The folks from 1985 Games were kind enough to send us review copies of some of their Dungeon Craft terrain pieces and their reusable BattleMaps, so I spent some time digging through them.
What is Dungeon Craft?
Dungeon Craft is a system of double-sided, 2d tiles used to represent specific items on your typical 1-inch grid. Tiles come in boxed sets with a thick stack of sheets with a huge number of tiles in them. The tiles are both wet erase and dry erase friendly, making them easy to do things like marking points of interest, numbering identical enemies, or marking status conditions.
The tiles are reversible and oriented so that the reverse sides will line up once cut out of the sheet. In many cases, the reverse sides presen an alternate view of the same building, such as a house both with and without the roof visible, or a wagon with the interior covered or revealed. Creature tokens typically have a color pallet swap, letting you distinguish groups of similar creatures or just pick a different aesthetic.
A Ton of Value for the Price
I’m very accustomed to terrain tiles and other things like this coming with a small collection of pre-made tiles that you can arrange in various but generally you’re still going to get some variety of a dungeon because there’s only so much you can do with a small, expensive box of what is essentially a white board jigsaw puzzle.
Dungeon Craft is roughly the thickness of laminated paper, which means that they can cram a huge amount of content into a single box. I counted 53 sheets in the Hell and High Water box. Once you’ve cut out the tiles you plan to use, you can fit a whole session’s worth of tiles into a ziploc bag.
In addition to buildings, trees, and other terrain features, Dungeon Craft also contains creature tokens. Some of packed along the sides of sheets with mid-sized tiles like buildings or wagons, but there also sheets that are essentially nothing but creatures, either as small tokens or as a full-page spread for bigger creatures.
The art on the tiles in fantastic. The style is slightly cartoony, which I absolutely love, but the monsters feel plenty monstrous, and while the art isn’t clearly stolen from the Monster Manual, you can still frequently look at a token and say “Oh, that’s obviously an imp.” I would love to have these tokens in a VTT for my digital games.
Grab Your Scissors
Using Dungeon Craft will require you to cut out the inidiviual tiles. Individual tiles within sheets are marked with clear 1-inch grid lines that are easy to cut along, but this is going to take some time simply because there is such a huge amount of content inside a single box.
Drop Those Tiles on a Grid
The 1985 Games folks also sent me two of their BattleMaps. These are two-sided mats with your standard 1-inch grid. They’re dry erase and wet erase friendly and made of the same material as the Dungeon Craft tiles. The mats are sizeable and fold up nicely. But, they will have creases from being folded and it may be difficult to get them to lie flat, making it difficult to keep your Dungeon Craft tiles in place. Try putting your rulebooks on top of the mats for a while.
A Test Drive
I got to run an in-person D&D session for the first time in a while, and I made great use of the Dungeon Craft tiles. The adventure began with a wagon from the Cursed Lands set which I then encouraged players to decorate with wet erase markers. The specific prompt was “make this look like it’s on fire”, and my players were perfectly happy to commit arson via marker.
Throughout the adventure I rotated in two sets of monster tokens and several small pieces of terrain. I numbered individual monsters with a wet erase marker so that I could track hit points, and other than trying to write on red demons with a red marker (that’s on me. my bad.), everything went great!
Conclusion
The Dungeon Craft tiles look fantastic on the table, they help up well to being moved around and written on, and I’m looking forward to using them again the next time I can get an in-person game together.
You can find more about Dungeon Craft and 1985 Games on their Amazon store or on the 1985 Games site. Many of their products are on sale for Black Friday / Cyber Monday.
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