3D grid table

[_flint_]

So, i recently had an idea for a piece of furniture that would reveloutionise the way we play tabletop games. A large table with a 1-inch square grid carved into it. Each square in the grid could be raised or lowered by increments of 1 inch at a time so that the GM could give depth to the terrain.

Do any of you guys know if this already exist or where i could go to get one made?

[TheThan]

There’s a board game with adjustable terrain. I can’t seem to recall the name of it, I want to say runebound, but I don’t think that’s really it. maybe someone else can help me out here.

Then of course, there’s legos.

edit
just recalled the board game.
it's heroscape.

[nedz]

It's a fun idea — doesn't do multiple levels though.

[Kjata]

To be honest, it's kind of a pain in the ass. We did that in a roleplaying game once, and after 2 sessions we showed up and the blocks were gone. The dm said he was tired of the setup time, and we all agreed.

[willpell]

That's why you make it mechanical. Attach each of the squares to a little piston that can be ratcheted up and down by pressing a button.

[Gnoman]

That would cost a fortune. Machinery with the necessary levels of precision would cost upwards of $100. Per square.

[TheThan]

I would use a screw and bolt set up.

Turn a key, the tile rises/lowers. The more you turn it, the more it rises, or lowers (depending on the direction. This way, you can make very smooth 3d terrain features like hills.
Something like this is never going to be cheap.

[SiuiS]

I would use a screw and bolt set up.

Turn a key, the tile rises/lowers. The more you turn it, the more it rises, or lowers (depending on the direction. This way, you can make very smooth 3d terrain features like hills.
Something like this is never going to be cheap.

Hmm. Plastic foam over a series o pistons/screws/whatever with a green, grid marked Velcro felt over it. You'll literally get smooth contours (though you still need to do cliffs manually) because the material will just flex over the knobby bits o the mechanics.

[noparlpf]

That sounds great (also rather expensive as has been noted) but how do we do multiple floors above each other?

[shawnhcorey]

It would be easier to use foam cut to 1 inch high and of various sizes. There would be rectangle blocks for man-made terraces and circles, ellipses, and kidney-shaped ones for various hills.

Another setup is to have an overhead projection bounce it image off a mirror on the ceiling and onto the table. An overhead-projector monitor allows computer control of the projected map. Terrain, buildings, and NPCs are added as the scene changes.

[Manga Shoggoth]

It would be easier to use foam cut to 1 inch high and of various sizes. There would be rectangle blocks for man-made terraces and circles, ellipses, and kidney-shaped ones for various hills.

Or buy a lot of lego...

[valadil]

How does one select the appropriate square? Is there a button per square or some other interface? The most workable thing I can think of is a button along the edges to select row/column and a button or crank for raising and lowering the selected item. It would require cooperation from the players out of the GM's reach though. And doesn't scale if you need to move several at once. I'd hate to adjsut the table if half the items had to be raised.

-edit-

Now if the table were a USB device, then we'd be on to something. Select as many items as you like and raise them all at once. Better still, save your layouts. Make terrain in advance and then tell the table to build it when the players get there. Hell, I'd use this even in a flat layout just to carve out walls of a dungeon if it meant the computer set up the terrain for me.

[Gnoman]

Adding computer control would probably add a few thousand to the cost. It would be doable, though.

[nedz]

A stepper motor under each block, each wired up to a micro-controller with a USB or RS232 interface to a PC. You're talking about a reasonable amount of dedicated software though. The latter is the expensive part.

[valadil]

Adding computer control would probably add a few thousand to the cost. It would be doable, though.

Stick one of these in there. http://www.raspberrypi.org/ That's overkill for $25. I'm sure someone who's actually involved in this sort of thing could find the right USB board for under ten bucks. Regarding the software, I'd write that for a couple thousand. Then you just have to split it over a couple hundred sales.

I was putting a bit of thought into this on the walk home. The only part that has me stumped is the motors for lifting each square. You can use one motor per square. But then a 10x10 board (small by gaming standards) uses a hundred motors. https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10171 puts them at $75 per hundred, which is already more than I'd be willing to pay for the board. Now I'm wondering if you really need a motor per square. If you could get a motor per row, rotating a cylinder that somehow connects to the square, that would be ideal. Then you're at $7.50 for motors for the 10x10 board, but that also scales to $7.50 for a 10x20 board. I'm not sure how you'd attach the motor to the relevant squares though. Maybe a motor on each column could pull that column against the row cylinder, the row cylinders spin, then the column cylinder returns? That gets you down to motors for the perimeter instead of the whole area, but it seems more prone to breakage and you'd need to devise something to hold the square up once raised. That said, I don't do this sort of thing regularly so I'm sure there are options I'm not familiar with.

