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I ordered this mat, 4x4 'Urban Zone' mat - https://tablewar.com/collections/fatmats/products/4x4urbanzone-10mm

It's supposed to look like this



or this


or this


But what they sent me was


While they did eventually offer me a partial refund (the $60 for the mat, I had to eat the shipping, and I had to cut up a corner of the mat to destroy it), they also argued with me that there was nothing wrong with the mat I received.

The mats look very different under different lighting. All I can tell you is that the mats in our warehouse are the color you received and the designer confirmed that they are correct. I do not have a mat to send you that matches the box label (which always prints out differently than the mats due to CMYK coloring and the way they print on mats vs. paper)

My guess is they have an entire print run that failed and just don't want to admit it for some reason.

So yeah, never doing business with them again, and I caution all y'all about buying direct from them yourselves.

The mats look very different under different lighting. All I can tell you is that the mats in our warehouse are the color you received and the designer confirmed that they are correct.

That is dancing around the fact they look totally different than the website photos which were used to advertise the product.


I would open a credit card or paypal dispute for the shipping. That looks wildly different than what is advertised.

While it's true that different lighting will have an effect on how colors appear, that definitely looks like a bad color print. I wonder if they do their own printing or if they outsource it? I've seen something similar that delayed fulfillment on some custom MTG playmats that were printed by Ultra Pro: too much blue in the initial print run.

Yeah my old one is more of a "beige grey" for the Dropzone commander mat.

Not blue ink extravaganza

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
I wonder if they do their own printing or if they outsource it?

They outsource for sure. Between ordering and receivng, they sent me a newsletter that mentioned they just received a shipment from their printers in San Diego (they're in Chicago).

 Stevefamine wrote:
Yeah my old one is more of a "beige grey" for the Dropzone commander mat.

I can forgive a bad print run; it happens. Send me a correct one or just admit it and refund. But they insisted over and over again that there was aboslutely nothing wrong with the specific mat I received, it looks exactly like it's supposed to, it matches the product page, and I'm just being crazy. That's what's got me all upset with them. I experimented with different lighting trying to double check I wasn't crazy, and the closest I could get it to look was under a warm table that was practically orange and it was still plainly off color.

They should have refunded you the whole amount, including shipping. Why should you have to eat the cost of their mistake?

"Send us a picture to prove you destroyed it!"

WTF m8?

So they made you destroy it before they would send you a new one? They wouldn't exchange at all? Weird.

 Dagstyrr wrote:
So they made you destroy it before they would send you a new one? They wouldn't exchange at all? Weird.

It was for a refund of the cost of the mat.

I can see the thought process. If you sincerely believe your customer's complaint is baseless, then to avoid being what you consider scammed out of a mat, you insist on proof that the value and utility of the mat has been severely compromised.

A plan with two flaws, firstly it's horrible optics from a service point of view, and it's also clearly apparent to anyone with eyes that there's an actual problem here.

Add one more flaw to that plan: by only cutting off a corner of the mat, he can still use the rest of the mat and just plop a big terrain piece down to cover the missing corner (or even just tape it back together). Not that I'm saying you would really want to use such a mat where the color was so off, but sometimes you use what you have.

To me the mat was still perfectly usable color wise, perhaps darker than you would have liked, certainly doesn't match the photos, but still perfectly usable. Unless I had a specific reason for wanting it to be a different color/shade (if I was trying to color match it to an existing terrain collection or maybe if I was hoping to use it for photgraphed/videod batrep content, etc. where the darker color might not photograph as cleanly) I would have probably just said "ah well thats a bit disappointing" and kept it anyway.

