Game: Skirmish Tiles, Castle System: upper level
Publisher: 0one Roleplaying Games
Series: generic
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 23rd, August 2004
Reviewer’s Rating: 7/10 [ Good ]
Total Score: 12
Average Score: 6.00
Ha-ah! There’s an unexpected twist here in 0one Roleplaying Games’ fantastic Skirmish Tiles, Castle System: upper level.
First off I think 0one Roleplaying Games are the best cartographers out there at this point of time (it could all change). There are a few very good cartographers, people and companies like Darkfuries as well but 0one have a steady, trustworthy, release schedule and so you can be sure that there will be great support for the style of cartography you buy into. This castle system tile set is for the upper level of a castle and there’s already a second level. You went get stuck with a few good looking tiles that don’t fit with anything else you’ve got.
0one Roleplaying Games’ battlemaps tend to have three styles for every single piece of cartography; full colour, greyscale and wire frames. Skirmish tiles loose the wire frame (simple line drawings) and stick with just the greyscale and colour. The colour tiles are super impressive. They’ll kill your printer though. You need to have a good and economic colour printer to do justice to the potential to the product. The greyscale will churn ink too but at least it’s manageable.
There are 25 tiles here and they’re great ones for having a skirmish on. The “upper level” of a castle is the flat rooftop. You have the parapets and edges of a tower top. If you put four edges together (one with each orientation) you’ll end up with a small tower top in which to fight. There are drawbridge tiles and some “event” tiles too such as wells and coils of chain. I imagine countless parties have battled infinite numbers of invade orcs in arenas like this one.
Oone have gone one step further with this product. In previous Master Accessory PDFs you’ve been able to click on a visual index (thumbnails of each tile) and jump straight to the one you want to print off. You can still do that on this one. You can take one huge step further though. In Skirmish Tiles, Castle System: upper level you have large empty grids. It’s possible to click on any one of the squares in the grid and then on the thumbnail index – this puts a copy of the tile in that place on the grid. Repeat the process and you can build up a castle plan of your own. Accompanying this battlemap grid there’s a reference grid. Write your notes on the reference grid. Then as part of the PDF itself there are compile and print options for the reference grid (do it first) and then the battlegrid. This links the two and you print out the referenced tiles you need to build your newly created castle top.
This is a great feature. It lets you experiment with your castle design before you print off any ink hungry tiles. It also works as planned in that it easier to orchestrate a fully documented map.
The weakness is in this set of skirmish tiles is shown up by the powerful preview feature. I wanted to design a castle with two sections. It’s not possible. All you can do here is design square or rectangle castles. If you’re willing to settle for an un-parapeted section then I can kinda hack together the castle design (which isn’t so unusual) but I’m not willing make that sacrifice.
This set of skirmish tiles currently goes for less than US$7. I think that’s impressive value – even without the powerful preview and print feature.
I’m a bit disappointed that the castle shape has to be so regular but overall this is a solid product and one for the shopping cart.