[nedz]

Well you probably need a GUI also, and I think you may be overestimating your sales volume.

[Chen]

Well you probably need a GUI also, and I think you may be overestimating your sales volume.

There's a company that sells this: http://www.geekchichq.com/furniture/sultan/

If people actually buy that thing at that price I suspect even a thousand dollars for a 3D grid table would sell like hotcakes.

[valadil]

Well you probably need a GUI also, and I think you may be overestimating your sales volume.

Conceptually there's nothing that difficult about the GUI for this. The thing I was starting to worry about was power. If it's powered over USB, I don't know that all the motors can run at once. If they can, great. If not, well, at least you could reduce costs by cutting out motors, but it would be massively slower to update. Adding an AC adapter would fix that, but might put people off from buying it.

I'm estimating sales volume with the assumption that the cost is between $50 and $100. I'm hoping it would be closer to $50. Given how many gamers are willing to shell out that much for a board game, I don't think this would be hard to sell. But I'm a computer guy and don't actually know much about sales. That said, this seems like a great idea for a kickstarter.

[noparlpf]

There's a company that sells this: http://www.geekchichq.com/furniture/sultan/

If people actually buy that thing at that price I suspect even a thousand dollars for a 3D grid table would sell like hotcakes.

As far as I can tell, that's a fancy wooden table. Where's the moving squares bit?

[Chen]

As far as I can tell, that's a fancy wooden table. Where's the moving squares bit?

My point was the price. If people are willing to spend $11k on a fancy table for gaming one would imagine there are people willing to spend $1k (if it even cost that) on a 3D grid for gaming. Presumably significantly MORE people then the table. As such I don't really think its too big an overestimation on sales volume.

[noparlpf]

My point was the price. If people are willing to spend $11k on a fancy table for gaming one would imagine there are people willing to spend $1k (if it even cost that) on a 3D grid for gaming. Presumably significantly MORE people then the table. As such I don't really think its too big an overestimation on sales volume.

Well how many people actually do buy it? It's possible the price is so high partly because few people buy it.

[lt_murgen]

You have to consider what height you want it to be. If you are talking miniature scale (28mm), then you would have to be able to lift each square 2 inches or better to get a second floor effect. That is a lot of height to adjust with a screw mechanism, and with binding issues of a square surrounded by other squares, nearly impossible. You would need guides at corners or middles to keep it straight. Even simple ball bearings wouldn't work- you need to restrict both X and Y axis to allow for Z-axis movement.

Now, most gaming mats are typically close to 24"X36". I don't know what a 10" X 10" board really buys you. maybe if you restrict all combat to fighting in buildings or dungeons, fine. But that cuts out all warhammer, heroclix, and other skirmish games.

You could put a 2-axis rail system underneath, with a 4x4 array of motors (16 in all) and control it to move and raise/lower individual blocks via screws. But such a thing would be roughly 18" high with controls. Now you have a very thick table you cant sit under and still reach to the middle of.


I've seen a much simpler version of this at a friends house. It was a 4'X4' board that he cut 1/16" groves in 1" spacing into. The groves held pieces of fiberboard decorated as walls, doors, etc. A second story was simple to build. Set up / takedown took 5 minutes if all 4 of us worked together.

[Gnoman]

Stick one of these in there. http://www.raspberrypi.org/ That's overkill for $25. I'm sure someone who's actually involved in this sort of thing could find the right USB board for under ten bucks. Regarding the software, I'd write that for a couple thousand. Then you just have to split it over a couple hundred sales.



Not even close. A basic 3-axis milling machine would probably run on that. You're talking at least 100-axis. You would need a modern desktop. That's the cheapest part. Multiple squares per motor is impossible, so a 10x10 grid (which is ludicrously small for most systems) would require 100 motors. A controller for that many motors would run at least 2-3 thousand bucks. There's no extant software that's designed for that many items. Figure another 5-6k for programming costs, as this isn't something that you can crowdsource. You'll need a laser sensor on each square. Not cheap. Then, of course, there's the cost of the table If I were commissioned to design this, I'd demand at least a $30k budget.

