Printed map or blank grid?
Two quite different products are sold under the name battle mat, and buying the wrong one is the most common mistake in this whole category. We only sell one of the two, and for most people it is not the one you want.
The short version
A blank grid mat is a surface you draw on. Plain squares, no artwork, and you sketch the room with a wet- or dry-erase pen as the party discovers it. One mat, every location you will ever run.
A printed mat has the place already on it. A tavern, a crypt, a forest. You unroll it and the room is there. It cannot become a different room.
If you are buying your first one, buy the blank. We sell printed, and we would still tell you that. One blank mat covers every session you will ever run. A printed mat covers one kind of scene beautifully and nothing else.
1. Why one name covers two products
Both are rubber mats with a one-inch grid, both are about the size of a coffee table, and both are sold by typing battle mat into a search box. That is where the similarity stops. One is a whiteboard; the other is a poster you can put dice on.
The confusion is not the buyer’s fault. Shops on both sides of it use the same three words, and the photographs look alike at thumbnail size — a grid, a table, some miniatures. You often cannot tell which you are looking at until it arrives.
2. What the blank one is good at
It is a whiteboard for maps. The grid is printed; everything else is you, in the moment, with a marker.
- One mat is every location. A corridor, a ship, a market square, whatever the party walks into next.
- It handles the unplanned. When they go the way you did not prepare for, you can draw that too.
- It is cheaper per session in the only sense that matters: you buy it once and it does everything.
The costs are real too. You have to draw — badly, quickly, while six people watch. Wet-erase ink needs a damp cloth and a minute of drying. And a hand-drawn room looks like a hand-drawn room, which some tables love and some do not.
If you run a long campaign and improvise, this is the right purchase and the rest of this page is not for you.
3. What the printed one is good at
It does one thing the blank cannot: the room is already there, in full colour, at the moment you unroll it. Nobody waits while you draw. Nobody has to be told that the wobbly rectangle is a bar.
- Set-up is nothing. Unroll, put the minis down, start.
- It carries atmosphere the marker cannot. Wet stone, spilled ale, ice. That is most of what people are buying.
- It is good for a scene you will run more than once — a home base, a tavern the party keeps coming back to, a one-shot you take to conventions.
And the cost is exactly as blunt: one mat is one place. If the party leaves the tavern, the tavern mat is finished for the evening. People who own printed mats own several, and that is the honest shape of it.
4. Telling them apart in a listing
Five seconds, and it works on any shop including ours.
- “Wet erase”, “dry erase”, “markers included” — blank. Those words only make sense on a surface you draw on.
- “Double-sided” — almost always blank: squares on one face, hexes on the other.
- A named place in the product title — printed. Nobody names a blank mat after a crypt.
- Photographs with no artwork under the miniatures — blank, and the photo is telling you the truth.
One more, worth knowing whichever you buy: check the grid. Ten squares should measure 254 mm, because an inch is 25.4 mm and not 25. A great many mats measure 250. Print our strip and check yours — it takes ten seconds and works on a mat from anyone.
5. Which one we sell
Printed. Five scenes, one per mat, 40 × 70 cm of rubber with a stitched fabric edge, gridded at a true inch — 27.56 squares along the long side, which is why the outer column is a partial square and why that had to be so.
So do not buy ours as your only mat, and we would rather say it here than have you work it out afterwards. A printed mat is a second purchase, or a first one if you already know which scene you keep coming back to. If you run a campaign and improvise, a blank mat from anyone will serve you better than anything on our shop page, and that is not modesty — it is the shape of the two products.
When ours is the right one, it is here: printed after you order, with delivery in 10–19 days. Shipping and import VAT are included. Other duties or courier fees may apply at delivery depending on the destination. Everything we know and do not know about it, including what we have checked on our first sample, is on the product section of our terms.
Questions before you buy anything, from us or anyone else: hello@mapwyrm.com. We will tell you to buy the blank one if that is the answer.