I touched on this in an earlier post but thought the subject deserved a little more dedicated attention and pictures.

Vinyl printing for mat and tiles have worked. I also tried Flag material when Pixelartprint ran a sale on that medium a while ago. I’m sharing the results here by way of a comparison and my view that they are ‘not as effective’ as vinyl printing was.

Flag Material Wargame Mat: Desert

Not sure why I placed some mounted terrain tiles on the left side of the mat for this pic. I think I was checking the colour match and possibly how it would look if ‘elevated’ terrain.

A Battle Systems portal.

Flag Material Wargame Mat: Frostgrave Themed Winter Mat

I won’t be bothering with Flag material again for this type of application. As previously mentioned they are:

• cheap
• light-weight, perhaps too light, but light enough that hills etc can be placed with some effect underneath
• slightly transparent, which also means a loss in vibrancy of colour and saturation
• as you can see from some of the closer images, there is a pattern to the fabric but to be honest, this is not really visible in situ and not really a deal breaker for me

They are fit for purpose but not as good as vinyl. The placing of terrain ‘under’ the mat would have been a winner but the fabric does not have the weight or  flexibility to properly conform to the shape underneath without creating too much creasing around the object.

The Frostgrave themed mat above has a white towel placed underneath it to counteract the transparent nature of the material. This works, but defeats the purpose if you need to carry around both the mat and the towel!

The eagle-eyed of you will have notice a couple of other experiments cropping up in the Frostgave pics.

First off is ‘re-scaling’ the rather great Fortified Manor House from Games Workshop by creating a new door insert more in scale with 15mm rather than the intended 28mm. This ‘cloaking’ method works well I think on certain terrain items which, whilst rather large, now look intentionally large. (See below for the same idea applied to some Necromunda terrain – pic from a ‘coming soon’ post that needs more photos taken.)

The other tester was the magnetic movement base (last pic on Frostgrave mat gallery). Concept works and I’ve since modified and finalised a size and material mix that works for me.