While it's often a question of taste as to how you furnish the spare, many see it as an opportunity to provide a refreshing change of pace to the rest of the house - some prefer to have their own home gym complex installed as a means to train at home, but others tend to take a slightly more laid back and stimulating approach, with indoor sports packages frequently used in combination to form games rooms.

Table Skill Games

Previously too heavy, too bulky and too expensive to buy for your own personal use (and as such reserved solely for pubs), indoor tabletop games have now become more compact and mobile, and as such are excellent for light activity, focussing the mind and developing hand-eye co-ordination. Table football - or foosball - has become a welcome pastime for having a kickabout without the effort of kitting up and going down to the park. Our range of Harvard model tables are especially good to serve as indoor practice for hand-skill sports (e.g. rowing or racquet disciplines) and can double as trendy entertainment for visiting guests.

Pool and snooker tables are also an excellent way of letting off steam and honing your concentration. While snooker is considered a more strategic sport akin to a game of chess, 8-ball pool is often targeted towards skill and reflexes. In either case, you need to ensure you have ample clearance in your room - not just for the basic dimensions of the table, but also some extra clearance to ensure your cue, which is usually about one metre long, can be aimed properly without striking the walls.

Indoor Ping Pong Tables

Table tennis has become the quickfire alternative to its lawn court big sister. Full size tables can offer the smooth, springy surface needed to play to professional standard. To get the most out of a new table, again you'll need plenty of room not just to fit the dimensions of the table, but also so you can move around - this is a sport where you need to stay on your toes. Especially important is to ensure your room isn't cluttered and there are not immediate obstacles for you to run in to. One highly recommended tip for playing is to learn a little bit about creating topspin or backspin - this is a vital component to playing and forces your opponent to play a similar shot in reply in order to keep the ball down.

Outdoor Garden Sports Equipment

While not strictly speaking intended for your games room, basketball hoops and scale-size football goal posts are excellent for storing in your recreation lounge to add a little sporting-themed décor, or even suitable for playing if you've got the room to set up and not risking upsetting anything else nearby. This is especially useful if your recreation room is just a stone's throw from the garden, where you can easily move equipment out for a summertime game. Keep checking our stock for these items, as we tend to vary our sporting products depending on the season.