It's probably relevant that I took 4 years of machine design in school, and have built more than one CNC machine.

[Nepenthe]

I have a good idea of how to build this completely mechanically--grid or hex--with support for moving nearby spaces at once to automatically create hills, cliffs, etc. However, I don't think I could do it for less than a six-figure price tag, and leg room would be an issue. I doubt anyone would want to fork over even enough to cover the prototyping costs.

[nedz]

I don't think you would need the optical sensors, that amount of precision is not required. But it would still not be cheap.

[Krazzman]

It depends on what you want to achieve now. A simple grid layout where you raise or lower each tile only by 1 or 2 inch? This would result into a place with exactly 3 states. -1, 0 and 1. Mechanically speaking this means motor at normal position, motor x times into right and motor x times into left. The actual position should be level 0 level 1 and level 2.

One way would be to have it consist of 4 motors. One for each axis and one to pull it into the direction. This would take the longest to actually make your map as this would be 100 motor-positions it would have to run through.
Another would be to have a screw-sort-of-thing being attached to n motors (nxm Grid). That has a few different possibilities. Either take n as the smaller or bigger number.
Yet another would be to take one motor per row and one per column. Or actually 2 per row/column.

The rising and such could work in a plateau system. I don't know how much an Inch is but I would assume the whole thing would make up about 5 Inch in height. as well as some form of display or port for an app. A display would take away place but would be the safest, an port to connect a mobile device like an Smartphone would give us more place but would make the programming a bit different and could be rather unsafe.

The GUI itself should be cheapass easy. Although if you consider 1 day of work could cost you 1.000€ (at least that is the rough estimation for projects inside of this company) it could get quite expensive with a lazy Designer. The GUI actually needs just the grid-layout with a +0- button on it and a default position button. As well as maybe one +0- for each row and column. Additionally a do it button. Which starts the procedure and a Stop button to stop it.

Hope this helps.

[Chen]

Not even close. A basic 3-axis milling machine would probably run on that. You're talking at least 100-axis. You would need a modern desktop. That's the cheapest part. Multiple squares per motor is impossible, so a 10x10 grid (which is ludicrously small for most systems) would require 100 motors. A controller for that many motors would run at least 2-3 thousand bucks. There's no extant software that's designed for that many items. Figure another 5-6k for programming costs, as this isn't something that you can crowdsource. You'll need a laser sensor on each square. Not cheap. Then, of course, there's the cost of the table If I were commissioned to design this, I'd demand at least a $30k budget.

It's probably relevant that I took 4 years of machine design in school, and have built more than one CNC machine.

You could do it a lot cheaper if you used mechanical stops to keep the squares raised. You'd only need 3 motors; 2 for X and Y rails beneath the grid and another one connected to a rising screw that would raise and lower each rectangular prism.

Each prism would need some sort of spring loaded catch to allow them to stay in position. The only downside is you'd need to raise the screw AND lower it so you could move on to the next square you wanted to move which would make creation of the map initially more time consuming. The controller for the three motors would be pretty trivial at least though.

[Gnoman]

I don't think you would need the optical sensors, that amount of precision is not required. But it would still not be cheap.

Yeah, you would. If you have no sensors, you guarantee that you will either burn out the motor or destroy the movable tile. Quite possibly both.

@Chen

A three motor controller would only be a couple hundred. I have no idea what sort of mechanical stop you are thinking of, so I can't comment on the validity of that idea (though I can think of absolutely none that would be cheaper than the method I described and fully automatic). The biggest problem, cost wise, with your suggestion is that rails with the minimum level of precision needed are quite expensive. The need for precision increases exponentially with length.

[Chen]

A three motor controller would only be a couple hundred. I have no idea what sort of mechanical stop you are thinking of, so I can't comment on the validity of that idea (though I can think of absolutely none that would be cheaper than the method I described and fully automatic). The biggest problem, cost wise, with your suggestion is that rails with the minimum level of precision needed are quite expensive. The need for precision increases exponentially with length.

The mechanical stop idea would only allow you to raise the squares though. You'd press whatever release there was on the squares and they would drop down to minimum height. So clearly its not fully automatic anymore, but its significantly cheaper since you only need the controlled part to be able to push pegs up (and move around side to side obviously). As to the catch itself something like a spring loaded barb is all you'd need. The motor can push it up but it can't fall back down.