It started with saucepans.

One evening, three of us were sat around a dining table with nothing better to do. There used to be a proper table tennis net that got strung up for exactly this kind of dining table tennis, but nobody could find it, so we lined up a row of saucepans down the middle instead. The ball kept bouncing off them in whatever direction it felt like, which turned out to be funnier than the game we'd actually meant to play. So instead of fighting the chaos, we wrote a rule around it: if it came back to you off a saucepan, you just hit it again.

Then we added a breadboard down one side, angled so you could play off that too. A kid's xylophone went in on the other side next, and it genuinely made the game better, if only saucepans and a xylophone weren't quite so small, and quite so likely to end an evening with something broken. So we tried building something sturdier: bigger angled flaps to keep the unpredictable bounce without needing to raid the kitchen, and an actual net down the middle instead of whatever pans were closest to hand.

Over many more evenings, with a rotating cast of other people who got roped in along the way, the rules kept getting tested and rewritten through actual gameplay. The aim was always the same: keep the rally going, keep it chaotic, keep it fun, and keep the rules simple enough that nobody has to stop and check them mid-point.

After enough rounds of that, we ended up here: a complete set of singles and doubles rules, and a small production batch of Tabel sets ready to go out the door.

It's stuck around for a practical reason too. A few of us are parents now, and getting out on a weeknight usually means someone's on childcare duty, or negotiating permission to leave the house. A game that lives on the dining table you've already got doesn't have that problem: the friend who usually can't make it out can just come round instead. It also solves the other classic problem with having people over, which is that otherwise you just have to sit there and talk to each other all night.

We should also confess that once you start naming flaps, spreaders, and glory holes, every rule ends up sounding a bit like an accident. That's not an accident.