Gaming Mats

Continuing my lockdown policy of Pay Now, Play Later...

In recent years, more and more companies have been producing gaming mats with very detailed images printed on vinyl, cloth and (best of all I think) mousemat.  I keep coming back to them and had been looking recently at Deep Cut Studios.

They provide a custom service where you can provide the images for them to print.  I was interested in a set of 2x2 feet gaming mats for DBA, Perilous Tales and other 28mm skirmish games.  They aren't cheap but then I had a cunning idea.  How about ordering a double-sided 6x4 feet mat and cutting it up myself?

I bought 12 very high resolution gameboard images from DriveThruRPG and then stitched them together using an open source graphics package into two images with 6 maps each.

This was uploaded to Deep Cut and in just over a week my double-sided mat had been printed in Lithuania and delivered to the UK.

Inevitably (and in fairness, as warned by Deep Cut) the two images didn't precisely line up so when the mats were cut (by my expert resident fabric wrangler) there was a little bit of wastage - but to all intents and purposes, I now have a set of twelve 2x2 feet mats for a range of scenarios.

I have (left to right, top then bottom) Lonely Road, Badlands, Snow Field, Wasteland, Desert Outcrop and River Valley.

Plus Borderlands, Ice Wastes, Cobblestones, Deep Desert, Lowland Plain and Highlands.

I'm really pleased with the quality of the printing and definition of the images (the photos above don't really do them justice) and this approach was less than half the price of ordering them as pre-cut 2x2 mats.