APG Paper Tiles

Game: APG Paper Tiles
Publisher: Alea Publishing Group
Series: generic
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 5th, December 2004
Reviewer’s Rating: 6/10   [ On the ball ]
Total Score: 6
Average Score: 6.00

Alea Publishing Group’s paper tiles are a simple animal with a simple purpose in life. We have full-colour cartography (and a black and white one to be kinder on the printer).

Unlike other similar products in this market place, APG Paper Tiles doesn’t try to provide value for money (US $5) by giving us a wide selection of floor plans. Instead, APG Paper Tiles (and this is volume 1) APG provides one basic template and offers slight modifications on it such as where the doorway is or whether the floor is stone paving or wooden tiles.

The idea, I think, is that you can more easily stack these titles together to create large rooms and straight forward but homogeneous dungeons/castles.

There are add-on tiles too; barrels, fur, benches and piles of gold which would be common in almost every fantasy RPG. There are generally several similar tiles side by side on the same PDF page; rows of barrels of many separate piles of gold. Although this makes it easier to print out many tiles in one go I think it’s a bit of a waste of PDF space.

It’s easy enough to copy a single barrel to a paint package and duplicate it many times. If you don’t have any graphics software (and there’s one free with Windows) then you’ll still have to print out other decoration tiles which you may not use.

The cartography is good. Alea is primarily a d20 company and so it’s no surprise that the maps you’ll make with these tiles are suitable for D&D – these are square tiles.

The illustration quality makes the APG Paper Tiles (and similar products) desirable. Unless you’re an artist and unless you’re an artist with an eye for mapwork the chances are high that you can’t do better yourself. These tiles remind me of the quality and style of computer roleplaying games these days.

This is the first in Alea’s range but there are others including a futuristic set. When making the decision to buy an electronic cartography tile set its crucial to know how well the line is supported. Unless you’re buying tiles for one specific battle or encounter then you’ll need tiles for other encounters too.

The problem in using the tiles for one climactic encounter is that it sign-posts the significance of the fight to the players (or lack of significance if you don’t use them which is probably more important). If you use the tiles often, a natural desire, then you’ll quickly need some variation. It’s this variation which is APG Paper Tiles (volume 1)’s, Achilles Heel.

This set seems a little samey. There’s not quite enough variation here to suggest to me that APG Paper Tiles has legs. This is a concern which will ease as Alea publish more tiles but it’s a valid problem now. The fourth PDF in the download set (there are four PDFs in APG Paper Tiles) is the Treasure Room.

The Treasure Room illustrates how the tiles in the set can be put together. It’s a large square room with piles of gold in it. As mentioned above the add-ons include piles of gold and the tiles here will go together to form a room. “Treasure Room” would have been a suitable alternative title for the whole product.

The other PDF in the set, the first of the four, is a pictorial index. Handy when you want to confirm that the tile you’re after is actually in this product.

One of APG Paper Tiles Vol 1’s biggest selling points is the price. Other similar cartography products cost a little more than the $5 (an on occasion twice as much).

Alea is a little hindered by being one of the latecomers to the electronic cartography marketplace. I have to wonder whether other publishers have the market tied up or if Alea can get a foothold.

At this point, it takes a little something to stand out from the ground and whereas the APG Paper Tiles get all the basic rules right and have a stable core offering there’s nothing here that really causes me to sit up and take notice.

I do hope there are more tiles from Alea. Products like the Paper Tiles get better as the series expands and the cartography options grow.