The Worst Board Gaming Accessory Ever
Table risers: A new trend on Kickstarter. Avoid it.
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If you play a lot of board games, sooner or later your setup starts including accessories to make your playing experience even more fun. Dice towers. Bits holders. Rolling trays. You may even go for special lighting and sound systems in your room, allowing for thematic music, sound effects and visuals. This is usually for hard core role players.
Eventually, you may decide it’s time to take the plunge into serious gaming furniture. There’s a lot of options, they are rarely cheap, and usually, well, pretty damn cool.
A board gaming table, which is not just a table you play board games on, is often the first major purchase to consider for a game room, after you have covered all of the walls with shelves. The features to consider often include some sort of surface that makes it easier to pick up cards, like a neoprene, mousepad-like cover. The surface is slightly squishy, which makes it way easier to pick up a card than something like a wooden tabletop. Speedcloth used in casinos can also be used. Plexiglass to keep paper map boards for wargames is a common feature. Some tables employ wipe off surfaces, so you can draw maps right on the table. This is all based on what you find your needs are and what you and your friends might need the most.
But the serious stuff often is what is referred to as a table ‘vault’. This is a table where the top is recessed. Usually, the actual table surface that you can eat off of is removed, and you look down into the vault, several inches lower than the usual table top height, and often covered with one of those nice playing surfaces. These tables can include drawers, cup holders, writing surfaces, trays, extensions, USB chargers, lights, built in dice towers, secret compartments and all sorts of goodies leading to a price easily more than the price of a car. Seriously.
