Alternatives to Dungeon Tiles?

[Haltherrion]

There is gaming paper.

Gaming Paper

I've been thinking on and off about using it. I might give it a try in a bit.

We started using square-ruled flip-chart paper. Pretty cheap and if you roll up the old ones, can always go back to that map if there is some back and forth in your travel. It also lets the ref draw things up ahead of time.

We used dry-erase mats for years. Those are fine but we've come to like the paper better- it marks better and cleaning those old mats as they age gets challenging. For a while we tried a semi-rigid white board (a white board on foam backing for hanging in a cube that we laid flat). We ruled it with permanent markers. Aside from my cat taking a perculiar liking to chewing on the edges of the board, it worked fine too but had the same issues as the mat with the added headache that the "permanent" ruling would wipe off in time.

I think we will stick with the paper pads for now; they seem to work best. Plus, being in paper, you can also draw and make notes in pencil for finer detail than dry-erase pens. We usually have someone keep the initiative track in pencil on it for instance.

 

[Mercurius]

The frustrating thing is that I finally decided upon what I want to get, but no one is making them anymore! Namely, Tact-Tiles or Battle Graph Dry Erase Boards. Anyone know if these are going to be produced again?

Barring that I'll have to "settle" for a Chessex Battlemat, which looks good enough, just not quite as good.

 

[madwabbit]

Original Tact-Tiles up for auction here.

 

[Argyle King]

One thing you could try doing is just getting a big dry erase board and doing away with the grid completely. You can draw whatever terrain you want with whatever shapes you want without worrying about fitting everything into squares. Movement can be done using a few cheap rulers bought from WalMart or wargame measuring sticks; either way, 1 inch is still a square.

One thing that will change is that burts effects become spheres instead of squares, but that's easy to judge because -again- 1 inch is still 1 square, so you just measure from the origin in each direction. After a while you can eyeball it without too much effort.

In my experience, wet erase markers actually work better than dry erase because you don't have to worry so much about accidentally rubbing off some of the terrain while moving minis.