"Ideas for Game Room Design and Improvements" Topic

Since I won't be making the trip to Historicon this year, I've decided to dedicate the upcoming week to cleaning up and reorganizing my game room and shop. I would like to hear from some of you as to how you have your gaming area set up. What kind of storage system do you use? What size table do you have? Pictures would be great as well.
I'm fortunate to have a separate building that houses my stuff. It's a former one car shed with an attached office. The car shed is now my shop and the office my game room. The main drawback is it is very narrow, about 14 feet wide so my gaming table size is stuck at 6'x8'. Besides the table, the game room has one wall which holds my library and some figure storage and I have some other storage underneath the table. The shop has the usual power tools, workbench, some shelving, my desk and filing cabinet, and a fridge. I running out of space in both rooms. I'm very curious to hear how you guys are set up for the hobby. As I said, I would enjoy seeing pics of your gaming areas too. Thanks.

I can't say my setup is anywhere near ideal, but I have found that it is important to have good lighting positioned over the table. I completely re-arranged our basement guest/tv/game room so the table was under one of the ceiling lights. Previously it had been in the middle of the room, with lights at either end, and it just wasn't working well. For painting we have desk lamps, so those tables could go in the corners.

For general purpose storage floor-to-ceiling shelving is the way to go. Take advantage of all that space all the way up the wall. I see people with little 4 foot high shelves complain they have no storage, they're not using half the room.

Design essential number one: A locked door!

1066.us

I like to use stackable plastic drawers that you can buy from Bed, Bath & Beyond or similar home stores. These are close to 2ft square by a foot high and have a clear plastic drawer that slides into a harder white plastic frame. I put buildings and other terrain items in these and then stack them up at the end of the wargame room. You can see what is inside each drawer, and its easy to slide the drawer out and remove the item. When I go to a convention, I just take the whole drawer with me, so the buildings are always in their proper container. You can also stack two or three of these under your table, so they are very flexible.

Make sure to make good use of all of the space UNDER your gaming table. A set of drawers or sliding shelves to hold miniatures is ideal.

Your table needs to be strudy too. You never know when a fat friend is going to go belly up on it to reach across the table to move a miniature.

If your wargames table does double duty for table tennis don't put you figure shelves at either end.
Robert