On a random day back in 2024, I was chatting to some friends about my love of playing D&D and how I wish I had more time to play it since the birth of my daughter. My friends, who were very occasional gamers, were lamenting the fact that they didn’t have the time to play many games either, and even if they did, they had no idea where to go to do so.

 

Houston and its surrounding suburbs is a massive area, and while there are a number of gaming stores you can go to and enjoy playing games, it isn’t always easy to find the time when trying to juggle work, kids and the long commuting times that come with getting around such a huge place.

 

So this brought me back to the other place I could play games: my house.

 

This got me thinking. Could I justify getting a gaming table for my house?

 

I looked into the options, and there were plenty out there. A few big companies and lots of independent builders, but I came across a few roadblocks.

 

There were tables that had extremely high production quality, but had been designed to integrate into a household as a multi-purpose dining/gaming table. While I loved the aesthetics and functionality, I wasn’t sure that I could live with the price point, especially knowing that my wife wouldn’t spend anywhere near that much for a dining room table regardless of what else it did. My daughter does her homework on our dining room table, we regularly shove mail on there and whatever else we get delivered. It occasionally gets cleared and used when we have a party. So there was no point buying a table to go in the dining room.

 

Some of the independently made tables looked equally as awesome, but lead times were a concern for me, as well as deeper digging showing that some smaller companies had done crowdfunding and products had then never materialized.

 

I suppose I was greedy. I wanted high quality, functionality, good delivery time and reasonable price all in one. I wanted something that could fit into my home and not get in the way, so it needed to be have the potential to be used for lots of things.

 

I started dreaming about all the cool things I could do if I made my own table, and then I spent an evening moaning to my wife about how people don’t make anything like this. She told me that maybe I should make my own table if I wanted one so badly, and that got me thinking even more...