Gaming Experience Upgrades: Component Organization and Storage

One of the reasons that I decided to get a Geek Chic table is the idea of improving the experience of playing board games.  While I have many hobbies, as evidenced by this blog, tabletop gaming is probably the hobby I am most dedicated to.  Upgrading gaming experiences in a variety of ways is part of what I enjoy when it comes to tabletop gaming.

Today, I'll be covering component organization and storage, how that enhances the gaming experience, and how to do it.

Component Organization and Storage

The contents and components for a board game are usually set up inside the box for storage on a shelf and cross-country transport.  While this works just fine for that, few publishers outside of Days of Wonder give much consideration to how players will actually organize the pieces and parts of a game once the game has been opened.  Typical solutions involve large amounts of plastic baggies and rubber bands.

Oh Terra Mystica...

Whenever I can, I try for another solution.

One of the keys for setting up your storage solution is to consider how the game needs to be setup.  This is the time that you'll be accessing your box the most, and you want it to be easy and quick to get everyone set up.  Consider ways of easily handing out multiple bags or boxes so that multiple people can simultaneously set up different parts of the game.

When able, I use organizers thought out and made by other folks, such as the many organizers made by The Broken Token.  These organizers work wonders for making setup a breeze and making components that need to be used during the game easy to leave around.  There are other options, such as Litko Game Accessories, and Game Trayz, but I generally prefer those made by Broken Token.

A place for everything, and everything in its place.

When these commercial options are not available, one has to innovate.  A great source of solutions to this problem can be found on board game geek's forums and files.

For example, for games with a lot of cards or tiles, tuck boxes can be very useful.  These are small boxes that you can print on your printer onto heavy card stock, then assemble.  My favorite example is my setup for Carcassonne using Tom's Carcassonne Tuckboxes.

So many tiny boxes.

The objective of any organization scheme should be to make setup a breeze, so you can get into the game faster.  In this case, my Carcassonne setup does this by having each box have a specific purpose.  The little box is a small expansion box that contains the base game and my favorite expansions.  The larger box contains the rest of the expansions.  This way, when getting set up, we can grab the base components and get them arranged while deciding which expansions to use.  Once that's decided, we can grab those out of the big box and toss them in the already prepped base components.

Sometimes, though, there is no original box to store your components in, or it is just so exceedingly inadequate that you have to use original solutions.  Once again, Board Game Geek's forums are a great place to go to find storage ideas and solutions.  Based on their concepts, I put together a series of Plano "tackle boxes" for our X-wing game components, keeping the actual ships nestled in Battle Foam.

One box for each faction, and one common box.

I'm always looking for more ways to organize my games, and speed up setup time, as well as provide a more immersive and thematic experience.  I particularly like the way I've organized my copy of Speakeasy:

The power cards, which need to be easily viewed and purchased by players, stay in the briefcase throughout the game, providing a strong thematic element.  The rest of the cards and instructions get tucked into the various pockets of the briefcase, for easy removal during game setup.

I could probably do a break down of every game I have, but here's a few of the basic principles for organizing your games and improving the gaming experience for your players. :)  Happy gaming!

Dungeon Master Musings: Building a digital table yourself

A lot of people have been asking me how to set up their own digital RPG tables the way I have.  I'm going to do a brief series on how I've done this, and may even do a little vlogging around it as well, if I can find the time.

The first question we need to answer is "What is a digital RPG table?"  There's actually a lot of different ways of doing it, but what they have in common is this:  Instead of using graph paper and grids that you put in front of your players to indicate what sort of environment they're in, you use some sort of computer display to show your maps digitally.

Implementations of this range from the simple to the seriously awesome.  I've seen setups where people have used an LCD TV as their digital table. Others use projectors, and some awesome folks use touch screen displays for some seriously wicked arrangements.  Just google "digital rpg table" for all sorts of different arrangements.  Definitely a lot of wonderful stuff out there to ogle.

My setup was specifically designed to be inexpensive, easy to use, easy to setup, and very portable.  I don't have a dedicated gaming room, so we need to be able to quickly and easily set it up and tear it down, while still getting the fidelity we need.

Originally we were going to use miniatures on the projected table, but we found that it was even better to use digital icons controlled by bluetooth mice.

