Slashdot Mirror
The $8,500 Gaming Table You Want
Recently I stumbled upon The Sultan Gaming Table. With a price tag of over $8K, it would have to be awesome: but it has little compartments for the players and DM as well as a drop-down playing surface. If you find the pricetag daunting then you are a sane person, and might instead want to look at the Emissary which starts at a "mere" $1,500 and has many of the same features. Honestly I just love the idea of having my minis on a playing surface underneath the dinner table. I ought to be allowed to expense one of these. I also wish they had more pictures and fewer renderings on the site.
The Sultan was recently featured in a PvP comic classic.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Heck, at that price, you could buy all of the tools as well as materials. Really, projects are just excuses to buy tools, right?
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Every morning you wake up breathing is an excuse to buy tools.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
But.. But... That won't be Heirloom Quality!
This is Slashdot. How many regulars do you anticipate ever having heirs? (Unless someone perfects budding or full-organism mitosis)
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Had one of these on loan from the GeekChic guys in our booth at GenCon last year.
VERY
NICE
GAME
TABLE
If I had space and the spare cash to front for one, I'd buy one.
I've seen people ragging about not being able to sit around one. This is what the fold-down desks are for.
I've seen people complaining that the drawers would get in the way. They don't. PERIOD. You don't leave them open during play. The drawers are for storage.
I've seen people ragging on the price. Look at the cost of nice hardwood furniture. And I said NICE. My mother's a friggin' oak fanatic. So I know how pricey this stuff gets.
Their prices are only outrageous when viewed in a vacuum. People are talking about being able to buy the materials and tools for less. Sure. If your labor is worthless and you have already figured out all the joinery and other neat tricks that they've incorporated into one of these tables.
Very likely though, you have not. As such, you're paying a skilled craftsman for labor.
Sure, you can buy a pool table or a folding table for a lot less. But the utility for gaming is also a lot less.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Gaming is not becoming more expensive If anything, it's cheaper.
They make the games affordable, but then where they get you is the furniture. Sneaky bastards.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Surgery on yourself is entirely possible, even to the untrained amateur. There is nothing stopping me (well, maybe common sense) from grabbing a knife and cutting into my body. Now successful surgery on yourself on the other hand...
"But this one goes to 11!"
And he still rolls ones just like the rest of us.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
Even easier. Start with a pool table, strip out the bits you don't want, and trim the table with whatever geegaws you want. That appears to be what this company did.
The big advantage over building from scratch: the boring generic "table" part is already done for you, and you can concentrate on the gaming part. In fact, if you made a kind of arrangement that sat in the pockets of the pool table, you could remove the whole thing and still play pool if you wanted to.
This is pretty much what it means to be a geek. To the average person, the "constructed" part of his environment, the things he lives with, that is something fixed. He can buy new stuff or throw old stuff away. If you are geek, no thing's form has to be regarded as fixed.
Practically everything I own has been modified in some way. When I got my Kindle, my first thought was that the metal back was too slippery. I considered covering it with rubberized paint, but settled instead by putting a couple of strips of two inch velcro loop tape to it which makes it easier to hold. I applied velcro hook tape to the slip cover so the two pieces could be handled as one unit. I have a leatherette (vinyl) zip portfolio that I carry paper, writing implements and my kindle in, and I slapped velcro loop on the inside to give the kindle (inside its slipcover) crush space. Since I had velcro hook left over I slapped that on the outside and now I can stand the portfolio with it's spine up and it is a reading stand.
People see that and say, "isn't that clever." But it's not. Once you realize you can turn any surface you aren't otherwise using into a reading stand by slapping some velcro tape on it, it's obvious.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Good god - what utter conceit! You look at a large and intricate piece of hardwood furniture, with all kinds of drawers, sliding parts, and recesses, put together with numerous dovetail joints no less, and you think anyone with access to a table saw and a miter saw could build one.
The sheer arrogance of this assumption leads me to believe you've never built anything like this before. If you had, you'd know that even building a single drawer using dovetails is not a trivial endeavour. Add to that the challenge of making many drawers, selecting and mounting hardware that aligns them nicely and lets them slide in and out smoothly. And after you have it all built, there's the significant task of applying a nice finish to the wood.
There is a huge difference between knowing basic carpentry and knowing how to make hardwood furniture. You clearly have no grasp of how much time and skill a project like this requires. It involves hours and hours of planning, measuring, cutting, machining, fitting, gluing, clamping, sanding, and finishing. It requires a sizable workshop with an extensive array of tools, and the quality of the results is directly proportional to the quality of the tools you employ. Don't kid yourself that you could easily build such a thing.
Yes, but he rolls ones FROM SPACE.