Wednesday, April 30, 2014

New Warmats from Barrage Miniatures

In an ongoing quest to enhance my terrain I'm always on the lookout to see how others do their terrain and I get lots of inspiration from the blogosphere for this. For a while I've been impressed by the look of those teddy bear fur mats but I could not find a good source to get them. Making such a mat myself is not for me, I just lack the skills to do it so I had almost given up until the blogosphere came to the rescue.
Gaming with TooFatlardies, an excellent blog from Benito in Spain which I follow for some years now attended me to a Spanish company called Barrage Miniatures. They make stunning grassy and desert warmats if you ask me so I sent them an email to see what they could make for me.

What happened next is something I don't experience each day. The Barrage team was not only friendly and responsive, they offered to collaborate on the design of the mat so I would get the exact mat I wanted. So we decided on the size, hight of the grass (to be used for different scales) and colours while Alf and Clara from Barrage where sending me almost daily emails with progress. They had checked my blog and even sent me pictures of my minis on the mat using photo editing software. One thing I added during the process was to cut the mat in irregular shapes at one short end and make it a bit longer. That way it could be used to represent the border of a beach for example using the desert mat underneath the fur one.

Initially I decided to go for the fur mat only because their desert mat could only be folded in one direction. When I mentioned this limitation to Alf he promptly redesigned the mat using different materials. When he showed the redesign a week later and explained what he did to tackle this I was sold on the desert mat as well.
The whole process and interaction with Barrage was lots of fun as you can imagine. In just a couple of weeks the mats were made and with every update I received I got more excited. We have now used the fur mat twice and the desert mat will have it's first outing soon. The guys from our gaming group here love the mats as well and the first one already ordered an even larger mat for when we use our largest setup.

Now I need to take the next step and work on my existing terrain to better blend it into the mat and make or buy some templates to break the green and some new WWII houses and streets. Suggestions welcome.

On to the pictures so you can judge for yourself. I'm more than happy with the mats and can only highly recommend Barrage Miniatures. And no, I don't have any shares or involvement in the company :-)

Recent ACW game. These are confederates from Patrick Diedericks who ran a BP game at my place to get us familiar with the system. I recently met him (he found my blog through facebook) and he happens to live 2 minutes from me in the same village.
Rob's Irish Brigade testing the new ground



Recent CoC game. Jacco forgot to bring his Early Brits so we had to improvise: Early Germans vs US Para's. 












WIP, one of the updates from Barrage

The short side to create the beach



On to the desert mat


After the redesign, a flexible desert mat
They even sent a picture of one of my Chevy trucks on the mat using the magic of photoshop. Nice


For scale

Can you make hills? Yes you can


Rolled out the desert map and took couple of pictures of the mat with some LRDG vehicles and our palm trees



Bought a pvc drainpipe for storage, the mat is over 2x3m

The grassy mat as they call it comes with a free storage bag






28 comments:

  1. Oh I like the look of those!

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  2. Those mats look great. Always nice when you get great service too.

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  3. Great stuff Mike! Thanks a lot for sharing this. That desert mat just might get my Bolt Action North Africa project going a lot sooner than planned. I'm off to check Barrage right now. :-)

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  4. As a heavy and long-time user of the warmats, I cannot recommend them more!!!.
    Flexible but sturdy and make your games look more than excellent
    Like falling from heaven after so many years fighting on modular terrains!!!!

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    1. So they are durable as well...thx Benito

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  5. That looks the dogs danglies, it has my attention and great service!!

    Ian

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  6. Quite lovely stuff Mike and nice people in the hobby too!

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  7. They are just superb Michael and what a great story of top quality customer service.

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  8. These mats really do look good. Have to check them out.

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  9. Superb looking items but bit pricey for me ( 242 Euro for 6x4) although I do appreciate the one-off nature of them and effort expended. Great for those in a club though.
    I fear if I bought one I would end up stuffed in the carrying bag by nearest and dearest :-)

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    Replies
    1. Now we want to avoid that Sgt..You actually get them a bit bigger than that but still we rather have you on your feet

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  10. Awesome looking mats! What a great buy Michael.

    Christopher

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  11. Those are some excellent looking mats. Sounds like a great customer experience.

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  12. Great mats Mike and amazing service!

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  13. Great looking mats; impressed to hear how they worked with you on them too. Mats are the way to go IMO; at least for storage & transport - as well as easy set up/take down. I love great looking terrain boards, but those seem they could become one-dimensional in use. Anyway, great looking terrain.

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    1. Agreed, I like some of the excellent boards as well but as you say they are somewhat limited for gaming use. I don't want to march on that same road all the time

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  14. Splendid post, very intresting indeed.

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  15. What a great buy! Stunning looking mats Mike!

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  16. Thanks for the comments guys!

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  17. Wow! Those are great. I like the irregular edge too, such a simple way to make them more versatile. Cheers, Paul :-)

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  18. They look pretty cool!!! Postie said how's the invisable train???

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  19. I WANT THE DESERT MAT!!!
    Fantastic. Alf and Clara are really wonderful people, and their products, fantastic.

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  20. Both mats look brilliant! I wouldn't mind having one for myself.

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  21. Impressive! I like their work!

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  22. Looks great...may be soon in our club! And beautiful pictures!

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  23. The mats look great! Thanks for posting this! I've been wondering where I could get a "fur" mat for gaming. I guess I can end my quest here!

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  25. Uttarakhand Board Of School Education (UBSE) Responsible For Conducting 12th Annual Examination Starting 12th Class Exam might begin on May 4 and might end on May 22, 2021, UBSE 12th Model Paper 2021 UBSE is an company of Government of Uttarakhand entrusted with the Responsibilities of Prescribing courses of instructions.

    ReplyDelete