About GameRoomSetup

GameRoomSetup.com exists to answer one question properly before anyone spends four figures on something that weighs three quarters of a ton: will it actually fit. Almost every other site in this niche leads with a list of tables. The list is the easy part. The hard part is that a 7 ft pool table needs a room roughly 13 ft 6 in by 16 ft 9 in with a standard cue, that the number people quote is usually the table's own dimensions rather than the room's, and that the difference between those two numbers is where the regret lives.

What is on the site

• 15 calculators. Minimum room size for a table size and cue length, the reverse question of what fits a room you have already measured, dartboard height and throw line, shuffleboard and air hockey and foosball clearance, arcade cabinet footprints, seating and viewing distance, stool height against counter height, lighting coverage, flooring quantity and a whole-room budget planner. Every one of them runs in the browser and shows the arithmetic rather than just the answer.
• 6 complete buildouts. Whole rooms priced line by line at different budgets, from a spare bedroom with a dartboard and a self-assembly table up to a full basement with slate, shuffleboard, arcade, pinball and a kegerator bar. Every line is priced and linked, every total is stated, and the costs that never appear on a product page, installation and electrical in particular, are called out rather than quietly omitted.
• 51 equipment roundups covering pool tables, cues, balls, dartboards, cabinets, surrounds, shuffleboards, air hockey, foosball, arcade cabinets, pinball, poker, kegerators, seating, lighting, flooring and sound.
• 20 guides on everything either side of the purchase: installation, levelling, hanging a board, basement humidity, electrical planning, flooring, soundproofing, maintenance, moving a table and buying used.
• 11 reference charts and 32 head to head comparisons, for when you already know the question and just want the number or the verdict.

How the numbers are put together

Clearance figures on this site are arithmetic, not opinion. A pool table room size is the table's playing surface plus twice the cue length on each axis, and that is the whole calculation. The cue length matters more than people expect: dropping from a 58 in standard cue to a 52 in shorty buys a foot on both axes, and a 48 in bar cue buys nearly two. That is why every fit calculator here asks for the cue rather than assuming one.

Dart figures come from the World Darts Federation playing standard: 68 in from the floor to the centre of the bull, 93.25 in horizontally from the board face to the back of the oche for steel tip, 96 in for soft tip, and a 115.5 in diagonal as the check measurement. Those are fixed numbers and we do not round them, because an inch of error in board height is the single most common mistake in a home setup and it is invisible until someone who plays in a league stands in front of it.

Equipment dimensions come from published manufacturer specifications for the specific model named. Where a size is given as a range because a maker builds a model in several finishes with different cabinet widths, the page says so rather than picking the flattering end.

What we do not do

We do not test equipment in person and we never claim to. Nobody buys nine slate pool tables, six shuffleboards and four pinball machines to write a roundup, and a site that implies otherwise is telling you a story. What we do instead is read the published specifications, the governing playing standards for each game, and a large volume of verified owner reviews from people who have lived with the equipment for a year or more, which is the window where cloth wear, cabinet movement, slate settling and electronics failures actually show up.

That approach is genuinely better for some questions and genuinely worse for others, and it is worth being clear about which. It is very good at dimensions, clearances, what is included in a box, what breaks after eighteen months and what a service part costs. It is not a substitute for standing in front of two tables and feeling the difference in the rails. Where feel is the deciding factor, the honest advice is to go and play on one, and the pages say that.

We also do not publish a page whose only purpose is to rank. Every page here answers a question somebody actually asks while planning a room.

How the site pays for itself

Affiliate links, entirely. When a link on this site sends you to Amazon and you buy something, we earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That is the whole business model, there is no paid placement, and nobody has ever paid to appear in a roundup here. The full version of this is on the affiliate disclosure page and it is worth two minutes of your time.

One consequence of that model is worth stating plainly, because it shapes what you read here. A good deal of the best equipment in this hobby is not sold through retailers at all. Brunswick, Olhausen, Diamond and Connelly pool tables, Champion shuffleboards and Jersey Jack pinball all sell through their own dealer networks. We still name those machines where they are the right answer, because pretending they do not exist would make the advice worse. Where we do, the page says plainly that the table is a dealer purchase and the button searches comparable equipment you can order today rather than pointing at a page that sells nothing.

Corrections

If a dimension here is wrong, we want to know, and a specification error on a clearance page is the most consequential kind of mistake this site can make. Send the page, the figure and the source through the contact page and it gets fixed rather than argued about. Prices move constantly and we do not treat a stale price as an error, though a product that has been discontinued is worth reporting.

Start here

If you have a room and no equipment, start with what size pool table fits my room. If you have equipment in mind and no room measured yet, start with how much space each game needs. If you want the whole room priced at a budget, the buildouts do that work.