I recently went to my local Ollie's and was able to get in on the $3 campaign cases. I'm traditionally a theater of the mind player, but this weekend I'll be breaking out the grid for the first time!
To go along with that I nabbed the Dungeon Kit DM's screen off of Amazon for $15.
These are all pretty nice products. It's kind of weird because it's all half and half. For instance in the campaign cases. The tiles, and the monster chits are all really nice. The idea of the clings is weird however. I'm not sure if I'll bother with any of the terrain clings, they do not look good at all. I'll see how the monster ones work out. They are just reused art from the books, but seem to be better quality than the terrain clings.
The Dungeon Kit is also a mixed bag of quality. The screen is really nice. I mainly wanted a shorter screen so I'd be able to more easily reach over it to tend to the board. I really like the art on the player's side. It came with a bunch of cards to randomly generate dungeons, and I don't think I'd ever use them. For one thing I like drawing dungeons, and if I wasn't going to make my own I'd probably opt for DonJon or something instead. The status cards could be nice for my players, and let's see if I ever remember that I own them! It came with a nice little dry erase grid you can draw on. I can see it being nice for note keeping, tracking initiative, things like that. I don't see myself drawing dungeons on it however. It's a single, 100 square grid, and you only get one of them. Perhaps it will be nice to draw out a single room. You could play on it, I think. I'll probably just use it for notes. I would have preferred a couple more of these instead of the cards.
So these products are really strange. At their cores they are really nice. The screen, the tiles, the chits. But a lot of the stuff that comes with them feels half-assed. Like they needed to have more crap to justify the MSRPs they tried charging. The cases for instance retailed for $60, which is wild! At $20-$25.. Even $29.99 these would be reasonable. The Dungeon Kit, I think had an MSRP of $25 which is much more reasonable, but I think it would have been a way better value had they cut out all the superfluous cards and add-ons and just sold a nice, high quality screen on it's own, at a lower MSRP of $10-$15.
I mean, it ultimately works out for me, as I get ~$150 worth of product for ~$20. But this in turn is going to look like massive failures by WOTC/HASBRO and probably prevent them from trying again with products like these in the future. They really just need to focus on simpler, high quality products, and allow them to stand on their own rather than trying to pack in a bunch of "added value" to justify stupid prices.
In addition to the WOTC stuff, I also recently purchased Creature Codex by Kobold Press(I got the pocket edition+ PDF bundle) and the EnWorld LevelUp5E Monster book(In PDF). I haven't gotten a chance to use either of them yet, but I'm impressed by the quality of each, and I'm looking forward to incorporate these new critters into my games.