Hello there chair enthusiasts of Roblox, WoodReviewer here with my first review of 2019. And coming off of this year’s advent calendar, what is a better game to review than a game based on chairs, which is why I am taking a look at Chair by Elttob. For those of you wondering what is in a game called chair, and whose game play entirely revolves around you sitting in a chair, the game is a chair. Personally, I have been looking forward to reviewing Chair as it is a short game that you can finish in about 30 seconds, and see the entirety of the game in those 30 seconds, unlike the current trend of massive 50+ hour simulator games that take you 10 hours to get out of the starting area. So this should be a nice, short review. Not some 1,500 word odyssey that involves a dozen pictures to inform you why the chair that you can clearly see in the thumbnail has bad wood grain.

So, how does the chair in Chair have bad wood grain? I mean, it isn’t rocket science. Just look at the chair.

While you can’t clearly see it from this image, it should be fairly obvious that all four legs and the backrest have improper wood grain. However, due to the poor lighting in the game, the poor resolution on the thumbnail image, and the fact that you randomly spin through the void once you sit on the chair, I can understand why it may be hard for you to properly see the improper wood grain on the chair.

So, after several long hours of research in ways to brighten up Roblox through image brightening, trying to extract the geometry of the game to get a copy of the game, and several attempts to try and find a copy of the game file through various means, I decided to take the hard way out and remade the chair in Chair in about 10 seconds in studio.

I the sat and looked at the chair, complete and with the same improper wood grain as the chair from Chair, and started to hate myself for the bad-wood grain monstrosity that I had created. But as much as I hate this chair, it was necessary to make it to help others understand how chairs should not be made. So, without further ado, here is the poorly made chair in studio.

So, where to start with fixing this chair. The obvious answer in the chair legs, although if you need help with being told how trees work, the answer is probably not obvious to you. So, lets start by looking at the chair leg itself.

The issue here is that the wood grain should be vertical on the chair legs, going from the bottom to the top of the leg, not horizontal, or wrapping around the part. Why does this matter? For 1 reason, really: because that is how it works in real life.

But why does it work like that in real life? For 2 reasons. One is related to the strength of the wood, the other is related to the cost of the wood. You see, each piece of grain represents a tree ring. For those of you that failed biology in kindergarten, each tree ring represents one year of tree growth. So lets start with the current chair legs. Using my very advanced graphical design skills, I have roughly marked out all the tree rings on this chair legs. That means that, at the least, this chair leg is from a tree that is 25 years old.

Next up I have the same chair leg, this time with the correct vertical wood grain. I have also marked as many of the wood rings as I can see, and in this case the tree has 6 rings, or is 6 years old.

That means in the time it took to grow one tree that you can get one piece of proper wood grain out of, you could grow, cut down, and replant one tree with proper wood grain 4 times. Roughly. You always loose a year or two due to bark that you have to trim off and the tree being a sapling, but even if it is 12 years vs 25, the difference is massive.

However, this difference only gets larger with bigger pieces of wood. For example, the original chair legs in Chair are 2 studs long. What if they were 4 studs long? How many years would it take to grow a tree that is 4 studs wide?

Roughly 40. Yup, to grow this piece of wood it would take 40 years. Now, how long would it take to grow a tree with proper wood grain that is 4 studs tall? It should also take 12 years, right?

Well, no. It is actually 9.

Why? It is simple. Each year, a tree grows at a relatively constant diameter. So a 100 year old tree would have a diameter of 100 centimeters, a 50 year old tree will have a diameter of 50 centimeters. However, vertical growth is not consistent. A tree may grow to 20 meters in 10 years, and then only grow 5 more over the next 100 years. The exact reason why this occurs is due to complex issues involving a trees environment, the trees root and leave system, and the complex way in which trees get water and other important building blocks from their roots to their leaves, but the fact of the matter is all tree types have a maximum height limit, but not a horizontal growth limit. So while after 100 years the second tree may not grow anymore, vertically, it will get wide each and every year.

So, why does this matter? Lets take the improper wooden leg, for example. Lets just say that the standard growth rate for trees is .1 studs per year. To get a piece of wood out of a tree trunk that is 2 studs in diameter would take 10 years when you account for the fact trees grow out on both sides. A 4 stud long board would take 20 years. 10 stud long board 50 years.

