Hey Climbers, it’s been awhile since I've posted, but boy do I have news! And yep, it's about PLAYMATS!
We made play mat table cloths for the Annapurna Tournament during PAX Unplugged last December. Each player had their own mountain, with places for each card carefully laid out and sponged each template with a color matching one of the four suits of cards.
Then we added places for the meeple, the backpack, the cache, the flag cards, and the peak tokens. We waited for everything to dry, and they turned out great!
All our tournament players loved them, and so did our tournament staff who could quickly reset a whole table after a round of play.
The drawback for mass production is that these tablecloths were made to fit a specific kind of round table used at trade shows and weddings. And sponge painting and mass production are just not compatible.
But I heard you and I kept on working on playmats!
These are two of the very early designs. The very first design, on the left, incorporated the mountain plus a Mandela-like image behind. The one on the right is based on the virtual mountain image that I created for online play in Tabletopia. By this pointI knew that I wanted to include the mountain.
Next came this design. You might have seen this version in some earlier photographs. It was done on vinyl and it quickly became clear it was way too big and that a rectangular playmate wouldn't work. What to do??!!
Cut them up!
Cutting up the rectangle meant I had to sacrifice the area designated for flags, but the triangle shape fit much better on the table. It still wasn't finished however, because the vinyl slid a tiny bit.
So, I reached out to our wonderful manufacturer Boda. We now have a triangular playmats made out of neoprene that’s thin and doesn’t slide. It has lovely stitching on the edge, and the mats can be laid out on a round table or a long one. And it's a design I LOVE!
TADA! (Applause please)
Look how wonderfully these fit together for a long table!
Look how they create a nice square shape!
Look at the stitching around the edge! See how clean my floor is!
Anyway, I’m excited. We just placed the order with Boda. The playmats are in production, and we’ll have a big announcement party with cake when they get here. (I love cake!) So keep tuned!
I'm going be at Origins next week, so if you want to say hi and tell me what you think of the playmats, (or my cat photobombing pictures) I'd love to talk.
Thanks for reading and as always,
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