If you’re new to the tabletop gaming hobby here are a few tricks of the trade and life hacks the rest of us learned through years of blissful ignorance. You old dogs can learn the odd new trick too.
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Wine Rack For Game Mats
Game mats are the must-have add-on these days come check-out time on a crowdfunded game campaign.
Of this I wholeheartedly approve — game mats are so awesome they almost deserve to replace the board in Board Games altogether, if it wasn’t for the fact Rubber Games sounds like some sort of fetish pursuit.
The downside is your rolled up mats are often hard to store in a way that makes them easy to get at. The temptation is to roll them around each other to create a 30 pound, foot wide rubber cylinder. Not that I’ve tried.
Enter the trusty wall-mounted wine rack. Screw it to a wall, door or the end of an Ikea Kallax shelf (available in both black and white to match the shelf), or get a floor standing model and you’ve got yourself something that looks custom-made.
[N.B. Bear in mind the thickness of the mat’s neoprene when it’s rolled up. You’ll find mats 5ft x 3ft and above won’t fit comfortably inside. You can also soften the edges with some trim.]
Crown Royal Whiskey Bag For Dice
This hack has been around for years, so I won’t waste too much time introducing the Crown Royal Whiskey bag to the uninitiated: it’s a nice big, plush, velvety bag that’s perfect for your dice.
In fact, judging from the images Google throws back when searching for Crown Royal bag hacks, they’re also perfect for bikinis, armchairs, trousers and even *gasp* storing whiskey in.
Sure, it’s indelibly branded, and amass too many and everyone will know what a complete pisshead you are, but if you like the stuff anyway, it beats forking out for a bespoke one, and it’s probably better quality than most of them. The bag that is.
Rugged Clipboard For RPGs
The problem with RPGs books is they often need transporting to games nights, risking a battering in the process. You can either accept that as “character”, or seek out some sort of Samsonitesque binding for it.
Well look no further protective pen-n-paper nerds, as I give you the Rugged Foreman’s Clipboard.
Not only will this bad boy give you something to scribble on, but also somewhere to store your core rulebook. A normal one at any rate, not your hardback Big Bumper 12th Edition Collector’s Edition, but then what the hell are you doing even taking that out of its shrink ??
It’ll also store your dice, character sheets and other gaming gubbins, and the clipboard part makes note-taking a breeze if you fancy running your campaign from an armchair, like a civilised despot.
LP Case For Rugged Game Transport
“No, just a geek, sonny… just a geek.”
People might think you’re being a touch over-protective when you rock up at games night with your precious cargo in one of these. They might even laugh at you. Right up to the point when someone sits on their flimsy Ikea bag and squashes their pile of games flat.
Make no mistake, even when empty this thing weighs in at a couple of kilos, but pack it well and you could even give it to an American Airlines baggage handler and it would (probably) survive.
Plus you can walk around looking like a totally rad DJ, instead of a sad, over-protective geek with too much access to Amazon.
Business Card Boxes and Stands
Component storage. The bugbear that haunts the hobby.
Many distributors help out by designing funky inserts or at least providing a bundle of baggies to keep the various counters and cards in check. Many don’t (yes, I’m looking at you, Fantasy Flight Games).
It doesn’t cost a fortune to buy yourself a bunch of baggies, but then you do run the risk of looking like a furtive drug-dealer rather than highly-organised board game geek.
Luckily business card boxes provide you with an alternative. Not only are they great for holding all sorts of counters, but they’ll even take some full-sized cards — in sleeves!
Plus they’re pretty cheap. Like the budgie.
What’s more, for those games that use stacks of different decks, a business card display stand not only does the organisation job with the minimum of table footprint, but costs a fraction of bespoke card caddies.
Coin Capsules For Counters
Some folk obsessively sleeve every card in the collection. But what do you do when there’s no more cards left to sleeve, but your OCD protectiveness towards game components won’t let up?
Protect your counters, that’s what.
Actually in most cases this just provides a satisfying weight, like you’re playing with poker chips. And lets face it, poker chips wouldn’t be half as nice to fiddle with during a game if they were made out of cardboard, right?
For other titles they’re actually helpful in other ways. Elder Sign for example, has tiny wee character counters that are easily forgotten after a turn. Not so once turned into a slab of plastic, my friend!
Fed up with rubbish cardboard coins? Give them a satisfying clink! They might not be metal, but they’re the next best thing.
