New Zealand-based AJ Pickett, who has written for the Rifter and consulted on lore for D&D: Dark Alliance, is crowdfunding tabletop battle mats made from silicone which can be thrown in a washing machine.
The pitch has more than 50 days to run, but it asks for NZ$77,365, about £38K. Can they make it? Progress has been good in the first week with over 200 backers and AJ’s YouTube channel has over 120K followers to point at the campaign. You can see progress on the pitch page.
A special offer to the Silicone Battlemats’ first 1,200 backers suggests how many people AJ suspects might respond.
That offer is a free combat tracker, also silicone and transparent, so you can scribble combat order, health and other data points on it and have those near the action without obscuring the map.
There’s also a lotto draw for people who go all in, and that’s a generous one but down to chance. It’s a quirky mechanism for the Kickstarter because once the campaign has been funded, it’s not in the backers’ interests to decrease their chances of winning by enticing more gamers into the lottery.
Choose from our colours and print options while taking advantage of our special deals and rewards. Plus, our battlemats offer more than just a gaming surface! Crafted from highly durable and non-toxic silicone, they can withstand baking cookies and pizza. Their non-porous surface is resistant to most crafting paints and glues, making them perfect for sculpting terrain and painting miniatures. You can even bake polymer clay models on them or use them as a protective surface under your 3D printers. Each battlemat is engineered to last a lifetime and be perfect at what it was made to do, all while reducing waste and pollution.
AJ’s HQ in New Zealand seems to bring great postage because many tiers have worldwide shipping included.
Backers who contribute NZ$55/£27 get one silicone battlemat with a square print.
Is the hex print more expensive to produce? It must be because that option does not unlock until backers contribute NZ$63 or more to the project.
After these two tiers, the battlemat crowdfunder leaps up the ladder dramatically.
It’s NZ$207 when the entire set appears, and that’s three full prints, with all three colours to pick from a dice set included.
After that, AJ offers retail tiers with 10 battlemaps in a mix at NZ$484 and, yes, 100 at NZ$4,504. Are any tabletop hobby stores busy enough to store and sell that many?
The estimated fulfilment date is this year and in September.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
