Dear Garry Owen
I am an expert on this as I designed my house that I am moving to, and did extensive measurements of my present gaming area. My own game table is 6 by 12 ft. I'll be moving in two months and it's almost completed
I presently game in my living room which is 14ft by 34 ft. There are bookcases on one side and furniture and couch on the opposite wall that take out about four feet together so that reduces the available space to 10 ft.
The width of a person seated at a war game table is the back of the chair must be 30" at least from the table. 24" can be managed but 30" is easier. Beyond that a corridor behind the table must be at least 36" to enable a person to walk comfortably behind that. At 24" you can Jink along by shuffling (as I have to do in my living room) but it's not conducive to easy flow. Thus this means the ENTIRE table must have a space around it of 54" To avoid pictures and stuff on the wall make it 60" or 5 feet. So that means that if you want a 6 foot by 12 foot table. You need a floor space of 16 ft by 22ft.
My new house in Maine has a footprint of 32' front to back and by 48 ft left to right. The basement hobby room is 32 ft by 28 ft. This will easily allow the table envelope desired of 16 by 22 ft. The excess space is for painting table, modeling table, book cases and shelves for soldiers. The remaining part is the garage of 22 by 32 ft.
I'll send you the plans if you wish.
Now… a bit of warning.
You are simply NOT going to find rooms like this in 90% of the houses you will investigate. Most of them are double-wides or modular and your footprint for the table are simply deal-busting dimensions for most modular designers. You can't have a room larger than 12 ft because they can't get it on a flatbed. I know, I tried with a dozen of them, all of them wanted to make it 10', and a 32 foot room was simply out of the question. Also most of the modular builders want to put in a whole claptrappery of second bathrooms, huge bathrooms, HUGE walk in closets which are beloved by women so they can display all their shoes like we display toy soldiers, and little "cute" alcoves and alleyways and cubby-holes all of them a complete waste of space. They do this for the stability of the load n the flatbed.
Of the rest of the houses yo will find which were purpose built they were built years ago and are small. small. small small, and most of which have the same type of claptrappery. This means no room for your table.
As you can see with a footprint of 16 by 22 ft that table is going to eliminate almost all the houses in the country.
So unless you are going to BUILD your own, you have a tough search. The only person in America who gets a room large enough to accommodate something like your table is the family car so it's the garage for you. Even the basement is not guaranteed as lolly columns and other supports will break up where you can put the table. I've been in the real-estate business as a 2nd revenue source and I must have seen hundreds of buildings to buy and sell and I have never seen ONE BUILDING that could suit a table in an envelope like you wish.
Now I want to caution you that when I said my table and hobby room was in the basement I might have given you the wrong idea. It is on the first floor. Technically the style of the house I am building is called a raised ranch. The Basement is on a slab ABOVE GROUND LEVEL so there is going to be none of this folderol of French Drains and sumps or flooding basements. (I live on top of a mountain besides) and that eliminates dampness and mold pretty much. Something else to think of.
Another factor in the house was the living room. I wanted the size of the living room, which is above the hobby room to be 16 by 32". This is because I wanted windows on all three sides-- nothing but windows separated by only the width of the beams, and from the top of a hip wall to the roof, cathedral ceilings from 8 to 20 ft high. All glass. I wanted this because I live in the woods and the woods come up almost to the windows, so it's like almost living in a tree house. The dimensions were cast so I can put a large part of my library in bookshelves below the hip wall, and the other wall against the house reserved for paintings and other bits of objet d'Arte I and my wife have acquired.
The relevance of this is the vista of the woods, the trees, and the beautiful trees that I preserved but more, it was the chief room of the house and so you can see that the Hobby Room would be below . I will no longer have to game in the living room, and having the basement above ground allowed for many windows into the hobby room providing much light.
By judicious and savage hacking at a book of plans from the modular builders, (I literally hacked their designs apart and wound up with a little pile of "bathrooms" "Bedrooms" "Kitchens", Living Rooms, Dining Rooms, Dens, and "occasional rooms" which I then mixed and matched and played with like a bunch of Settlers of Caitan tiles or Dungeon tiles to figure out the layout. The final design has a
living room of 32 by 16 ft
Kitchen of 11 by 12 ft (NO ISLAND another waste of space.
Dining Room of 19 by 19
Master Bedroom of 12 by 14
Guest Bedroom of 10 by 12
Full bath (no tub) of 6 by 10 (small I admit but it's what I have now and it's not a room I linger in)
Laundry Room of 6 by 10
17 x3 ft of closet space between dining room and three bedrooms.
Attic space for storage of 20 by 30 ft.
2 car garage on left side.
worries about not losing his rules stuff.