The One And Only Laminator
Desktop laminators are amazingly cheap. You can pick one up for as little as £15. Obviously, like printers, the hope is you’ll spend much more on consumables, but for gaming you’re unlikely to get through a single pack of lamination pouches in a year.
The pouches are like card sleeves for stuff too big to sleeve, or just for things that are just too laughably flimsy to hold up to much table time at all (yes, Kollossal Games, with your wafer-thin player aids for Western Legends.)
Plus they’re great for making more robust DIY-printable player aids from resources like The Esoteric Order Of Gamers. Which, incidentally, is a whole game hack in itself. Go visit.
If you’re a GM/DM for RPGs and you’re tired of players handing back player aids and character sheets looking like they’ve spent time at the local creche, a laminator can add some protection from the PCs’ infantile mitts until you’ve had a chance to kill their character off.
Plan Holder For Game Mat Transport
Take a dip in a wetsuit and you’ll discover neoprene isn’t waterproof, and takes around 4 years to drip-dry.
So the last thing you need is to be caught in a rainstorm with a play mat that won’t fit in that rugged, waterproof game transport case, which would have kept a normal game board perfectly safe and dry. Ah, folly!
So take a tip from artists, architects, and those used to transporting precious rolled up parchments in all weather, who use a plan tube.
They not only keep your game mat(s) dry, safe and easily portable via a nifty shoulder strap, but you can waft around looking like an angst-ridden, bohemian doodler. Or a super-rich architect. Your choice.
Don’t (Necessarily) Ditch Your Punched Boards
When punching counters for a game, we usually discard the remaining cardboard (after posting a picture of it on social media to trigger the highly-strung with “What did I just punch?”)
However, you might want to hang onto those used punchboards, and rather than wave them about on the internet, stack them neatly under the insert in the game box instead.
Most games’ boxes are packed to the brim, with the punchboards taken into account. So if you want your insert flush with the box lid to stop components swilling about inside when you store your game vertically (i.e. correctly), the used boards under the insert will restore the status quo.
Fishing Tackle Boxes/Bags For Unboxed Game Transport
I wrote an article a while back about shoehorning 42 games (and 9 expansions) into a single shoulder bag, and much of that feat was accomplished by unboxing games into plastic tackle boxes.
“Why, Compliments on my exquisite taste in game transport, of course.”
With that in mind, it’s worth looking at some fishing tackle rucksacks for perhaps the ultimate in unboxing goodness. Not only do these things come with a load of boxes prepacked so you don’t have to match a bag to a box size, but they’re also rugged and waterproof for protection and peace of mind.
Just be prepared to be drawn into random conversations about bait choices, prize catches and the one that got away.
Cassette Tape Boxes (& Accessories) For Card Decks
If you’re a Generation Xer, then not only do you believe that you pretty much started the whole tabletop and video gaming boom (and you’d obviously be RIGHT), but you probably have a box of old cassette tapes in the loft, convinced they’ll come back into fashion, like vinyl.
Well, I’ve got news for you: they won’t. However, with a small mod the boxes make excellent storage containers for decks of cards. You’ll need to snip off the pins that slot into the cassette’s spools (or just buy some that don’t have them), but once that’s done they make a great alternative to a baggie or *gasp* a rubber band (don’t do it!).
You can also use cassette racks, boxes and carry-cases to store any deck of cards that’s close to the “normal” 52-card deck size, whether stored in a tape case or not.
But if they are stored in a tape case you can resurrect those craft skills from when you used to pirate stuff tape-to-tape and beautifully customise and label each box. Marie Kondo would be proud.
Budget Pool Table As A Gaming Table
Top of many a gamer’s wish list is a bespoke gaming table. A swathe of cushioned baize for their gaming delight, with a recessed gaming vault, drink holders, wide arm rests… it’s the way games were meant to be played.
Sadly even the most modest gaming furniture requires eyeing up a surplus kidney/offspring to purchase. Surely there’s a cheaper way to get the same features without remortgaging the house?
Yes there is. May I present the budget pool table. Retailing at around £350, you can pick them up second hand for a complete song. Mainly because they’re completely crap for playing pool on.
You may scoff (especially if you already have a piece of enviable gaming chic in your house) but think about it: a recessed playing vault, a cushioned surface to make card pickups easy, a side wall for hurling dice into.
It’s all there. You can even use the pockets as drink holders (which will also stop dice rolling down there). Plus, you can play pool, table-tennis and even air hockey on it. What more do you want?
Apart from a bespoke gaming table.
Do you know any cool game hacks that aren’t on this list? Be sure to share them in the comments below! Knowledge is power!
