





Today I’d like to do something that I normally never get to do; look at a modern product! I am a legendary tightwad when it comes to gaming. I’ve got two children who are very skilled at discovering new and innovative ways of disposing of cash as efficiently as possible; and with my current game, I was already over-budget. Whenever one turns the printer on it costs money, and I printed a lot of stuff! But there was one thing that I couldn’t print myself; I wanted a big hexmap to act as a game board. It needed to be big enough for all of us to see, and we’ll be using it for a while. Creating a DM wilderness map is easy as dropping toast butter-side down, but copying the wilderness map over to another medium is not!





Traditional vinyl gaming mats are great products, however you’ve got to take care of them, and I fear staining those things, so I always keep them clean. Thus, using a vinyl-hex map is not an option. I’ve even got my homemade jobby, which is easy as heck to keep clean, however I’ve also got 2 cats that love playing all of those tabletop strategy games, including AD&D, and they are very good at it! They can wipe out entire nations and still have time for a nap. Armies that take us months to defeat are of no challenge to the cats. Sometimes you want something that is permanent, and of a size that you can’t print, but Gamingpaper.com has a magnificent invention, selling 1” Hex paper by the roll! Maybe you noticed that I added the link to my sidebar? I highly recommend this product!





First off, this stuff is cheap: Including Shipping & Handling, I only spent $9. It is 30”x 4’, which is a lot of hex paper! 30 hexs is exactly the bottom width of the hex paper I typically print off myself, thus I can get lots of maps out of this stuff, which I really wasn’t expecting, I thought that I’d have to cut the stuff to size.





The paper itself is exactly like wrapping paper, it has a waxy kind of coating which improves it. You can use whatever you want to draw on it, I used your everyday Crayola wash-able Magic Markers, the ink dried fairly quickly, and I put it on pretty thick. The color stayed where I put it and didn’t bleed, I did have to use a clean cloth to protect what I had done from my wrist while coloring, but that is normal whenever you are working with markers; the clean cloth stayed clean, and didn’t damage the drawing in any way, even dark colors were set and dry in under 10 minutes. The colors didn’t bleed through the paper, which really impressed me, I was worried about staining my workspace (which has happened more often that I’d like to admit too), I even used a permanent red Sharpie to highlight a road and the ink didn’t bleed out or through the paper which is amazing.





Taken with my crummy camera

Folks have complained that if you use dry erase marker, you can’t fill in, but regular magic markers worked perfectly. I have it hung up on my big dry erase board, to keep it safe; like wrapping paper it tears and wrinkles really easy.





I was also surprised how easy it was to keep flat. I just used some dice boxes to keep the paper in place, and a few times I had to reach over wet ink and just touch the paper with the marker and the paper stayed in place. It allowed me to work as fast as I could without having to worry about anything and could focus on accurately copying my map over to it.



