I am just starting the game. I have played a few times and really enjoyed the game. A buddy has all the planes and both mats but as he can't always come up and play I am buying the rules and some planes.

I have to say the mats do look nice but I am cheap and $80 for a surface to play on is high for me. I am thinking of buying some cloth at the local craft store for $10-20 and using that. Thinking blue and break out the air brush and do some light and dark parts to add some depth.

What do you guys use? If you have photos that would be great.

Stephen

 I haven't purchased the stuff for this game yet, but I use a 4x8 piece of  green felt sprayed with spray glue and lightly flocked and spray painted with shades of brown for texture. I then use 3-D hills and buildings for my 20mm ww2. For this game I won't use the buildings and will use the mesh stuff used to line shelves to represent fields and forest areas. You can purchase trenches close to scale pretty cheap as well.  For desert I have a tan sheet with some paint sprayed on it to look like dunes in the sand. Your options are limited only by your imaginiation.

Dave

I went to the local fabric store and bought a 6 foot by 6 foot piece of lightweight canvas, dunked it in a little blue dye, and presto!

The canvas weave keeps cards or miniature bases from sliding around too much. It works great.

However, I also bought the official mats - if only to support the game!

I only recently picked this up, but our store has some old MechWarrior boards made with felt that we're looking at using for matches. We're hoping that the felt helps keep the cards from shifting that often (or until we all get minis).

We use a single sided "Megamat" from Chessex and drew a 60cm by 90cm rectangle on the felted back side. That's not to say that the Megamats are cheap, but it's what we already had on hand and it works pretty well.