Kickstarter Fielding Cigar Box Battle Mats For Your Tabletops
September 26, 2019 by avernos
Cigar Box Battle are currently on Kickstarter with a campaign to bring a new type of mat to peoples tabletops. Cigar Box Battle mats have previously produced mats in two materials a fleece and a plush fleece.
The designs are printed crisply on the fabric and they have a pleasing texture especially the plush that gives depth to the mat allowing terrain and miniatures to sink into the fabric giving a lovely realism to your battlefields.
The new fabric that they're calling Premium Satin, allows for even sharper detail as you can see from the stretch goal Jungle mat here that sharpness will be required as Cigar Box Battle have strived to improve on their designs from year to year, and this Kickstarter is no different.
Another nice feature of the mats is that this campaign will allow you to choose almost any combination of mats to print double-sided. I said almost because having a dark city or forested mat on the reverse of a white snowscape isn't possible, but pretty much everything else is doable. This essentially lets you pick up two mats at a reduced cost to buying them separately and saves on space. I think this is a great idea and use the reverse for mats I wouldn't use often like space or ocean mats.
Cigar Box Battle have a wide range of mat designs already available in various scales over 80 currently with more to come hopefully during the campaign. From Grand Tactical scale mats of Waterloo or Stalingrad, to 28 mm versions of American Civil War battlefields or just generic mats to play your games on.
My favourite aspect of the mats is that they are made larger than the advertised size to allow realistic contours on your tabletop. Simply put some foam hills, books or even a rolled up jumper underneath and get beautiful rolling plains to play around instead of the usual set on terrain pieces.
You could even stick a hill under this island to raise it up for games of Blood and Plunder or Pacific world war 2 games and get a real feeling for assaulting up a beach.
Do you think Cigar Box Battle are outstanding in their field?
"My favourite aspect of the mats is that they are made larger than the advertised size to allow realistic contours on your tabletop..."
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Look great and I could go back to using books for hills under the mat!
Books for hills… I remember those days with Warhammer Fantasy Battles 2nd edition…
It’s amazing and looks great…I have 6 mats from them already
I’m a bit matted out at the moment…. old school GW 6×4 green, X-Wing, Frostgrave, desert, countryside, dungeon and two sets of TT Combat MDF (painted for snow and underdark) and the water one from Dreadfleet.
I think they have made it to easy for themselves with some of the 28mm versions. Simply making roads wider and leaving everything else as is makes the maps look wrong. For example the palm tree jungle. or the one with the fields on it.
I see what you mean. But once other terrain is on you don’t notice that so much. In fact until you pointed it out I hadn’t noticed and I have quite a few from many years now. So game wise it’s not as bad as you think
It’s one of those “once seen it can’t be unseen” things… it would bug the hole time… But to everyone his/her/its own. 🙂
they are looking good.
Are Cigar Box Battle outstanding in their field? …. no. It’s a particular style that some might really like these aren’t the “best” mats around though. The variety looks good on first glance, but some are so specific their reuse value is minimal. How often would anyone use the Stalingrad map in that scale?