Impedimenta

[ochoin]

" I try to keep all such impedimenta off the table completely when I am playing."
A comment from the previous thread.

Does detritus on the gaming table worry you & what do you do about it?

I'm well aware of the visually stunning wargames' table that has rule books, dice, beer cans, leftover food, etc, etc marring its look.

Many of us use various markers that blend into the table to record casualties etc. The table at my place is further surrounded by benches & tables on which we put various gaming paraphernalia.

donald

[Stavka]

Food and drink have no place on my gaming table, full stop. Greasy fingers and matt varnish don't mix socially. We take a pizza break for lunch, than it's scrubbing up and back to the table.

There's usually a bit of space at the ends of the table to keep various game detritus. Any other available table surfaces in the room are for drinks or cats.

This being Tokyo, I'm extremely fortunate just to have a room of my own for a painting desk, books and figures, and a large living room (by big city standards) with space enough for a decently-sized gaming table. Most others here have young children, so setting aside gaming space is not really an option for them.

Yes, we all know that some of you have dedicated gaming rooms with massive tables, oodles of bookshelves and cabinets, and walls festooned with military prints and framed fragments of army-issue underwear from Waterloo. But I prefer this to be a hobby for me, not an interior decoration statement. And I'd very much prefer to preserve my marriage...

Bottom line, I constantly need to make the best use of what little space I have available. So within reason, and outside of convention games, I've nothing against a few dice, measuring tapes, or even a rulebook on the table in the midst of combat.

These are all tools of the trade in a dynamic hobby; I'm a wargamer, not a model railroader or static diorama builder.

With some game systems we need dice on the table anyway, to track orders or casualties. Doesn't bother us in the slightest. We may get around to making terrained diceholders one of these days, just to move them around the table more easily. But with all the painting we need to do first, it's not a priority.

For disorder markers in our Black Powder games, we use extra paper flags mounted on terrained washers. Not a big fan of MDF printed order markers; I find dice less obtrusive.

[subedai]

" I try to keep all such impedimenta off the table completely when I am playing."
A comment from the previous thread.

Does detritus on the gaming table worry you & what do you do about it?

I'm well aware of the visually stunning wargames' table that has rule books, dice, beer cans, leftover food, etc, etc marring its look.

Many of us use various markers that blend into the table to record casualties etc. The table at my place is further surrounded by benches & tables on which we put various gaming paraphernalia.

donald

It's the things not relevant to the game -like cups, plates, crisp packets etc scattered across the table that I find annoying; many a tasty looking game at a convention has been spoiled because the players haven't cleared such items away. Unfortunately, being old school trained and part wargaming Luddite, neither am I a great lover of status cards or even the loose small dice following units around the table. However, in saying that, the little die boxes that go on the back of a unit base are quite effective and relatively non-invasive. Casualty, resupply and routing markers a la Fire and Fury are fine because they bring something to the table and thus don't look out of place. An 'Event' doesn't have be written on a card, a table in the rules with a dice roll is just as effective and far less intrusive. Rolling large numbers of dice every ten seconds also has no place in my games so anything by GW is a complete no-no.

[paintinglittlesods]

Dice and rules are fine for the games we play, but not drinks or food are allowed on the table (more to protect against spillages).

[olicana]

No drinks or food.

In general, we are anti-roster sheet so you will not find reams of paper strewn about but you might see the odd rules QRS, likewise pens and pencils are pretty unheard of. However, the compromise is that everything you need to know about unit status has to be shown on the table.

In the pic below (showing French employed Swiss attacking the ditch at Cerignola 1503), the Swiss pike won the last round of melee and is following up, it has taken 5 'casualties' (4 stones and 1 stone on two two-penny pieces), it is disordered (tuft on penny) and has not spent it's morale check re-throw for being 'valiant' (red bead on nail spike). The blue roundel, just going out of shot, holds the commander's details - in this case it bears his name Tambien Chandieu, his coat of arms (I couldn't find a portrait) and his command ability (8 Aggressive) similar to the one pictured for Fabricio Zamudio on the red roundel (the commander of their Landsknecht opponents). That's quite a lot of 'detritus' but all of it is about the game - an on-table roster sheet at a glance. Some (not that many but, some) people absolutely hate it and once in a while, at a show, they'll tell me so saying they prefer to look things up on sheets, mark things off on those sheets with a pencil and don't mind the loss of game time, and mistakes due to memory lapse, doing it: Rosters seem like a lot of worthless effort to me, and I tell them so - horses for courses.