What you need

Here are the components that I used in my setup.  I'll go over each one, why it was needed, and things I considered about it.  Please note that this is merely about how to reproduce a setup similar to what I have.  Creative folks should be able to riff on these to create their own setups. Don't take anything I say as expert advice. It's just what one person did, with enough information to hopefully do it yourself.

1. A small, tripod mountable projector
2. A VERY tall camera tripod.
3. A whiteboard
4. A computer with at least 8GB of RAM (Preferably 2)
5. A source of maps, or tools to make maps
6. A map sharing application

There are a variety of options on each one.  My setup wound up costing me about $750, excluding the laptops that I already owned.  However, you can do a similar setup for even cheaper, if you're willing to skimp on your projector quality.  I'd say you could do this for less than $500 easily.

Let's look at each component, what your options are, and what to consider when buying it.

The Projector

The projector is probably one of the first places to start to set up your own digital table.  It's going to be the most expensive component, and the hardest to pick correctly.  We purchased the LG PA77U for about $650, and it fits our needs NICELY.

Lots of wires, but it works great.

One of the first questions to ask yourself is whether this is going to be a dedicated projector or not.  For us, we happen to have a large empty wall in our front room, and decided that our projector would double as a movie projector for big get togethers and movie nights.  (Or for playing video games on the BIIIG screen.)

It's all about options!

If your projector can double as a movie projector, then by all means, go all out and get one with 1080p or 4K and whatever other whiz-bang features you want it to have.  But if you're just using it for D&D, you'll want to consider what sort of resolution you really need to display.  If you're on a tight budget, you can get a really cheap projector for as little as $120, like this tiny little guy.  We decided to go with 720p.

Of course, this is only the first consideration you have.  The next thing to consider is brightness of the projector.  This is measured in lumens  You want something that is going to be bright enough to see during your normal gaming time, in your normal gaming space.  Are you playing in an area with a lot of natural light during the day?  You're going to need a relatively high brightness to see anything.  Playing in a dark, enclosed basement?  You could probably cut back on the lumens quite a bit.  For reference, my projector is 700 lumens, and it works in all but the brightest circumstances for D&D.  I have trouble seeing it during the day with the lights all the way up, but otherwise, it's fine.  It's too dim for movie watching during the day, though.

The last thing to consider is throw distance.  This is the range of distances that you can actually project at.  You'll want something that can project an image pretty close up.  The PA77U projects between 3 to 10 feet, which is perfect for what I'm doing with it.

Once you've decided on these qualities, you need to make sure whatever projectors you're looking at support manual keystone, which is what allows you to project at an angle, but still have a rectangle and not some weird other thing.  You also need to make sure it is light enough to work with a normal camera tripod, which means looking for so called "portable projectors."  Check out projector central for researching your various options.

Camera Tripod

Most people don't have the time, knowhow, or space to be able to make their own permanent projector mount, so the solution I arrived at was getting a really tall camera tripod.  We got this one for about $60.

It towers over us during the game.

Simple truth about projectors:  The further they area away from their target, the larger an area the image covers.  Another truth, when you're dealing with a surface you're putting minis on or pointing at, the more angle there is, the more shadow you cast across the image.

Ideally, to solve these problems, you'd mount your projector right above the playing surface.  Of course, this is probably not going to work in most places, so a good portable solution is a tripod.

The key here is to get as high a tripod as you can get.  In our case, we went with 80 inches tall, and that seems to do the job for us.  We have very little shadow when we project down to the table, and get an image that fills our whiteboard.

You'll want to make sure that whatever you get is strong enough to hold your projector.  We went for overkill in our case, getting a tripod that could hold a projector several times heavier than our little 3 pound friend.

Whiteboard

To actually project, you need a white surface to project onto, and what better solution is there than a whiteboard?  We went with this one from the Board Dudes for $23.  I think we picked it up at Office Max or something.

Your white board is a vital piece of the puzzle, as it essentially becomes the map area.  As you can see, our projector image fills the entire white board.  The great part of using a white board is that you can draw on it, put miniatures on it, and more.  So often, we would get so immersed into using the white board that we'd forget that it was actually not a TV screen either.  We'd drop something on it and yelp in fear that we just broke the TV, then laugh as we remembered it was just a cheap whiteboard.

