RPG Product Review: The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats

Loke Battle Mats has a fantastic book you need to pick up, particularly if you want to be able to quickly set up a game and get playing on the fly. No need to bury the lede.

Loke Battle Mats produce a series of spiral-bound books full of battle mats. As you flip each page, you find a whole new set of environments. Each one inspires a multitude of ideas for encounters.

I was sent two different books from Loke Battle Mats. They sent me the Big Book of Cyberpunk Battle Mats, which I’ll be reviewing soon, and The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats.

Yes, I said “Books,” plural. The two books come encased in a single sleeve, and act in conjunction to one another. You can open both books, put them side-by-side, and you have a whole 24X24 dungeon ready to go. Each page is numbered, with the maps in both books corresponding to one another, but many have similar design styles, and so can be mixed and matched together to create a large variety of dungeons.

Because all of the maps are spiral bound, they all lay completely flat, allowing you to fold them in half to create different shapes. You can arrange them in different ways to make longer maps or L-shaped dungeons.

They are also laminated, allowing you to write on them and wipe them off quickly to add elements and mark up trapped areas of the dungeon. 

While I’ve previously reviewed a battle mat book, I like the Loke battle mats a lot better. They’re more compact, lay flatter, and have a more interesting visual style.

While I was setting up the mats for some glamour shots, I walked away for a few minutes, and Gabe, my son came in the room. He started moving the miniatures around, walking them through the dungeon hallways. When I came back in, I pointed out that the map he was looking at was actually two books, and they could be mixed and matched together. His eyes lit up, and he began flipping back and forth through the books looking at all the pages, describing the puzzles that each one could hold. Before I knew it, he was asking me to pull out some RPG books and digging through my minis to decorate the dungeons further. He tells me he particularly liked the sewers, and any of the maps that had magical effects on them.

I highly recommend these to anyone running in-person games. It’ll allow you, on the fly, to create dynamic dungeons that will visually capture the moment. The extreme flexibility of this book means you can use this over and over again, even using the same pages for different contexts. Bring this book, a box of minis, and Tiny Dungeon to a game night, and you’ll be able to run a whole adventure on the fly without any prep time.

You can pick up the Dungeon Books of Battle Mats here, along with all of the other great battle mat books they have.

Loke Battle Mats sent a copy of Dungeon Books of Battle Mats to Dice Monkey for review.