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Playing miniature wargames used to be all about textured boards and fluffy static grass mats. These days there’s a variety of alternatives, the best of which is in my opinion a proper gaming mat. Gaming mats look great, they’re durable, easy to store and most importantly offer a wide spectrum of themes to improve the gameplay experience. When it comes to gaming mats there’s a few clear leaders in the market, but my favorite is the Playmats – a well established Polish brand of gaming accessories and Battle Mats for wargames. For years now I have been a faithful customer, improving my wargaming experience with Playmats, be it with their original designs or via commissioning them to produce items to my personalized specifications. This review is less of a classic price/quality/etc. and more of a product-focus. As it happens the Playmats just released a Battle Mat produced in association with yours truly. A great opportunity to present to you my own idea realized as a fully fledged product of a well known company.
The product in question is the “No Man’s Land” mat for wargames. The idea behind the mat is to provide a ravaged trenchline background for a desolated battlefield, so that any configuration of so-called trench-hills will fit, regardless of setup. The inspiration came out of nowhere when I was making a new Trench Crusade gaming board and weighted my options between fully 3D modelled, plank covered ‘ground floor’ and a standard battlefield type gaming mat. Modelling floor tiles is a tedious task that limits setup options for scenery, whereas for a gaming mat – there was just no design of what I had in mind anywhere out there. Most gaming mats are designed to look good as standalone products and are not necessarily treated as a background for a full scenery set – I figured to pitch my idea to Playmats and to my surprise they took it in with an open mind.
I will skip the entire design process and focus on the finished thing instead. The gaming mat I got is a standard 48×48″ (122x122cm), one sided print on a rubber pad. I have many Playmats products already so to no surprise the quality is very good, with strong and vibrant colors, smooth cutting lines and perfect rubber pad to print adhesion. The final design is very much to my liking, full of messed up trench floor, ideal to stick out from beneath trench-hills.
The No Man’s Land comes in a variety of sizes and as such it fits a variety of games, including Trench Crusade (like in my case), but also an Imperial Guard themed board for Warhammer 40,000/Kill-Team or a cool Warzone trench line. I am very happy with the results.
For the record: I do not earn any affiliation based returns from the sales of this product. Now that I have a cool No Man’s Land gaming mat of my own, I have no further horses in this race, if you catch my drift. I’m here spreading the hobby love because I do appreciate Playmats eagerness to release my idea, not to forget the great quality of all the cool stuff they delivered throughout the years. At this point I am a fan of theirs for life!
This and other Playmats products are available at Playmats.eu or Playmaty.pl for all of you – Polish friends.
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