The main thing to consider here is the size of your whiteboard relative to your projector and tripod positioning.  Different projectors project different image sizes at different throw distances, so you'll have to check this yourself when you do it.  We were super lucky in that the project image matched the whiteboard so perfectly with these heights.  If you get your own setup, make sure you research the size you'll be throwing onto to make sure it's going to make sense.  Otherwise, you may wind up with a really huge or tiny image that doesn't fit well on the white board.

One last thing: The black bezel on the whiteboard was really helpful for hiding the menu bar that shows up when MapTool is full screen.  Thus, despite it still projecting that menu bar (seen in the left side of the image,) it felt less like an application and more like a map by hiding that menu bar.

Computer

You need to drive the images from something.  I personally use two laptops: My personal laptop and my work laptop.  There are advantages to this that I'll discuss in a moment.  Considering that I have them already, the added cost was nil.

DM's laptop

Player laptop

In terms of application performance, MapTool, at least, can run twice on a single computer, making it relatively easy to drive both the DM view and player view from a single machine.  As long as you have enough RAM, you shouldn't have any issue whatsoever.  I'd recommend at least 8GB.  That said, having two computers makes life a lot easier and gets you a few extra options that I'll go over in a moment.

The DM needs to have access to the computer that's hosting the application, so that they can get the DM's view that shows all of the rooms and provides tools for revealing various parts of the environment that the players are in.  I'll cover the tools and their capabilities in a bit.

If you use a second laptop for the players, this enables the option of adding one or more bluetooth mice to the setup that work with that second machine.  With this, the players can then look around and move their tokens by themselves without requiring DM intervention to do so.  Also, since your secondary laptop will be on the same side as the projector, the player on that side can look at the laptop screen instead of the table if necessary, since otherwise some of their view will be upside down.

Source of Maps/Map Creation Tools

I'm about to blow your mind.  Ready for this?  To project maps onto a digital table, you're going to need digital maps.  I know.  Wild.  Personally, I use the GIMP for all of my image creation needs, since it's free and I know how to use it.

There are actually a wide variety of sources of maps, where you don't have to create your own.  Some publishers, such as Paizo publishing, actually sell PDF versions of the maps they include with their modules, which can be repurposed for your own campaign or used directly for their modules.  There's also tons of map making communities on Google+ and other forums, where people liberally share their map creations.  Steal like crazy, and you'll reduce any workload you actually need to have.

If you do want to create your own maps, you could always just be simple and just draw black lines on a grid.  That's simple enough.  But if you're doing that, why not just draw on the whiteboard directly?  Instead, you probably want to create relatively pretty maps.  Before you jump into your map creation software of your choice, there are several map creation programs out there, like Campaign Cartographer, that give you a great set of tiles and objects to easily import into a map.

Of course, most of those tools cost money, and frankly, you don't need all their features.  Between sites like rpgmapshare.com and the various image libraries provided with MapTool, Roll20, and others, you can cobble together your own little tiles and object library in very little time.

For actually composing the images, both GIMP and Adobe Photoshop are great programs for producing these images.  Specific details of how to build maps with these programs is best left for a future blog post where I'll go to that in depth, but with a little bit of practice, anyone should be able to  create maps very quickly with either of these tools.

Map sharing application

There's a lot of different ways to get your map application shared to your players.  My personal favorite is MapTool, a delightfully free tool that is easy to start with, but has a lot of depth and possibilities.

MapTool is one of the tools created in the RPTools suite created by the RPTools team.  It's free, and I really like the way it makes it easy to set up visual blocking layers and reveal portions of the map to players.  However, it's just one of several tools available.  Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, and many other applications all serve the same purpose as MapTool.  They're all pretty similar, with different sets of features and capabilities, different levels of glamour and polish... But what makes MapTool stand out to me is the simplicity it provides for doing digital table play.

You see, all of these applications are designed with the primary goal of connecting players remotely across the internet.  The idea is that they are not in person, and need to use a tool like these to connect to each other.  But of all of the ones I've investigated, MapTool is the only one that explicitly acknowledges the in-person digital table use case, and provides some options for making it easy to use.

I recommend trying them all and experimenting with the various options they provide.  You can even get most of them to do some level of scripting, where they automatically calculate hits, AC, track HP or initiative, etc.  Covering all of these is yet another blog post, which I won't go into here. :)

Conclusion

So that's my setup, and how I do things.  In future blog posts, I'll go over my setup for map generation and share my XCF files and my process for quickly pulling a map together for a game.  (You can check out my template file here, if you're interested, or check out this completed map for some ideas as well.)  I'll also go over MapTool, how I use it, and some of the features that are available.

