or - On the Benefits of a Wargame Room.
As has been mentioned several times before, we're moving house. One of the perks of the new house is that it is bigger than the old one. Of course, much of that space will be taken over by the ever expanding supporting infrastructure of a growing child, but there will be room left for that holy grail of the wargames hobby: a permanent wargame room. Yay!
Now, the story of the wargame room in the new house is a quite convoluted one. The original intent was to build one in the cellar, but than the cellar turned out to be prohibitively expensive, so it is not build. The idea was than the put the wargame room on the attic, but the presence of a gas mains on the floor in the middle of the space there makes that impractical (not so much because the gas is dangerous, but because people will trip over it, and Murphy will dictate that they will consequently fall straight down the stairs and, what's worse, do so while clutching a batch of freshly painted miniatures). So the attic will have to wait until it is finished into seperate rooms (in a couple of years), and those rooms will probably go to the offspring anyway.
So that leaves the wargame room in one of the small bedrooms (about 3.5x3m). That gives me space to put in a 1.8mx2m table and my modelling and painting desk, along with oodles upon oodles of shelf space to stock all of the terrain, supplies, figures and other more or less exotic paraphernalia of our hobby. If I host big games, I'll probably put them up on the attic anyway, and just hope for the best :).
As to benefits of a seperate wargame room; apart from the obvious, often stated ones (games can be left set up, centralised stocking, ...) there is the advantage of containment: all of your hobby stuff can be confined to one room, which can then be defined as such. It makes it easier to keep children away from your wargames stuff (for as long as you want to keep them away - I can't wait until Britt can paint :) ) when it is all in one room. Somehow, a child finds it easier to understand "you're not allowed to go into that room without asking" than "if you ever see a tiny tin man hanging about, or a pot of paint, or an exacto knife, or superglue ... DON'T TOUCH IT". I think.
For those among you with wargame rooms, what are the advantages, or disadvantages, to you?
"all of your hobby stuff can be confined to one room" Are you kidding me?
ReplyDeleteRudi
>�all of your hobby stuff can be confined to one room� Are you kidding me?
ReplyDeleteWell, having just packed up the majority of my stuff, it is concentrated in an area about 1m square and 2m high, so conceivably, in unpacked state, it might fit one room, given enough shelving space.
Of course, that's not counting the stuff that's still in the garage. And the stuff upstairs. And ...
Ah, I get your point now :)
Hi Bart
ReplyDeleteJust back from sunny Spain.
There are NO disadvantages to your own room, except maybe a little jealousy from your spouse. It�s a great place to retreat to. alan
__UPDATE__: this comment was accidentally deleted when it got caught in the spillover from a spam clean operation while operating in a caffeine deprived state. In other words, I deleted a comment too many when deleting spam this morning. Luckily, [Google](http://www.google.be) still had the comment in its cache - three cheers for the oracle of the Net! -- Robartes
Careful we will be getting into the 1:2.43 collection ratio arguement again here.
ReplyDeleteThe big disadvantage of putting it all in one room is that your spouse can see just how much you have got. And more to the point so can you.... Suddenly all those little items that were stashed away for a rainy day either 1) become the node upon which yet another new project is founded or 2) they stand to become rationalised to pay for/make way for said new project. Either way it's expensive.
I have my own wargame room now, and it makes life simpler. Whenever I need something gaming-related, I know it's up there somewhere, so no need to look through dozens of different places.
ReplyDeleteW.r.t. keeping kids out, that's just not going to work :-). I guess that it's even more of an attraction to a kid to explore the 'forbidden' room when daddy is not watching. OTOH, why would you want to restrict access? If the concern is about using potential dangerous tools, that hardly is limited to the wargaming room. The kitchen or garage probably have much more dangerous things lying around than the hobby room. Of course, the real danger is about handling the miniatures! But then, let your kid handle the miniatures, and one is dropped, then you get angry! It won't happen a second time, and your offspring has learned that those mniatures are really beautoful to look at :-)
What I would really like to have is a wargaming room with a bar!