Cue sports, equipment and the betting line
Everything else that shares the floor — foosball, air hockey, shuffleboard, table tennis, darts, stools and card tables.
The room is the constraint, not the game. Air hockey, foosball, shuffleboard, darts and poker each want a different shape of floor, and the difference is not the footprint of the table but the space the players need to stand in while they use it. Game Room is where the Journal works through those shapes, and where the shop’s archived pages on everything that is not a pool table are kept.
The first question is not which game you want. It is which walls you can give up. A standard air hockey table needs clearance at both ends because players stand there to strike. A foosball table needs clearance along the long sides because that is where four bodies crowd in to work the rods.
Listed in the order the section reads: journal first, then features, answers, equipment notes and catalogue indexes.
Two pieces carry the argument. One sets air hockey against foosball, because the two are chosen against each other more often than any other pair and they fail in opposite directions — one needs clearance at the ends, the other along the sides. The other takes shuffleboard, which looks like a question of taste and is really a question of length: the table comes in a range of sizes for a reason, and picking from that range is room arithmetic before it is anything else.
The catalogue side of the section is broad because the shop was: barstools, lighting, wall décor, playing cards, dice games and the miscellany that a room accumulates. It is kept at the original addresses so that old links still resolve, and it is worth reading as a snapshot of what a full game room was expected to contain.