Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is the mat that you buy and then take with you to any RPG session you attend, unless someone there already owns one. You draw on it, set tiles on it, play with miniatures or tokens, roll it up and put it away. You practically forget it's an essential part of your DM stuff collection, until the day you've left it at home by mistake. Over a decade later, you realize it has survived more abuse and wear than every piece of furniture in your house. It's easy to forget to write a glowing review of a product that isn't terribly flashy and stays with you forever and ever -- if I wasn't about to buy a second one of these to permanently install on a table, I wouldn't have thought to pop in here and 5-star it either. Granted, it's just a vinyl mat with squares and hex-marks. But this is exactly everything you could possibly want from a vinyl mat with squares and hex-marks. The alternatives for sale (notably including products by the sorta awful "Role 4 Initiative") are just overpriced big sheets of laminated paper, which sound nice at first (you can use Sharpies!) but tend to crinkle when rolled up (and will never ever lay flat again). Rather than buy a $20 gigantic laminate that Kinko's could probably create for a third the cost, buy this mat. And if you remember to, years and years later, come back and write a 5-star review about how durable and useful it was. :) (Oh, and in the event of stains, just google for how to clean vinyl. We've cleaned a wider variety of gunk off this mat than it would be possible to clean out of carpet. Soda, condiments, dust from bags of chips, blood from a nosebleed, permanent marker, glue, paint used to paint miniatures, paint used to paint walls, coffee, and a million things I'm forgetting. I've heard of people throwing their mats away over accidental Sharpie use -- don't! trust the google! it's recoverable!) Chessex also makes a larger version of this mat, in case you want to have longbow fights. I think a larger mat would just be more cumbersome.