16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Know what you're paying for..., October 18, 2007
This review is from: Ruins of the Wild: Dungeon Tiles 4 (Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Accessory) (Misc. Supplies)
I hate these sealed package products, especially when you can't find what you're buying. This is for all you other folks like me.
What you get in this pack are six double-sided pages of thick cardstock with a plasticy finish. No adventures or anything else--just map bits. Some of them are cut into 2x4" or 2-8" strips, with other bits that have groups of boulders or other terrain on them. The idea is to mix and match them Tetris-style to make a variety of maps. Presumably you could also use them with another forest map, but the thick stiff cardstock makes it so they wouldn't blend well--it's really thick. You could still make color copies of them though, cut out the bits you want, and keep the originals pristine for future use.
Another problem is that about half the cards are dominated by pretty exotic stuff that would be less useful for general purposes: an 8x8 circle of druid stones, hunting lodge floorplan, campsite or big round room filled with hay and bones. The campsite is alright, but the others are way too specific for my preference--determining the adventures you can do rather than giving you tools to run the adventure you want. Now there's still plenty of good stuff. Just about everything that is strange or difficult to use has some perfectly normal foresty grassland on the opposite side--and there's enough variety to the cards that you could just lay down the forest tiles, rotate and swap them periodically and you'd be fine. There are a couple of strange ones that would be a little tough to use in a normal game, like a gargoyle statue, a graveyard, a gypsy wagon, a giant's thighbone, scattered adventuring gear, a full giant's skeleton, a wrecked wagon, and...horses?? More of them are perfectly good and useable than that are odd, however.
One big advantage of the cards is that because they're in peices you can move characters along, laying cards down in the direction they move and pulling away ones where they've been. Especially if you buy a few of the same pack of map bits you could fill a full table with forest terrain and flip some cards over and switch them around and the characters could explore forever. It's a novel idea and I like it.
It really is a lot better than I was expecting. Certainly my first review of them was a bit unfair. I actually hadn't turned the tiles over to see that they were printed on both sides. Yeah, that made a difference. Boy, do I feel kinda' dumb.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great product, January 31, 2008
This review is from: Ruins of the Wild: Dungeon Tiles 4 (Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Accessory) (Misc. Supplies)
This is a great product. The heavy, coated cardstock really makes it easy to pick up the tiles. I use the Ruins of the Wild quite often in my D&D games. My only complaint is that we need more variety. I hope they make a second set with more wilderness tiles.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nice tiles, great quality, January 3, 2009
This review is from: Ruins of the Wild: Dungeon Tiles 4 (Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Accessory) (Misc. Supplies)
As others have said, these are very sturdy tiles. I purchased these along with a few other sets at the same time and am very pleased with all of them. This set has several large tile pieces and some nice accessory type pieces to go with it. I was slightly turned off by the grid system which uses a series of + marks to show squares instead of lines or shadows. This is a similar feature on most other tiles so I didn't mark it down for that.
The only thing that kept it from a full 5 stars for me was the lack of non-terrain tiles. There is a tower type building and a few other smaller campsite items, but was hoping for more forest and shrub type tiles.
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