A Review of RollinMats' Kingdom Death: Monster Game Mat

Opening Preamble and Disclaimer

RollinMats is a Spanish company that produces high quality neoprane game mats for a wide range of different board and card games. I have purchased and used game mats they designed for Arkham Horror, Game of Thrones (The FFG Board Game) along with Space Empires 4X and in all those cases I have found them all to be quality productions with a great layout. The graphical design of these pieces is something which really clicks for me, I've been wanting to get their Middle Earth: The Wizards play mats to complete my Arda set for Hero and Minion plays. I mean just look at how gorgeous this is:

Link here: https://www.rollinmats.com/products/tapete-middle-earth-collectible-card-27365-eng

So in the summer of 2024, after another round of survivor sheets fell apart due to endless writing/rewriting, I decided to invest in one of their Kingdom Death game mats. The main thing which drew me to it was the addition of spaces where dice could be used to track temporary things like armor points and elements that can change a lot during a showdown such as survival and insanity.

This is very useful for myself because as amazing as Scribe is (and it is an incredibly useful product that I recommend for players who want a digital management app for the game), I perform better when running fully analogue games (plus I don't have a tablet to run Scribe on, there's no way I'd use it on my phone). You can see how I struggle when playing electronically if you watch the gameplay on Playing Board Games YouTube channel, the switch from physical to digital results in me missing triggers and forgetting things because I don't have access to all the custom tools I use in my physical playthroughs to ensure triggers are not missed and abilities are all tracked. The Kingdom Death Simulator is an incredible digital version of the game and I love it, but it lacks accessibility options that would help me perform better.

Now, if this mat was just a replacement board I would not have been interested in it, but, when viewing the page I saw that it also included a dashboard for the monster, a smaller hunt track and a complete set of injury charts. All of this looked incredibly useful and I was excited to try one out in order to review it.

When it arrived, I was initially really impressed with the production quality, it was clear and readable despite there being a lot of text. Here is that mat.

However, when I sat down to play with it, I discovered that the mat was not performing to the standard I wanted. For example the Grim Pack portion was missing the stat bar for the Scout:

The Monster Dashboard had a space for the Basic Action and Reference Card (despite those two elements being the same double sided card):

And probably the largest issue was the spots for placing dice to track armor points/insanity/survival were too small for normal dice, meaning that unless I bought a bunch of smaller dice I wouldn't be able to use those spots due to crowding and overspill:

I packed the mat up and considered my options, the main one was to ask for a refund and return the mat, though doing that would have meant I would need to go through the additional expense and effort of those actions, and also it wouldn't solve this situation for any future buyers. I certainly felt I couldn't review this mat without highlighting the various shortcomings I experienced during my week of using it.

I also do not enjoy writing broadly negative things about products. I criticise not to tear something down, but to help it and future iterations of it to be better. I often hope in some small way that I've helped the game I love so much with my reviews and analysis, I really love the Legendary Card Pack which was in part built based upon feedback that my community gave to me to pass onto the Team, it's had so many great impacts upon improving the play experience (especially slicing the Base Game monsters away from the Generic locations so those generic lines can be used in any campaign). Things like that make me happy, calling something bad without any intent to try and guide improvement is a fools errand.

While weighing all this I decided to use the contact form on RollinMats' site and explain who I was (someone who plays a lot of KDM every week), what I'd purchased and why I felt it wasn't up to the company's normal high standards. If that was all that had happened then I wouldn't be here writing this preamble to a review. Instead RollinMats got back to me fairly quickly, asking for additional details about the issues I had found with the game mat. This resulted in over half a year of correspondence with them, involving my giving feedback, explaining why that was the case and then the RollinMats design team considering those comments, revising their game mat and testing it out internally.

Some of the feedback I gave included the monster dashboard, Dreaded Pack, Survivor Attribute spaces, numbers of token slot and with measurements to allow for the mat to work with the Ultimate Showdown Board and a removal of the phases breakdown (which is helpful, but ultimately if you play KDM so much that you want a play mat, you really don't need that kind of information over space for other things).

