Where am I supposed to play my games?

Tabletop RPGs are conversely blessed and cursed by their analog nature, games composed of physical materials but played out in shared imagination. I am a professed slut for media I can hold, and thus I prefer to interact with games by spreading their requisite tomes and tchotchkes across a surface—tables, desks, and countertops—instead of opening a handful of PDFs on my monitor. But that physicality demands space, which is hard to come by when you live in roughly 400 square feet of converted barn.

Not everybody’s homes are as limited as my temporary “barndominium”, but the squeeze has forced me to recontextualize my relationship to playing games. I previously maintained a portion of my apartment for hobby time—reading through RPG books, setting up board games, and painting miniatures—at a small IKEA dining table in what my parents’ generation would have used as a dining room. It wasn’t perfect, but it also wasn’t the desk where I worked eight hours a day. Designating rooms thus created different zoning within my brain, separating play from obligation as much as possible.

Now, in my appropriated slice of barn, there isn’t much room left to partition for games once you account for bed, desk, bathroom, and a cozy living space where I sit in a different chair and look at a slightly larger screen during my leisure hours. Where do games go in this tight configuration of furniture? Where do games ever go in our lives?