Being a miniatures wargamer, I have converted my spare bedroom into a gaming room. I have had a good looking table that I had built myself for some time now. Through the years I have found that a 4X8 sheet of plywood turned into a nice table will not do for many reasons. No matter what I did the size of the table was too ungainly; wither the area was too small or the battles tended to concentrate in the center of the board. A further problem was that this size lacked depth fighting across the board or lacked maneuver room fighting lengthways. A larger board size proved unsatisfactory as well; the players simply could not reach all their forces all the time. I also found that once I tried a small campaign scenario, I had troubles transferring the map situation from a hex map onto a rectangular table. I just had to rack my brain and find a solution. Then I hit upon an idea; a hex shaped table! I experimented and found (at least for me) an ideal solution. I cut several sheets of 4X8 plywood into half hex shapes - essentially parallelograms - with three sides four feet and one side eight feet long. Now I have the flexibility I wanted! I can place two sheets together to make one hex and thus correspond to one hex on my maps. Then I can add hexes or parts of hexes as I need. I can use my spare bedroom real well now, too. With a hex shaped table, all players can teach the gaming area, as well as fight in both depth and width. Now my games don't waste' any space, that is, I don't have unused corners. On top of that, I don't have these wasted corners to navigate around when gamers cross to the other side of the board. It's nice to have my table fit neatly into my gaming room. Some example of how this flexible gaming table can maximize your gaming pleasure: POSSIBLE TABLE COMBINATIONS I tell you, this system works real well! Here's how to make the table yourself. Usually a lumber yard has inexpensive plywood sheets and will cut them for you. If not, you can easily cut them yourself. First, cut a six-inch wide strip off the top of the eight foot length (I prefer eight foot sized plywood). Next, mark off two feet from either edge at the bottom. Cut from these two marks to the corners of the top, and you have your half-hex! I use saw horses to set the half hexes on so I can fold up what I don't need at the time and still can add what I need as I go. Well, have fun with your new hex-tables. You will find that now you can have great campaign games, and avoid all that map-to-table correlation headache. Good gaming! Back to Table of Contents -- Courier Vol. VIII No. 4 To Courier List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1988 by The Courier Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com