Review: The Giant Book of Cyberpunk Battlemats

In a Nutshell: What it says on the tin. 62 pages of cyberpunk battlemats, each 12" x 17", spiral bound. Seconds available here from Loke Battlemats for £20 plus postage, full price £42.

Intentionality: Okay, now I'm off the reservation; another New Year resolution bites the dust. It was the discount wot dun it.

What You Get

Well, lots of big battlemats with a cyberpunk theme. Here are some pictures with eM-4 and Copplestone Castings figures for scale. As you can see, they're set up to use as double-page spreads, 24" x 17", and like other Loke books, you can lay them out next to each other for even bigger layouts.

Heroes vs Zombies in Stuffer Shack. (These mats are for cyberpunk, of course it's Stuffer Shack.)

The Usual Suspects in a meeting engagement with a high elf noble and his entourage. Gate, anyone?

Cori and Arion meet the patron at a quiet pavement cafe. What could go wrong? Well, how long have you got, because I may need to prioritise...

As befits the theme, most of the mats are urban scenes, though there are some outdoorsy spreads and some ruins, giving it some utility not just for SF, cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic games, but - to a limited extent - fantasy ones as well.

The maps are plasticised so you can use dry-wipe markers on them, and include a couple of plain grids for that when the pre-drawn ones aren't quite what you need.

What I Think

I've been using Loke's stuff on VTT for a long time, but this year I'm really missing the tactile feel of combat with figures on a table. I'd love to use terrain, but I've nowhere to store it, and the time it takes to set up and knock down is too big a fraction of the slots I have.

So battlemats are a good compromise, especially ones that come spiral bound in a big book so I don't have to hunt through my gaming cupboard for them. And I have a clear favourite among producers of battlemats, which is Loke. I probably won't use markers on them, since I tend to start with a map and build the scenario around it, but the thick, laminated card makes the mats very sturdy, and I expect to get a lot of use out of them.

Seconds, like the one I bought, come with no shrink-wrap and some slight wear and tear, but I figured it would be no worse than I'd do to it myself in a couple of sessions. When the book arrived, it proved to have a missing page and others bound in the wrong order, but when I contacted Loke to check if that was covered by the description of 'seconds', they immediately offered to replace it at no extra cost, so props for service there; they didn't need to do that - I'd bought it as imperfect, after all - though I'm very pleased they did.

Looking at the size and heft of the book, I made a mental note to be careful with it, especially when folding it back on itself to use single pages; spiral wire binding is the best option for a book you want to open flat, but my past experience with similar products is that the wires tend to bend over time if you're not careful with them, which can damage the pages. You can usually manage to get them back into place, though.

I'll continue to use the VTT versions of the maps for group games, and realistically this impulse buy will only be used for the occasional solo game; but as my father often said, there's no pockets in a shroud. Expect to see these lovely battlemats in future solo writeups.