/ Cory Doctorow / 6:51 am Wed Sep 24, 2008

World's largest wargaming table art installation


Ethan sez, "Timothy Hutchings's art work often references gamer culture. Particularly striking is his 900 square foot miniatures wargaming table. It starts out as a blank landscape. Over the course of the art show, it become populated by gallery goers playing with it." The World's Largest Wargaming Table (Thanks, Ethan!)

16

  1. Well, maybe a table but not the largest gaming surface. Back in the late 70’s the club I belonged to used to use an entire gymn floor for our 1/1200 naval battles as well as our D&D wars. Hundreds of lead figures all over! I guess we didn’t get the notice because the WWW wasn’t around yet…

  2. Could you imagine if it had a train track on it as well? Conductor/Gamers? That would be insane, and possibly deadly.

  3. *nerdgasm*

    I’ve seen this table once before, I’m sure of it. Perhaps in the old yellowing pages of an adolesence’s supply of White Dwarfs, all stored away in a crawlspace somewhere.

  5. I think that you would roll the die to find out how many seconds it could go.

    I am not sure what it’s goal would be. Maybe to kill people on the tracks, like my link in #2.

  7. That would make an incredible installation at a children’s museum. But, they might modify it from a wargame into a deluxe train table, or an African safari adventure game or…? The basic design, seems ideal in that it allows many children access to the table at the same time. Excellent.

  8. Almost as good as the guy I knew as a kid. His Dad’s ENTIRE basement had a train setup where you had to walk hunched over underneath the table until you came to one of a dozen or more trap doors. Awesomeness +3

  9. Hi folks, I’m the artist who made this. Thanks for the compliments, and thanks for it being shown on Boing Boing.

    Eadict, please go over to Ethan Ham’s blog and see the response I put up to your identical comment there.

    The Boy, this version of the the table had a small article in White Dwarf about three years ago. That’s not enough time for your magazines to yellow, so you were probably looking at a different table in an older issue. However, the WD folks did say that this was a record to the best of their knowledge. Ripley’s, however, refused to accept it as being too specialized of a subject.

    On putting a train on the table: That’s dangerous! It immediately becomes a model train set and no longer a wargame table. When I was building this, I made specific decisions about building it that engaged a wargame table style than a model train set, ex. styrofoam and not paper mache’.

    Rules for trains in wargames are out there. I’ve seen rules for the Smialny armored train (of which I built a life-sized model of one car) and its ilk, and engagements featuring armored trains set in British held Africa.

    If you like the table you’ll probably like this: http://www.plagmada.org

    Thanks again!

  10. “It took two players three hours to march a small force of Elder (sic) the length of the table, at a cheating double pace.”

    Lol.

  11. Wow….we’re always having trouble getting space to play large games. I never thought of declaring it was art and setting up at a gallery.

  12. My grandfathers model train set up puts this thing to shame. Like #8, his basement is devoted to model trains with trap doors so you can pop up in the middle of this massive mountain town he created. But he doesn’t go around calling himself an artist for it… perhaps he should.

  13. Wow, that’s a nice gaming table. But “world’s largest???” Hardly. I’ve been seeing wargaming tables like that since I was a kid in the 70’s.

    I’d really like to see some more of this guy’s work… especially since this thing is really designed for the “Battle of the Giant H-Shaped Battlefield.”

    No, really. Good work. But not the world’s largest.

  15. I saw this in the gallery, an it’s much larger than the photo shows – the table actually stretches into several rooms.

    I wonder if these gaming tables of yore that everyone is referring to might have something to do with the fact that they themselves were much smaller at the time… ;)

    Artist or not, this is still a beautiful labor of love.

  16. There’s nothing I like better in art than utility. This is a wonderful example. I also am a huge fan of anything miniature. Beautiful.

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