My major issue around roleplaying with miniatures is storage space. You need room for the minis themselves, you need room for the maps, and if you use terrain, well, forget about it. As a player I’ll still buy and paint minis for characters if it promises to be a long-running campaign. As a gamemaster, if I use miniatures at all I stick to printable paper minis.
Battlemats, frankly, have always been a pain. You can roll them up, sure, but then you have this floppy thing to try to store somewhere out of the way. Not a convenient size. I took to just putting a full-sized dry erase board on the table and using a ruler or tape measure to gauge distance rather than sweat drawing 1″ hexes. At least the dry erase board could be stashed under the bed or behind the sofa. It’s not exactly a portable solution, though, if you’re running a game at a friend’s house or a con.
Back in the 1990s, I somehow inherited a boxed set of Warhammer Fantasy dungeon tiles. Loved them to death. Arrange them as I wanted, make dungeons, awesome. The idea later caught on, and is pretty much standard 4e gear. The problem I have is, unless you really like buying a kajillion different sets of different sorts of locations and terrain, you’re either stuck with what you’ve got or you ignore what’s printed on the tiles. Dungeon tiles are pretty, to be sure, but they lack the generic flexibility of dry-erase mats.
So along comes Longtooth Studios with Battle Boards, aka Battle Graph Dry Erase Tiles. For around $25 you get four 11″ square dry-erase puzzle pieces, with 1″ squares already on them. They’re good, sturdy press board, and can be assembled any way you need them. They’re blank white, so draw on ‘em to your heart’s content and make your own maps. Buy more sets, snap ‘em together and make bigger maps. Easy to store on a shelf between game books. Easy to keep in your bag for travel (although a little heavy, but four tiles aren’t as heavy as your average hardcover game book so not a huge deal). The brilliance lies in the simplicity. Such a basic idea. Genius.
My big concern was cleaning them. Back in the day, we’d spend weeks delving into a single dungeon, so the marker lines would stay on the battle mats and leave stains. Faint, faded color that soaked in and would never, ever come off. Not a huge deal, I’m not THAT anal or OCD, but mildly annoying. To test the Battle Boards, I scrawled on them and left them sit in my hot apartment for a few days before trying to wipe the marks off with a paper towel. The marks came right off! Clean as a whistle. I have high confidence that standard dry-erase care (using dry erase cleaner or isopropyl alcohol) would work just fine if you had some residue. Good quality stuff, here. Recommended as a solution for gamemasters on the go, or with limited home storage for game accessories.
Full Disclosure: A rep from Longtooth emailed me a couple of weeks ago and asked it I would like to review this product. It’s up for an ENnie for Best Accessory, and they want to get the work out. They took the time to write me a nice email, and spared the expense to ship me a physical copy of the product via Priority Mail, so I bumped them to the top of my list. Of course, as per usual, if I thought the product sucked I wouldn’t review it at all, and if I had issues I’d tell you. Sending me a freebie didn’t influence my review at all, but my liking the product does make me want to get the word out and support their bid for an ENnie.
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