X-Wing Custom Play Mats

I’ve teased a few times about playing “Heroes of the Aturi Cluster,” a fan-made expansion for the X-Wing Miniatures Game from Fantasy Flight. Heroes is played with standard ships and play mats (but custom terrain) and supports up to six players. When we played through the first time, we found some of the missions got really crowded! It felt just like driving in rush hour traffic. 😆

We decided to start “Battlestar Pallas” a few months ago. This campaign uses the same framework as Heroes but features a serial story played out over three seasons. (Rebel pilots break out of jail and steal an Imperial Assault Carrier! How much fun is that!) The Pallas campaign only goes up to four players because that’s how many docking clamps the Gozanti offers. However, there are folks that feel the campaign scales quite nicely up beyond four, so we decided to jump in with everybody and give it a go.

It was rush-hour traffic on steroids.

There were way too many TIE Fighters…too many ships in general. It felt like there was more bumping than shooting. After the first few missions our group sat down and talked it through and came up with a couple of ideas to streamline the game. First, use fewer ships than called for by the mission parameters, but upgrade them. (They’re not necessarily Elite, just upgraded.) Second, I put two 3’x3′ play mats together and “fenced off” an extra foot of play area by laying out range rulers. That gave us a 3’x4′ play area.

Both helped. But I had been looking for an excuse to print a custom play mat, and now I had one. 😎 I had been looking at Inked Gaming for this for a while, and it was time to take the plunge. They have some awesome looking 4×4 play mats, but I wanted something unique.

Next stop: Hubble Space Telescope. I went to their site and looked at nebulae, planets, star fields, whatever they had I looked at. My plan was to find a star field that I could use and then a second more interesting / colorful image to use for the second mat. (Yes, I was going to order two. I wanted mats of epic-ness!) I found some fantastic images! The problem was, I couldn’t find two that looked good next to each other. Frustrating, but that’s what happens when you have a vision and can’t execute it. <sigh>

Then I found a very wide image that had enough bits (pixels) to create two mats! Here was my solution! I could take this large image and cut it in half and ask Inked Gaming to print each half on a separate mat. By this time I was on first-name basis with Jim (who has the title “Sherpa at Inked Gaming”) so I ran the idea by him. The problem is, as he explained it, their printing process involves running part of the image off of the edge in order to make sure there is no wasted space. In order to make sure the two halves of my galaxy lined up perfectly, I would have to put extra data on the two edges that would be lined up together and plan on cutting down the mat after it was printed. Then it’s no longer 4×4. Again, <sigh>

Back to the drawing board.

This time I decided that in order to make my two mats play nicely together, I should use the same strategy that Fantasy Flight does. Have you noticed that their mats (other than the plain star field) have their design only in one corner? That way there is at least one edge that is empty space, and that edge lines up perfectly with a star field mat to provide an epic 3×6 play surface. I could use that same concept.