This resulted in revisions and recently I have been sent a copy of the new, revised, updated KDM SOLO mat (links to the mats at the bottom of this review) as an example of the updates they have undertaken on all 4 versions of their mat. As a disclaimer, I paid for the original mat in full, but I was sent this copy at no additional cost. The RollinMats team hasn't asked for me to write this review and I've received nothing apart from the replacement mat you see in the upcoming photos. They have asked me for some feedback, and I will be sending them a link to this review as a part of that.

The Review

Here is the new RollinMats KDM SOLO mat sat on our main gaming table, as you can see this is large mat for a large game. Sitting at 125 x 96.5 cm (49” x 38''). It passes right to the edges of our rather large table and that's absolutely perfect for my purposes. A more overhead view of when I initially placed the mat on the table is here:

In the top left are the 6 injury charts, the top middle holds the game board, the top right has the smaller hunt track and then along the bottom is where all of the main action happens. We have spaces for Moods, Traits, various Decks (resources etc.) and where Terrain cards can sit. In the middle we have each of our five survivors and on the bottom right is the main monster dashboard. The white spaces are where dice used to track armor points/insanity are placed (I use KDM D10s) along with spots to place markers (I use wooden cubes) for Heavy and Light injuries and a third row where you can track the key stats for a survivor (I use D6s, green dice for positive stats and red for negative). Above each survivors gear grid and tracker are spaces for various tokens, I keep all of the KDM Official Survival Action tokens along with any temporary stat tokens in there. I also keep Bleed Tokens in one of the circular spaces, or if they get too full I place them in the black space beneath the armor/injury boxes

This mat has been revolutionary for me, it's brought all of the important information close to where I/We sit and having the Monster Dashboard right by the survivor ones really helps bring together the fact that the monster isn't really on the board, it's on that dashboard, the miniature is just its representative pawn, same as the survivors.

We'll take a look at the various elements individually now with an example set up for a L2 Crimson Crocodile Showdown (because that's what I was hunting at the time).

Here is it all set up, including fully populated dashboards, a set up hunt and the Ultimate Showdown Board.

You can see in the foreground here the smaller tables that are used for dice rolling and keeping the survivor sheets on, I have those because I keep all three phases fully set up on the board when playing. If I had a more normal set up/tear down process I would be able to keep those elements on the table. The wooden insert you see is the LaserOx KDM and GCE inserts (see reviews on these via the review collection or review tag) and the acrylic plastic card stands in the top right are from GameGenic. I use them to stand key moods/traits up vertically to ensure I can't forget them when playing. Please excuse the tile gaps in the showdown board, I was in the process of painting those, so they are not present at that time due to being on the painting desk before the showdown was run.

When it is complete I will share the entire painted showdown board, but that's probably going to be a few months away as each tile takes approaching an hour to paint and there's 352 of them! I also have a semi-haphazard way of painting them, this is to mix between painting the tiles that all faces and the ones with interesting features like the Crab Spiders - variety helps keep the task fresh.

We'll start our dive with a look at the Hunt Track.

This condensed version of the hunt track isn't fancy looking like the original, but it also doesn't need to be flipped over to get to the settlement side and it takes up less space. If you are curious, the gold sleeves are Dragon Shield Japanese Size sleeves (thanks to Trent “BigDeno” Denison, for that tip, go watch his content here after you've finished reading this. He's a much more prolific video up loader and a better KDM player than I).

You can see that the clearance for the Ultimate Showdown board is tight here, but it doesn't go over any of the spaces. In truth what I really would love to see now is a Hunt Phase/Encounter Board combined mat, which could be placed next to (or on top of) the showdown mat. I am an absolute fiend for table organisation though, so perhaps the target market for something like that (and a Settlement Mat) is not large enough to justify such a project.

Next up the Monster Dashboard!

