Town Square is the brand new pre-painted WarLock Tiles set from WizKids, bringing cobblestone roads and flagstone paths/sidewalks to life. With over 70 tiles included in the set, Dungeon Masters will be able to build out winding roads, flagstone paths that wrap around buildings or marketplace spaces. Note that this set includes the WarLock EZ clips, rather than the standard clips, which are slightly softer and easier to use. However, is this 4D settings set for all D&D / Pathfinder players? Let’s find out!
Until now WarLock Tiles have focused on bringing inside locations to “4D” life. With caverns, sewers and more being released over the next year, Town Square is the first set to be an outdoors location. Due to this focus on the spaces between buildings the set doesn’t include any wall pieces, being floor tiles plus a few accessories. That being said, Town Square offers 296 square inches of flooring, which is vastly higher than in the original Town & Village set where there was only 96 square inches.
A huge selling point of the WarLock Tiles sets to date has been that the floor tiles have been double sided. Alas, this is not the case for the Town Square set. On the reverse of the tiles is simply flat black plastic, with the WizKids logo embossed. The reasoning behind this is that there is a noticeable height difference between the cobblestone and flagstone, with many tiles included in the set featuring both. Therefore, these tiles wouldn’t sit flat, nor flush, with others if they were to be flipped upside down. Whilst the logic stands it is still somewhat of a disappointment, and a range of the tiles which feature solely flagstone or cobblestone could have been double sided.
Two terrain types are still included in Town Square though, with the cobblestone and flagstone tiles, so the variety remains. Putting the obvious uses of roads and paths aside these two new terrain types open up other opportunities. Cobblestone works perfectly well with the stone walls of the Dungeon Tiles sets to give a room a visually different floor surface. Going above this players can use a mixture of the flagstone tiles and standard stone floor tiles in patterns to give rooms an interesting layout. There’s already plenty of opportunity to have encounters flood out onto the streets but with these additional uses the set can even bring some variety inside.
The biggest oversight with this set is obvious as soon as you attempt to build a small town area with buildings. Being all 2” by 2” tiles the grid aligns perfectly with the tiles used for the inside of the buildings. This sounds awesome until you realise that the thick outside walls of buildings from the base sets add around an inch on the outside of buildings. With no 1 inch tiles players must resort to either sitting buildings on top of the Town Square tiles or some of the Town Square tiles around the building need to be shifted by an inch. There are issues with these methods, as covering tiles wastes those that are hidden underneath and shifting sees a few tiles jutting off the side of the otherwise nicely squared build.
We are hopefully getting a 1 inch tile set soon for the base sets which will alleviate much of this. Considering the 1 inch sets aren’t even available yet it just makes it worse that some 2” by 1” or 1 inch Town Square tiles weren’t included. Another less impactful emission from the Town Square set, which have been included in all other tile sets, are end caps. Whether these would be used as much as with the base sets isn’t certain but the option of end caps would have been nice.
As a comparison to the wooden plank/stone floor terrain tiles seen in the base sets, it is harder to see the 1 inch grid on these new terrain types. Out of the two the grid on the flagstone tiles is easier to see. Thankfully, this isn’t to the extent that the grid is gone, being very much usable for encounters – just being more subtle than before. Interestingly the images on the box and what I had previously seen online made the colour of the flagstone look lighter than they are in reality. It pops nicely from the dark grey of the cobblestone still, so there is no issue with it being a more muted shade.
In addition to the tiles and EZ clips, included in the box are a range of accessories. These are awesome flair items – including three lamp posts to a range of grates and thin tile flagstone accent pieces. These items instantly bring that touch of believability to the crafted environments, taking flat road locations and adding visual variety. The grates come in three sizes. The square shaped grate is hinged, allowing the grate to be opened. This opens up the opportunity for players to climb down into a sewer below, or perhaps is where a range of monsters spawn from. The other two grate options are a base with a grate that sits on top. While not quite as cool to use as the opening hinged grate, these still offer DMs the ability to visibly show if something is opened or closed, with one being a large size – covering more than an inch space.
The lamp posts were a concern of mine, though thankfully they are not top heavy. They will fall over if knocked but otherwise there is no issue of them staying upright, even when placed on the less than flat cobblestone tiles. The lamps themselves are separate, hooking onto the posts – so you could even remove them and set up an encounter with bandits who are stealing the swinging lamps.
The final accessories are a range of thin tiles with flagstone brick patterns, which sit on top of the regular tiles. The thin height, of just over a millimeter or two, means they don’t interrupt the flow of the regular tiles, just adding patterns to areas, with the square accent tile being the same size (2” by 2”) as the WarLock Tiles. The only issue with all of these accessories is there is no special way to attach them, such as magnets. If you want to move the build around or just expect they might get nudged you’ll have to resort to something like Blu Tack to hold them in place.
With the base sets Town & Village I/II or Dungeon Tiles I/II gamers could get a single set and either start their WarLock Tiles journey or happily use them with nothing extra to create small scenarios. Town Square is the first set that really feels like it is not aimed towards everyone, firmly aimed at those with multiples of the base sets and willing to instantly purchase additional Town Square sets. A decent small outside town area can be created with a single set, enough for a marketplace. It’s not quite enough to create longer road sections, flanked by numerous buildings – which could bring a small section of a town to 3D life. This isn’t necessarily an issue with the set itself but it is something to be aware of. Simply the pieces you would need a lot of, the straight half and half designed tiles, would run out quickly.
Despite some flaws and oversights, there is no getting around that the WarLock Tiles Town Square set offers glorious pre-painted 3D terrain for your D&D and/or Pathfinder games. Not only do the tiles make scenes look visually stunning, the accessories only enhance them. If you are committed to the 4D settings line of WarLock Tiles then getting multiple sets reduces the major issues with the set, with bigger scenes able to be built and it not being as much of an issue to build tiles on top of other tiles. Unfortunately, at least for now, not having 1 inch tiles does pose issues when building. For those looking more to dabble with 3D terrain it is far easier to recommend the WarLock Tiles base sets, as they will probably get more use. Still, this is another exciting product in the WarLock Tiles line and it only increases the hype for future releases.
(Editor’s Note: The WarLock Tiles Town & Village – Town Square set was provided to us by Asmodee for the review. The set is currently available from local board game stores! Find your local store here.)
