Home bar & game room guides

Almost every regret in a home bar or game room is dimensional, not financial. People do not buy the wrong pool table — they buy a table the room cannot hold a cue around. They do not buy a bad bar stool — they buy a 30-inch seat for a 36-inch counter. They do not buy a faulty beverage fridge — they build a freestanding one into a cabinet it was never designed to vent inside. These guides exist because those decisions are all arithmetic, and almost nobody publishes the arithmetic.

The measurements worth knowing before you shop

• Game tables need their own footprint plus a full cue length on every side. A 7-foot pool table wants roughly 17 by 13 feet of clear floor; bumper pool, played with 48-inch cues, wants about 11 by 11. The room-size guide has the chart for every table size.
• Bar stools are seat height equals counter height minus 10 to 12 inches — measured to the underside of the top, which is where a thick butcher block quietly costs you two inches. The height guide has the full table.
• Dartboards hang at 5 feet 8 inches to the bullseye with the throw line 7 feet 9.25 inches away. Those numbers are fixed worldwide, and the mounting guide includes the diagonal check that catches an uneven floor.
• Bar carts need about 13 inches of shelf clearance, because a 750 ml bottle is roughly 12 inches tall. It is the spec that decides whether a cart is useful or decorative, and it is almost never in the listing.

The "is it worth it?" questions, answered honestly

Two purchases in this niche carry a real premium and a real catch, so each gets its own page. Nugget ice makers make the only chewable ice there is — and the soft texture and the fast melt are the same physical property, which makes them the wrong machine for a slowly sipped whisky. Kegerators genuinely produce better beer and work out cheaper per pint — but a tapped keg has four to eight weeks before it declines, and the line cleaning is not optional. In both cases the answer depends on you rather than on the product, so we give you the figures to decide with instead of a verdict.

Starting from nothing

If you have not bought anything yet, start with how to set up a home bar: six bottles, five tools, four glass shapes and decent ice, which together cost less than a pair of bar stools and matter considerably more. The glassware guide covers which four shapes and how many of each. Then home bar ideas for the layout that fits your actual floor space, and what to buy first for the full order of purchase.

Every guide carries real picks from products we rank elsewhere on the site, at live Amazon prices stamped with the date we checked them, placed after the section that explains what to look for rather than before it. We have not tested any of this gear and say so on every page — see how we pick.