Much like a lot of others, this site has inspired me to create my own table. I have zero woodworking skills so I knew this would be a challenge. I’m going to go through the step-by-step of what I did if anyone is interested in doing the same thing. I will however, need someone to post the pictures for me as I can not do that yet.
My first step was to go online and find a printing retailer. I used the file that Young Grasshopper sent me (he is using the same one I believe) and it ran me about $30 with shipping to have it printed on piece of vinyl. I then went online and found some containers at, imagine this thecontainerstore.com that I wanted to use for holding the units etc… I wanted to have both of these items in my possession before I got started so that I could base my measurements around them.
Once those things arrived in the mail it was off to the hardware store to pick up some wood. I got 2 - 4x8 sheets of plywood. One sheet was 1/4inch thick, the other was 3/4. I also picked up about 8 2x4’s
I cut the 1/4 thick piece to the exact size of my game board. I then centered it on the 3/4 piece, glued and nailed it down. The idea of this was to give me sort of a “lip” when I enclosed the game board itself. it also helped me frame the table without having to worry about fitment of the board.
Next I took the 2x4’s to a friends house and had him “rip” them down to 1x2 pieces. I found out the hard way that if you buy a 1x2 piece of wood from the store, that it’s actually NOT 1x2… I guess I didn’t get the memo. I now had my wood that I was going to use to frame out the board and put my separators in between the different compartments.
Since I already had the 1/4 piece of plywood centered and mounted at the center of the 4x8 sheet, it was easy to frame the whole table out. I laid the 1x2’s on their side (meaning that I had a 2 inch tall “wall” going around the whole table) glued them down, and screwed them in from underneath . This left me with a bunch of room on the ends, I ended up using that as my dice rolling area.
Once it was all framed out, I sanded down all the wood then I stained EVERYTHING. I actually tried to use a stain color that was close to the color of the compartments I bought but that was a complete fail - It’s WAY darker. Oh well, at least it still looked OK :roll: you can even see the difference in color between the boxes I got and the color of the table.
On the sides I glued some felt that I got from the craft store directly to the base. I then added a kind of rim around them using some smaller pieces of wood to hide the cutting imperfections. You can see the spot here, before I put the felt down:
All that was left to do now was glue the print out of the board down. (in the pictures the board seems to come and go randomly, that’s just because I couldn’t help but mock it up in place while I was building)
I added all my pieces to the compartments, put the compartments in their respective places and then BOOM I was done! I had laid out where I was going to put them specifically ahead of time based on where that country is on the board, and how big of a power they are(how many game pieces they actually had).
There is a little bit of staining that still needs to be done in the dice area, but for the most part it’s complete.
all-in-all this took me about a week to complete. And I’m a perfectionist. Thanks for looking!
