best battlemat?

[paulewaug]

I use a dry-erase battle map. My wife found one with a permanent 1" grid on it, when she comes home, I will see if I can find out where it came from.

It is 4' X 3', and I will never look back. I had the battle map for a while, but this thing really is the best I've seen.
Aluvial

Hey Aluvial, I would be interested in finding out where she got this.

I have used one of the battle mats, I think it was the chessex, the one that is 2 sided, and personally, I found the wet erase to be a pain. The mat smelled funny (rubbey, I guess) and sometimes it was kind of hard to clean up.
Mostly though we use Huge pads of paper with 1" squares on it and I was looking for something to save on paper. But I ended up using at least as much papaer in paper towels as using the pad so that didn't help. Tried a spunge and it just got nasty quick.

So I would really like to have a dry erase board, for me it would be great and worth the $$. And it looks like a good size-
Thanks!

 

[anonystu]

I like the Dragon Mat from Dragon Scale Counters (here ), or specfically, I have about five.

They're dirt cheap ($2.00), and are basically dry-erase mats that are the size of a sheet of paper (but much sturdier). While you sacrifice something for large-scale battles (but you can always have a large battlemap), but there's something really cool about the preparation it allows you: you can draw out whatever situation the PC's are in, and then, flip it over, and instant map!

I like the flow this offers a lot more than I need sprawling battlemaps, but the cool thing is that if there is a sprawling battle coming up, I can just keep that on the battlemap, because it doesn't see much use.

 

[Kichwas]

It's not quite as bad as you make it out to be. All it leaves behind is a thin section at the very end of the book, after the index. It's no different than tearing out the registration cards they stick in their books. If you tear out the cards, tearing out the mat is no different.

I don't tear out registration cards... that leaves rips behind.

It's not only as bad as I make it out, it's worse.

As for the counters, wasted pages for me. Hopefully they'll put up a PDF of them at some point.

 

[buzz]

Hey Aluvial, I would be interested in finding out where she got this.

I dunno aout Aluvial, but you can get dry-erase 1" gridded boards here.

You can also go nuts and get wall-mounted magnetic boards here. Or there's even clear grid and hex plexi boards with risers over here.

I was using a gridded flip chart for a while. Yeah, you waste paper, but you can also draw out maps in advance and not worry about "burn-in". I gave in and bought a Chessex battlemat eventually.

 

[paulewaug]

hey buzz

hhmmm...those DeeMer plexi boards look interesting.
I might have to check them out, thanks for the heads up!