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WarLock Tiles: A Year Later Our Story Opens in a Time of Plague Many adventures start in a tavern. Ours began in a pandemic. Launching a major new product line during summer of 2020 might not have been as ideal as we originally envisioned, but it went better than we could have imagined. With glowing reviews, robust sales, and growing interest, WarLock Tiles hit the ground running and is still gaining speed.
Over the past twelve months or so, we’ve been focused on expanding upon our initial Dungeon and Town & Village sets, giving fans ever-increasing options for customizing their builds in those always-popular settings. We now have sets that offer angled, curved, and 1-inch-wide walls and tiles to enable people to create even more-elaborate, intricate, and unique layouts. Full-height walls were introduced to allow for more-immersive environments and added details, such as wall-mounted torches and banners. And we began experimenting with incorporating technology into the mix with the magic of LED lighting.
Beyond the walls, floors, windows, and doors, we’ve also been creating cartloads of all the other things GMs need flesh out environments and add flavor to encounters. From treasure chests and trapdoors to barrels, braziers, and beds, our ever-growing array of Accessory sets provide the finishing touches that add character and bring every setting to life.
Soon, intrepid adventurers will be able descend into the darkness far underground with the upcoming Caverns set. This new environment offered us an opportunity to develop a new type of WarLock Tile product. Instead of square tiles that lock together, the Caverns set is composed of loose, organically shaped stone slabs devoid of right angles to make create natural-feeling tunnels and caves easy and intuitive. These spelunk-able spaces will be divided and bounded by rock formations including flowstone walls, pillars, arches, stalagmites, and a series of stalactite-style pieces that can be extended or shortened to create unique formations. We also designed a simple, somewhat perilous suspension bridge. (Imagine the rope-and-plank bridge from “Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom,” but leave off the guard rails.) It’s flexible, fully adjustable in length, and can connect to the cavern floor tiles as well as between natural arch bridges to provide heroes with completely a safe and stable way to cross bottomless chasms and other hazards.
The Caverns set also introduces a new line of 24-inch square game mats that will serve as a sort of thematic “blank canvas” that can be used as-is or in conjunction with terrain. With a rubberized bottom to keep the mat in place and a high-quality felted top to help minis do the same, each game mat features full-color artwork depicting one of three different environments heroes might traverse: Expansive Cave is hard-packed earth and stone. Treacherous waters fill the Subterranean Lake. And the crusted-lava-filled Magma Chamber presents a great location for climactic battles and easy disposal of powerful artifacts. The artwork also incorporates a subtle grid that’s handy for tactical placement and movement of minis, but easily ignored if space-by-space detail isn’t critical to your game.
/Begin/ Innovate, Explore, & Expand /Repeat/ From the very start, we were determined to create a versatile, modular terrain system that would allow gamers to create the kind of detailed, intricate, and immersive settings that we also love building and playing on. WarLock Tiles needed to not only look amazing and function in all the ways we already knew we wanted, but it also had to be capable of incorporating new ideas and designs that we hadn’t even thought of yet. Every product we design is another opportunity to improve upon what we’ve already created and to add new functionality.
Setting-wise, we began like many adventuring parties do: traipsing through dungeons and wandering around town. But those places are just the beginning of a much-longer campaign we have in store. This fall, as gamers begin delving into the depths of our first new location, we’ll be working on opening up other territories and terrain And even as we venture into new places, rest assured we’ll still revisit all of our old haunts to continue filling them with options and opportunity for endless storytelling.
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