Boardgamer's Toolbox - A Questionnaire

We have a very small table, only about 1000x500, which we’re in the process of converting to a gaming table. We’re making the lid removable, adding an extra bottom to it and looking it with felt, probably speed felt, depending on the price. For most board games, this is all we use. I expect them to come with the correct components and not need anything else! There’s a few exceptions, one being Battle for Rokugan, where I’ve added extra bags. Dipping into an opaque bag is both more satisfying and easier to use, as well as being easier to setup and put away, than putting tokens facedown on the table.

For Netrunner specifically we each have playmats, (my partner’s is Saisentan, and I have a variety, my current being Mimic. We each have different styles of tokens, mostly translucent acrylic, though I have some wooden 2-sided tokens that can be flipped depending on which side they’re used for, and then there’s a few dice. Spindown D20’s from MTG (blasphemy!) and I have a single casino die because I’m a total mark. My partner users a fishing tackle/sowing bits box to keep their stuff in. We both have our own deck boxes. Mine is a sturdy plastic thing that all snaps closed on a very satisfying way. The lid, which has a transgender heart sticker on it, comes off to reveal the decks, and this section itself acts as a kid to a tray underneath for the tokens.

Our decks consist of some pretty unique promo cards, including some fan made alt arts, and our IDs are also unique. My corp ID, again, translucent acrylic that has the artwork and game text engraved into it with a laser. My partner has a similar process done to a piece of shiny mirrored acrylic, and the text on the piece is mirrored. (The ID is called Mirrormorph, making it a “Mirrored Mirror Mirrormorph”.) My Runner ID is a full art promo with the signature of the most recent world champion printed in gold lettering on it. As you can probably tell, most of our gaming time is actually spent playing Netrunner.

Beyond all that! We have a fake kalax that we got as part of a big furniture purchase. A bunch of it had small knocks of damage, nothing too major and as we found more and more kept emailing the company. They gave us small refunds we were happy with until eventually they refunded the full amount, so we got it for free. Nice. There’s an older one that is next to it which is ever so slightly smaller. None of our games fit into it in a satisfying manner. I need better solutions. They will be coming at a later date though.

We do keep saying we’re going to rank our games, figure out what we need to play more. I literally posted a message to this effect yesterday. We may never actually do this. :upside_down_face: I attempt not to find new games. I listen to the podcast and watch the YouTube videos, but don’t engage in many things being SUASD. I fear for what would happen if I did. I started watching a lovely couple on YouTube recently who’s videos were sadly not the format I wanted. Every video was like 90+ minutes with a rules walkthrough, full play, then review. I really liked them both, but that’s just so much. They did a video where they talked about Uwe Rosenberg’s games and mentioned there was a Halloween edition of Patchwork coming out, which I then bought for my partner’s birthday! (We have yet to play it, obviously. Because we are dunces.)

As for talking about games, we mostly discuss between ourselves here at home, and I’m in a few streamer discords (as well as my own) and Netrunner places where we talk about board games and stuff. I would say here, but I’ve been absent for a while so maybe not! :sweat_smile:

EDIT: HECK that’s a lot of words!

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