Of course, this may be hard to visualize. So here I am standing with a 10 stud long board with improper wood grain in front of a tree that has a 10 stud diameter for its trunk, which you need to get an improper piece of wood grain that size from.

Now here I am standing with a 10 stud wooden board with proper wood grain in front of a much smaller tree that you can get the entire plank from.

Yes, much smaller. So, in conclusion, you can get a much taller tree much faster than you can get a much wider tree, meaning you can grow more trees faster, meaning correct wood grain is much cheaper than improper wood grain.

So that is why it is cheaper, in real life, to use proper wood grain as opposed to improper wood grain. But what about strength? Well, to understand this you have to have a fundamental understand of material science, biology, and physics. But based on the fact that I just had to explain why bigger trees take longer to grow than smaller trees, I’m going to assume you are all dumb and explain it to you as such.

You see, trees are all made of fibers. These fibers make up the wood grain that you see, which lighter fibers that grow during the summer being much lighter than the fibers that grow during the fall/winter. This is what causes tree rings to form. As the tree constantly grows out and the seasons go by, the different colors from different seasons make the rings. But what about the fibers?

Well, the fibers mean everything. You see, the fibers themselves are very strong, but the connections between them are very weak. This is why in a single ax cut can cut through a single piece of fire wood, but to cut down a tree it can take many ax cuts. 

To think how many connections there are in wood, just think about how many tree rings there are. For the proper wood grain, there are 6 tree rings, or 6 sets of connections. Each connection is very long, going from the bottom of the board to the top, which helps improve the strength of the wood.

Now lets think of the improper wood grain. This board had 25 rings. That is 25 connections, each very short. The amount of connections and their short length makes them very weak and prone to breaking.

Ok, so enough of explaining why the wood grain in the game is wrong. How do you fix it? Well, first you give the legs proper wood grain.

Just like that.

And then you give the back proper wood grain, with the grain going from the bottom of the back rest up towards the top.

And then the seat get fixed, by having the grain go from the front to the back of the chair to help prevent the seat splitting in half between the front and back chair legs.

And then BAM, just 1500 words and a dozen images later, the wood grain on this chair is fixed. So, with how easy this chair was to fix, and with the fact the entire game just consisted of this single chair had had improper wood grain on the every surface, how do I rate the wood grain?

Well, actually the wood grain is just fine.

“But WoodReviewer, I just spent 15 minutes reading your nonsense on how how the chair had bad wood grain. How is the wood grain just fine.”

Well, you see to get a rating of not-bad from me, one of two things must occur. Either the game must have entirely correct structural wood grain, or entirely incorrect wood grain in such a way that clearly indicated that the wood is not actually real wood but some sort of weird alien wood that does not apply by our understanding of wood. So, the game much have alien wood, right?

Wrong. You see, Chair is not a game within itself. It is a part of the much larger Chair Gaming Universe, which includes such well known games as Chair and Broken Chair. Not a big universe, I know, but it is still within the same universe. And in Broken Chair we find the answers to why the wood grain in Chair is just fine. And the answers all lie in the thumbnail.

“But WoodReviewer, the chair in Broken Chair is broken.”

Yes, exactly. The chair with improper wood grain from Chair has a broken chair leg in Broken Chair. And why does the chair in Broken Chair have a broken chair leg? From the bad wood grain. You see, while the wood grain is incorrect, the game clearly shows that this is not the correct way to use wood grain, as using wood grain like this will cause the chair to eventually collapse as a result of the improper wood grain.

The fact the Chair and Broken Chair, through both game’s gameplay and non-verbal story telling tell the player that eventually, a chair with improper wood grain will collapse and fail, is the reason why Chair and Broken Chair both have correct wood grain. Because they are correct; broken wood grain will fail, and if you want a sturdy chair, proper wood grain is the correct way to go.

With all these factors taken into account, this is not just why I am giving Elttob the satisfaction of having two of the only games that I have ever reviewed to not just have no improper wood grain, but for helping me in pushing the message that improper wood grain is wrong and only proper wood grain will stand the test of time I am giving them the WoodReviewer Gold Star of Non-Suckiness.

This is a very special award that I am making up on the spot right now, and while it may not have any trophies, certificates, or anything else to present to Elttob, it is the thought that counts. Although, if more people use proper wood grain in their games, maybe this will become an actual award. If you want it to be an award, go out and prove it. Make games with proper wood grain. Show the rest of Roblox how superior you are to them with your proper wood grain.