Cloth Battle Mats: What They Are and Why Wargamers Use Them

A cloth battle mat is a printed fabric gaming surface for tabletop wargames. Instead of a rubber-backed neoprene sheet or a printed vinyl roll, the artwork is printed onto a soft polyester fleece. It weighs a fraction of what neoprene weighs, it folds down small enough to go in a backpack, and — this is the part most people don't think about until they've used one — it doesn't lie flat unless you want it to.

That last property is the whole reason cloth mats have stayed popular with historical and skirmish gamers for decades, long after neoprene showed up.

The problem a flat mat can't solve

Most tabletop games use true line of sight. You put your eye down at model height and look across the table to see what you can see.

On a flat surface, that rule does almost nothing. The ground itself contributes nothing to the game. Every sightline across the table is clean, from edge to edge, and terrain gets reduced to a handful of objects sitting on an open floor. A printed hill on a flat mat looks like a hill, but it gives you no height, no actual cover, and it doesn't break a single line of sight.

There's a second gap that most gamers hit sooner or later. 3D printing has largely solved buildings — a few hours of print time, a few dollars of filament, and you have something that paints up well. It has done almost nothing for organic terrain. Rivers, ponds, lakes, ditches, fields, tracks and roads are genuinely hard to make look right. Water in particular eats time and money: resin pours, warped bases, gloss that never quite reads as water. So the terrain that actually gets built is buildings, and tables end up crowded with structures and empty of everything else.

How a felt wargame mat handles both

Fleece and felt drape. Put anything under the mat — foam blocks, a stack of books, a magazine, rolled-up socks — and the fabric settles over it into a genuine slope. You get real grade, real crests, real dead ground behind them. Infantry stand on the hillside rather than beside a picture of one. A tank can go properly hull down. Valleys and gulleys form. Sightlines get interrupted by the ground itself, which is what the rule was written for.

You don't need to buy anything special to do it. Whatever is on the shelf next to your table will work.

If you've been wargaming a while, none of this is news. Draping cloth over books and foam is one of the oldest tricks in historical gaming. What's changed is that you no longer have to choose between a good-looking printed surface and a surface that will actually take terrain underneath it.

The second half is Cut & Play — printed sheets of rivers, roads, ponds and field edges on the same fabric, which you cut out with scissors and lay flat on top of the mat. It's the water and the roads that don't get built otherwise. Cut & Play doesn't compete with your 3D printer; it covers what the printer was never going to do for you.

Cloth vs neoprene vs vinyl

Neoprene is a rubber-backed mouse-pad material. It's heavy, it grips the table well, and it lies dead flat. It usually ships folded, and those fold creases tend to be permanent. Stored rolled, it needs a tube. It will not conform to anything you put underneath it.

Vinyl and PVC roll up small and cost less, but they hold curl from the roll and most of them are glossy enough to throw glare under a bright gaming light.

Cloth and fleece are the lightest of the three, fold flat without permanent creasing, and are the only one of the three that conforms to terrain placed underneath. The honest tradeoff: fleece is softer and more pliable, without a rubber backing, so it behaves like fabric rather than like a mat that stays put on its own.

A cloth mat is also the only one you can throw in the washing machine. Cold, gentle cycle, on its own, tumble dry low. Don't iron it.

Which size

Sizes are measured in inches, and the mat is generally a bit larger than the play area so there's material to spare for draping over hills underneath.

• 30x40 — skirmish games on a 2'x2' or 30"x30" area. Kill Team, Necromunda, Forbidden Psalms, Trench Crusade, Frostgrave.
• 50x60 — a 3'x3' or 4'x4' game. The standard size for smaller-point historical games and most fantasy skirmish.
• 60x80 — covers the 6'x4' standard used by Bolt Action, Flames of War, most historical rulesets and larger sci-fi games.

If you're buying one mat and you play across several systems, the 60x80 is the one I'd get. Oversize is never a problem — extra fabric at the edges is exactly what you want when there's a hill under the middle.

Browse the range

FeltPro is a felt-based wargame mat system: the base mats give you the ground, risers underneath give you the third dimension, and Cut & Play sheets give you the water and roads on top.

Every mat ships free within the US, printed to order, and typically arrives in 5 to 12 business days.

Common questions

Does a cloth mat slide around on the table? It has no rubber backing, so it behaves like fabric. On most gaming tables the weight of terrain and models holds it in place. If you're on a very slick surface, a strip of masking tape at the corners settles it.

Can I iron out the fold lines? Don't iron it — the print is sublimated into polyester and heat will damage it. Fleece doesn't hold creases the way neoprene does; folds relax out on their own within an hour or two of being laid flat.

What do I put under it to make hills? Anything with a flat top and a bit of height. Insulation foam is the usual choice because you can cut it to shape, but books, magazine stacks, coasters and rolled towels all work.

What scales does it work with? The base mats carry no scale cues — no printed buildings, no fixed roads — so they read correctly from 15mm through 28mm and beyond. Several work for naval and aerial games too.

How is this different from a plain fleece blanket from the fabric store? Mechanically, it isn't — that's the same principle, and it's a perfectly good way to start. The difference is the printed ground: mottled color, scrub, gravel and churned earth that reads as terrain rather than as a colored sheet, and Cut & Play pieces printed to match it.