I Can Hardly Believe This Is Real

While researching (read: drooling over) Geek Chic tables the other day, I came across a reviewer who commented that their furniture is, “the stuff gamer dreams are made of.” Saturday, we went to their workshop and I’m pretty sure I got high off all the gamer fairy dust in the air. At least, I don’t think our five minutes in the lacquer room was enough to explain my post-tour giddiness.

You see, we’re ordering one of these:




It’s called the Emissary and, on the outside, it’s a gorgeous, hardwood dining table. However, take out the leaves, pull out the drawers, and you have a 7’x4’ gridded wet-erase gaming surface with individual desks for seven players and a GM (assuming a table that big will fit in our house… the jury’s still out on that). It is, seriously, the most amazing piece of furniture I’ve ever seen and soon, it will be ours.

We’d seen the tables in person at GenCon several years ago, but Geek Chic is located just up the road in Everett, WA, so we couldn’t resist the opportunity to go over all the options in person with their salesperson or “Enabler,” as her job title aptly labels her. Plus, we got the opportunity to tour the workshop where the furniture is made with the company’s founder, Robert Gifford.

It was amazing. What started out three years ago as a few guys building geek nirvana in their garage, is now a thirty-person operation with a warehouse-sized building and a showroom in the works. The tables are all built by hand out of sustainable woods with construction meant to last for generations. Plus, despite having an enviable backlog of orders, they’re constantly coming up with new ideas. We saw some of the projects in the works and amazingly, I think it will be possible sometime in the near future, to have an entire houseful of furniture designed around a gamer’s inherent… uh… gamerness. There is a slight possibility you’d have to sell your soul to afford it, though.

I'm thinking it would probably be worth it.