Both of these topics are covered in depth elsewhere on the net, so I'll just be adding to the pile, but definitely go check it out.

Geek Chic Experience Part 3: Using it

Spoilers:  I got a Geek Chic Table recently.  Here's my experiences of getting one.  In this post, we'll cover the first times we've used it and what that was like.


Jessie was the first person to sit down at the table while the guy was delivering it.

Jessie proudly sits at the new table

I join her to pose for our first picture. :)

The distance from bottom to the top of the table was 31", which gave us about 25" of clearance under the table.  It's tight with our 17.5" chairs, but even with all of our fat thighs, I'm the only one that's having any trouble with it.  So the valet turned out to be right about the height:  It's better to make the table tighter around the leg than to have the top be too high.

Everyone was nervous about eating on the table at first, but in reality, one of the nice things about the table is how resistant it is to dirt, spills, etc.  You don't even need to use a coaster!  Here's our first person sitting down to eat.

Pretty quickly after that, we got into gaming:

Our first game. This picture is amazing.

Playing on the aubergine velvet is an exquisite experience.  Somehow it feels... better... than an ordinary table.  Everything feels like it has its place.  It is a luxurious, clean experience.  The velvet holds the pieces in place and feels nice to touch as you pick up pieces and move them around.

The spaciousness of the table really came in handy for larger games like Lords of Waterdeep and 7 Wonders.  For the first time, it felt like we could actually fit all the players around the table to play without getting overcrowded.

Lords of Waterdeep felt great on the table

In 7 Wonders, we actually had 3 people to a single side of the table, for a total of 7 players.  It was the biggest game of 7 wonders we've ever played, and everyone had sufficient room to play.

Three people gathered on one side of the table.

Once again, the velvet held the cards in place extremely well, and dealing cards out was a dream.  Unfortunately, while cleaning the velvet, we had a minor accident where we scratched it.  It's actually very fragile and can easily be scratched, but smudging it out made the scratches nigh invisible.  It's also only 3% of the total cost of the table, so not too big of a deal.

Our general experience is that the velvet is just *really nice* to play all games on, and we play games on it whenever we can.  However, when something special is needed, we switch to "hardcore mode," where we go down to the acrylic layer.  We did it for playing Power Grid, drawing gaming information on the table, and used it with the space insert for X-wing, shown below:

A giant, 3 way, 6 player game of X-wing.

The X-wing game felt amazing on there, but we experienced a lot of glare on the acrylic.  We discovered later that the delivery folks installed the acrylic with the wrong side face up, and once we flipped it, the glare diminished rapidly.

Speaking of glare, a few days later, I got to finally run my first D&D campaign on the new table:

All decked out in preparation for the players.

For D&D, we used the leaf desks and leaf guards to shrink the inner area and expand the desk space on top of the table.  My players reported having considerably more room than in the past, and enjoyed the easy sight lines down to the projected map.  The map projection was pretty good on the acrylic, but from some angles there was a weird shimmery rainbow effect, due to the anti-glare coating.  However, none of my players complained.  Overall, they felt it was a significant improvement over the old table.  They said they felt "spoiled."

My new DM station

My new DM setup was a lot different than my old one.  Instead of using my old side tables, I was able to put everything directly on the table in front of me.  It took some getting used to, but ultimately resulted in an improved experience for me.  Everything was in a much more convenient spot than it used to be, and I was able to look up and reference information more easily.

Overall, the table delivers on its promise of providing a premium, luxurious gaming experience.  I always knew it would be nice, but I never imagined it would be as nice as it is.  The gaming space helps transport you to the other worlds and experiences that the various games take you to. There's a sort of "geek gamer" equivalent of the "Las Vegas Poker" experience when you're playing at a nice table in a nice casino.  It just feels betters.  More fun.  More immersive.  Just... nicer.

Plus, it really helps to be able to pause a game mid-way and eat without disrupting the things you're doing.  Keeping cups off the table protects game components, and enables us to focus more on the game itself.  Somehow, I feel encouraged to even drink more water than I used to while playing, because it's so convenient to have a cup holder at your side instead of trying to play a game while not knocking over a cup.

It's been a wonderful journey, and a very long wait, and it is finally here.  I am very happy. :)