PWork Wargames Explore A Lifeless Land With New Mat

April 22, 2020 by brennon

PWork Wargames has been showing off a new mat design for those looking to battle it out in a toxic landscape. The Lifeless Land mat seems like the perfect place for a deadly showdown between alien armies in your Sci-Fi games.

The mat features a cracked and broken landscape where perhaps once green and verdant lands have now been taken over by blackened soil and foetid ponds of bubbling sludge. Could the previous owners of this land have ruined it with the fires of industry or was it always like this, a dead land which is inhospitable but yet rich with resources for the taking.

There are many different ways you can snap up this mat dependant on the kind of games you're looking to play. It works for larger scale battles through to small skirmishes over important objectives. I like that they've managed to maintain a lot of the cool details of the mat throughout the various versions so you don't feel like you're missing out.

Much like with other mats, this immediately gets you thinking about the narrative on the battlefield. You could make those toxic rivers and pools deadly terrain which strips flesh from bone for example. Also, the layout means that at larger sizes you could even build a facility about that central river/stream which could be harvesting its resources.

You can see a couple of examples of set-ups in the images below...

It would probably be quite good for those playing games like Kill Team, especially if you went down the route of trying to protect/attack research facilities and resource harvesters.

You could, of course, take mats like this from across the PWork Wargames collection and use them as ways to show what worlds you're fighting on during a campaign. Break out the appropriate mats and the players will know exactly what they're fighting for!

What do you make of this Lifeless Land and how would you use it in your games?