convenience. You’re going to end up with a fairly boxy piece of furniture. You could buy a fold out table, catering tables or papering tables can be had for €40-60. Unfortunately most of them are a foot or two too narrow to make purchasing them useful (most seem to be about two foot across, you probably want at least three and ideally four). The fold up tables do take care of the space issue though.
If you don’t want an entire table then the next solution is “pimping” your current table. This generally consists of buying a sheet of cheap timber of the requisite dimensions and plonking it on top of your existing table. It has the fact that its cheap and surprisingly easy to store going for it. The cons being that it’s generally ugly as fuck. Of course you can go further with it, you can chop it into more manageable pieces (and then construct a method of connecting the two pieces firmly together for when you need to play). You can finish it with paint and varnish or staple on some nice felt. You could edge it to stop dice escaping it, etc. Really for most games that don’t fit comfortably on a standard table this is probably the best way to go (though I would recommend at least tarting it up a bit, nobody likes bellying up to raw wood).
But I wanted more, I wanted a configuration that meant I didn’t have to bother with battlemats or hand drawn maps or any of the various accoutrements that the more popular rpg’s are laden down with. So I (once again, as I tend research this once a year or so) priced some custom cut polycarbonate (lexan, pvc, etc.) and discovered that a) there aren’t a lot of places in Ireland that do them, b) the places that do deal in it don’t tend to do it in the dimensions I want and c) getting it shipped from abroad was rather expensive. I am envious of American chain hardware stores. I found some places in England that would do them, but the price was pretty high. So while the appeal of a dry erase overlay for your table overlay (perhaps one with a laser etched one inch square grid on it) is unmistakable it’s also (for the moment) unobtainable. Of course, while handy for random combats it doesn’t deal with the issue of having to draw out a map for each encounter. There are ways around this, print out the maps and place them under the sweet sweet polycarbonate being the obvious one.
I also looked at whiteboards, but unless you get lucky and snag a second-hand one (or steal one as some people I know have done, kudos) an extended tabletop size one is pretty expensive. I thought I’d cracked the issue when I came across gridded flipcharts. But sadly Viking changed their manufacturing process and the squares are no longer an inch square. Ecclesiastes 1:14 was right, “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”
So I moved onto combining the real and the virtual. There are two routes for this, the more boring and achievable one is to use a tablet/monitor/flatscreen tv connected to a laptop/notebook to display a virtual tabletop. You can display the maps on that and move the pc’s markers around. If the players have their own tablets they can even move themselves or they can use a laser pointer or what have you. The obvious problem with this is that it isn’t portable (though most people have HD tv’s so that isn’t an issue) and it completely removes the tactile feel. The baller and shot caller option is to use a short throw projector, either correctly mounted or using a reflective plane (which we may call a mirror) to project the maps onto the playing surface. So you can save yourself the time, use the official maps and still have all the fun of using miniatures. The cons here are that it’s not portable, it needs to be properly installed (though you can do some nice stuff with a lighbox for portable projectors) or at least setup, but the biggest con is that decent short throw digital projectors are fucking expensive. You would want to be running a lot of games to justify coughing up around five hundred quid just for some sweet maps.
RPG’s aside the issue of the actual tabletop surface looms. Not all are created equal and ones with a little “give” tend to be better for most boardgames or card games. Not an insurmountable problem, to be honest a heavy tablecloth often does the job. If you’re using a table “overlay” then you can cover it with felt (which is more expensive than I thought). But what I really want to do is get a full roll of jersey backed neoprene (if you’ve ever used one of those mats for CCG’s that’s what they’re made off, think fancy mousepads as well) that can either be attached to a table overlay or simply laid on top. It feels so good to play on. The only place that seemed to sell this stuff in Ireland appears to have shut down and its hard enough to find suppliers of the industrial stuff (which is far too thick). After some searching (and some US company fuck not bothering to respond to emails answering questions they asked!) I found a supplier in England that sells full rolls (roughly six-foot by four-foot) for, well not a reasonable price, but an affordable one. But its hard to pull the trigger when you could buy two or three boardgames for the same price (also having to replace two hard drives in the space of as many weeks means I really need a job before I spend any more money on stuff like this).
Ha, I was about to post that without complaining about the very thing that brought it to mind. Behold, the unfairness of international shipping crushes my spirit once again. These GNL Mats look pretty cool, modular and super durable, but not only is the shipping to Ireland extremely expensive they only let you back one option so if you want more of them you can’t get a deal with the higher backer options and have to pay even more via the “Add more tiles” option. So I guess its back to dreaming about tricking carpenters into doing what I want and slathering their creations in custom cut polycarbonate for me. Well until my birthday at least, when I can surprise family members by asking for a big roll of fabric for it (I really want that neoprene, gonna sleep on the fucking stuff, then use it to make a diving suit after a particularly crushing boardgame defeat).