Note that this particular mat layout splits some of the trait cards away from the monster and puts them on the left hand side. That suits my peculiarities, but if you wanted those cards all together the other variants should offer that, check out the link at the bottom for alternative layouts and absolutely send them a message if you have further questions. They are polite, thoughtful and keen to make the best possible product.

Sleeves are GameGenic Matte Bridge/American size.

As you can see we have space for lots of tokens, future proofing pretty much any situation, but also giving a good place for me to keep not just monster tokens but also showdown specific ones like Stink Tokens. I also keep a dice in the top right slot to track movement and the slot below it to track toughness. This means I can keep the reference card face down most of the time and not have to flip it back and forth because I don't hold all the toughness and movement numbers for the monsters in my head.

I generally keep the three most important traits on this side and the rest, along with persistent injuries, I keep on the other. Speaking of which:

This is the nine spaces for moods, traits and terrain. You can see here I'm making use of the spaces to hold the various decks, but I will move those decks off the mat when dealing with a monster that has more traits, persistent injuries and/or lots of terrain cards. Kingdom Death's various monsters keep getting more and more complicated. It's kind of crazy to see how many cards the Frogdog and Crimson Crocodile have when compared to the older monster designs.

Next comes the six injury tables:

The Ultimate Showdown Board sits tight by these tables, but none of the text is obscured. I greatly appreciate having these tables as having them outside of the book is something that I always need. I would use my injury decks, but I need to print out a new set and this table has made needing them redundant.

Finally we'll get to the survivors.

Sleeves here are GameGenic Matt and the gear grids came from Feldherr, I use raised gear grids on top of the printed ones on the board because I tend to set the loadouts up over at the settlement portion of the table and then move them across. Having the portable grids makes it easier to transport them. They also are 'locked in' so I can't accidentally knock the grids around and it keeps all the cards all parallel, which pleases me.

You can see here the current way I am tracking the survivors. This particular group doesn't have any stat changes (no SoF this time!) and I don't put dice on the movement space except when one of the survivors doesn't have the standard 5 movement. The various KDM dice I've chosen are a set colour for each different location, this makes it quick and easy for me to glance at the dashboards and distinguish each different hit location's armor points very quickly. You don't need to go that far!

Above the dashboards you can see where I keep all of the survival action trackers along with other tokens such as that +1 Luck token from the Fish of Abundance. I'll stack multiples of the same tokens if I get those. (Also in classic left handed Fen fashion I've put the Survival dice on the wrong slots for the two survivors on the right hand side, something I only noticed when starting to play and at that point I didn't want to redo the photos, I'm not a board game photographer as you can clearly see). You can also see the bleed token in the bottom right, I trialled keeping them there and it worked nicely but I switched back to using a red D6 in one of the circular spaces instead)

Final Thoughts

Throughout my correspondence with RollinMats they have demonstrated themselves to be professional, polite and always keen to improve their products to be the best possible. I have purchased their mats before I got the KDM one and I will continue to purchase them in the future. This mat is clearly laid out, organised, tough and good looking. The storage tube it comes in is wide enough to ensure the mat won't get over curled at one end while also being strong, not too large looking good when put away. I really like their redesign and finally being able to use dice to track stat changes has been, well a game changer, for an analogue board gamer like myself. I have no issues giving this one a seal of approval, as the only elements I would have liked on top of these would have been slots for the individual survivor status cards such as Terrified or Spiral Age.

As an aside, I can also personally recommend each of the other mats I have purchased from RollinMats previously (mentioned at the top of the article) and I can also attest that they have speedy delivery across Europe, shipping from Spain to Sweden took less than a week.

Check out the link at the bottom of this review to see other examples.

You can purchase these mats and mats for other games here: https://www.rollinmats.com/products/kingdom-death-monster-mat-70108

If you are not sure if a mat has been updated or not to the new design, please do use their contact page, they've been nothing but excellent people throughout this.