We Built A Table Topper

I was hoping to have this post for Friday, but Thanksgiving went better than expected - and thus longer - and Friday was consumed with the actual building. I was also hoping to have some pictures, and I'll hopefully get to add some soon but I haven't had a chance yet as of the time of this writing.

On Friday we built a table top that can sit atop our normal table. The table we use for game is great, but when everyone has their character sheet, dice, notebooks, drink, and potentially food it fills up fast and that leaves little room for battlemats, miniatures, and other things needed to be on display for game. The solution? build a second table to sit atop it.

What we have now is just a rough proof of concept. We already had the tools (consisting of two drills) but everything else (including screws) came to less than $70 at Home Depot, which isn't bad for building a tabletop. With the table top deployed there is currently 15 inches (this is too much. We're going to cut it down to about 9-10 inches!) of clearance for people to use the table. LED remote lights are on the bottom of the table to provide light for character sheets.

Essentially this doubles our table space. The actual table can now be used for sheets, dice, food, notes, and everything else. Then the action can be on clear display on the second tabletop. You have to stand to comfortably move your mini for combat, but I also noticed that everyone got a lot more into combat once they were standing which was awesome. Combats also got to be a lot bigger because we got to use the large battle mat I have instead of making do with the half sized one.

All in all, I recommend it if you can. Maybe you don't have a table space problem - or a very large table - which is awesome. But this was a relatively cheap solution that made the game better in a lot of ways in my opinion.

I'll update or follow up with pictures when I have them.

I did find this thread of people doing similar things (if you want to see about how it looks) which has also given me ideas for how to make my own work even better!