I’ve had quite a few comments about my gaming table so I thought I would do a post to show how it was designed and made! I didn’t take any progress pictures unfortunately though…

We are currently living in a rented house and don’t have much space so I needed quite a small table, we didn’t have a dining table and playing round the coffee table wasn’t much good. My budget was also pretty small as I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it only to upgrade in a couple of years when we buy our own house with a dedicated games room (it’s the dream)!

So I managed to make a pretty decent table from two IKEA desk tops and four legs which came to a grand total of £24, plus a couple of quid for screws and metal plates to attach the two table tops together.

This was ok for a little while… until we wanted to play a 3×3 map tile game of Zombicide and very quickly ran out of room for player areas, the table is only 100 x 120cm! So with some help from my Dad and his workshop we came up with a solution to allow us to add player trays to extend the gameplay area of the table. Here’s the initial design for the tabletop:

The trays are designed to give players room to store components and they have a small slit at the back to stand cards up in. We also made them with an edge all around so they can be used to roll dice.

As you can see in this image, we built a frame under the edge of the tabletop, which the trays slot into. On the short edges we have room for just one tray which sits centrally, on the longer edges of the table there is room for two trays side by side or you can position one tray centrally.

The frame is screwed onto the table top and then the legs are screwed onto the frame. I painted the frame and trays white to match the table top and covered the bottom of the trays in grey microsuede which is great for picking up cards and deadening dice!

The frame and trays were made using layers of MDF, and I think with white paint it came to about £25. With the microsuede costing around £20. So the overall cost is somewhere in the ballpark of £70.

I really wanted to find a way to incorporate drink holders but with the table being so small anyway, I didn’t feel like we could lose table space for them. I’ve also considered covering the entire tabletop in the grey microsuede but have settled for game mats covered in the microsuede instead. The next table will definitely have these things though!

Here’s a few more images of it in use…

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*Originally published by me on Board Game Geek