Do It Myself Board Game Table

This is my game table.  I built it with my hands, mostly.  I think it is pretty.  And useful.  Pretty useful.

Because let's face it: a lot of us are too old to sit on the floor to play games anymore.  Getting up is hard. My knees crack and my back hurts and sometimes I'm all "I can't get up" like in the Life Alert commercials.

That's why trees evolved into tables, right?
Here, I drew this just for you; it's how science works:

Totally factual evolutionary chart thing.

I suppose a regular ol' table would be fine, but where's the fun in that?  DIY projects are great for killing time.  And a fancy looking surface solely for board gaming increases board game nerd street cred by like, 1000 somethings.

That is why this had to be built.  It's a simple gaming table.  Actually, I just built a table-topper to sit on top of my existing table. Because building a table from the floor up would cost time and money that would be better spent on games and pie.
Also, I'm no carpenter.  I'm leave that to the guys on PBS.

But I did have the skills to build this simple, elegant yet functional tabletop.  Here's how it went down...

It all started with a table.

Too small.  Not felt-y.  Must make fancy.

Then, a piece of wood to go on top.  A bigger piece of wood.  A typical board game table size would be something like 4'x4' or 4'x6', because people like round numbers.  Mine was 45"x65" because I like numbers that end in 5's.
The wood is a simple piece of 3/4" thick OSB.  It's not too expensive (it was 20 bucks for the 4'x8' sheet) and was sturdy enough for my purposes.  Doesn't look great, but I'm covering it anyway.

OSB: Oh, so big.

The people at Home Depot were kind enough to cut the full sheet down to size for me.  So I didn't have to risk losing a finger or my nose.  My nose gets in the way of things a lot, so better safe than snout-less.

The final pieces of the puzzle are some fine fabrics.

The white stuff is some soft cotton stuff.  It was squishy and pretty cheap.  I wanted to use it as an underlayer to create a little extra pillbury doughboy squish underneath. Tee-hee.

The red stuff is felt.  But PREMIUM felt, from JoAnn's Fabrics.  The regular cheaper craft felt bunches up and balls up and stretches and doesn't last.  Gotta get the good stuff.

I got a nice dark red/burgundy color.  Reminds me of fancy poker tables.

It's also apparently good for hopscotch?

The felt and white cloth ran $30 (after a coupon, but JoAnn's always has coupons).

The the scarlet felt, in the boardgame room with the revolver.

Staple gun, set from "stun" to "kill."

So the plan was simple:  staple gun the white underlayer into the board, then staple the fancy felt layer over the top.

I started by draping the white fabric over the actual table.

Then I put the osb on top, folded the fabric over onto it, and stapled it up down the middle.  My staple gun was feeling a bit drowsy today, so I had to hammer in each staple to make sure it was flush with the board.

Then I staped the other side down as well. I made sure that I pulled everything tight, so there was no bunching.  You want a nice, flat, taut surface here.

For the edges, I trimmed off the excess fabric and threw some staples into the side of the board.  Not the prettiest edging, but this stuff is gonna get covered up anyway.  Again, I made sure everything was stretched super tight.

I had quite a bit of excess fabric trimmings.  And I don't like to waste things.  So...

DIY vestments. 

Then it was time for the nice stuff.  I repeated the process above with my lavish burgundy felt.

To finish off the edges here, instead of doing the trimming, which looks super tacky, I just folded the edges under.  Not the most elegant solution, but it was easy and didn't look half bad.

Flip it over...

The final product

I'm VERY happy with how this came out.  It's simple, but nice looking.  And it only took me about $50 and a couple of hours to put together.  Not bad...not bad at all.