That being said, their handling of the situation is pretty awful, they should have either let you keep the mat in exchange for a full refund, no "destruction" required (next time someone does ask you to destroy something to get a refund, ask around for someone with photoshop skills, I could have "destroyed" that mat for you digitally and they would be none the wiser) or sent you a return label to ship it back to them. In general I have found tablewars mats to be pretty awful and can't recommend them to anyone though, not so much because of printing/customer service issues, but because the designs of the mats themselves are very plain and low effort beginner-level tier photoshop hackjobs. Frontline Games mats, Deep Cut Studios, and PWork are the ones I usually recommend to people. Kraken Wargames also isn't bad but I find a lot of their mats are overproduced and maybe less than half of their designs are really usable without causing a weird logic issue with relation to the pseudo-3D effects they have on them.

chaos0xomega wrote:
if I was trying to color match it to an existing terrain collection

I was! The terrain in the TW product pictures are a papercraft set specifically for Dropzone Commander, the same set I and everyone I know that plays has. I was looking for a mat that matched it exactly like in the pictures. The one they sent is tonally off compared to the papercraft. We gave the mat a try yesterday, to see if maybe it wasn't so bad once you got units and buildings onto it but it wasn't. I still hate it.

Compare the below picture, with the exact same buildings as in their shots, from a professionally mass produced set, under the same lighting as the mat, to theirs and others pictures of the mat.

Looks like someone messed up when printing that Matt and now they trying to still shift that failed production run.

They could have updated their store with a Cyan variant limited edition of the matt you got alongside their normal CMYK matt.

Poor service thanks for the heads up.

Requesting destruction of a faulty product when replacing it is something I've run across before, though mostly in electronics and collectibles. It's both to ensure that the product is actually defective, and to ensure that a defective product doesn't wind up on the secondary market.

slyphic wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
if I was trying to color match it to an existing terrain collection

I was! The terrain in the TW product pictures are a papercraft set specifically for Dropzone Commander, the same set I and everyone I know that plays has. I was looking for a mat that matched it exactly like in the pictures. The one they sent is tonally off compared to the papercraft. We gave the mat a try yesterday, to see if maybe it wasn't so bad once you got units and buildings onto it but it wasn't. I still hate it.

Compare the below picture, with the exact same buildings as in their shots, from a professionally mass produced set, under the same lighting as the mat, to theirs and others pictures of the mat.

While it doesn't match the company photos exactly, it looks fine to me.

OK - colour is a tricky thing..... your whole shot mat DOES look bluer. Your cut piece (on MY screen) looks very similar to the "company" pic.

It's odd how in one picture, your matt looks blue, while in your other picture, the cut corner one, the matt looks the same as their advertisement pictures.

What's going on there?

Different lightning as he himself said. What we don't know is lightning tablewar has.

tneva82 wrote:
Different lightning as he himself said. What we don't know is lightning tablewar has.

Tablewars is using indoor lighting, while the OP is using the sun.

And then with the cut mat, it looks like that the OP is using indoor lighting.

I would have to see Tabelwars take a picture outside under the sun light, or the op take the cut matt and put it outside under the sunlight as well.

Right now, the sun light seems to be the issue here.

catbarf wrote:Requesting destruction of a faulty product when replacing it is something I've run across before, though mostly in electronics and collectibles. It's both to ensure that the product is actually defective, and to ensure that a defective product doesn't wind up on the secondary market.

Yes, same. I've had to cut the cords off stuff and post photos to get a replacement - it keeps me from having to ship them something broken, them from having to deal with something broken, as well as from me potentially reselling something that actually was OK. So I also don't think cutting off a section was a particularly weird request.


As a side note - I recently got my first mat from Urbanmatz? It was a little spendy, but it was absolutely beautiful and came incredible fast. I really like the mat I got.

 BuFFo wrote:
It's odd how in one picture, your matt looks blue, while in your other picture, the cut corner one, the matt looks the same as their advertisement pictures.

What's going on there?

Even in the cut picture its a lot darker than you'd expect, its just that everything behind it is also fairly dark which makes it look brighter and the OP mentioned it was under bright light. Blue dress/gold dress issue. It looks like TableWar might be photographing under some pretty unreasonably bright studio lights given how stark the shadows are in their pictures. Camera settings can go a long long way as well, but I'd be surprised if that was going on here.

I think regardless, it's not a great way to deal with an unhappy customer, particularly with something where its pretty plain to see where the disappointment comes from. It's probably not a product they can resell at this point so I get the desire to not lose a sale, but... well, there are better ways to handle it. Word of mouth and consumer trust is so important in this industry, it would take a lot for someone "scamming" you out of a mat to hurt in the long run, particularly when you consider that you're probably not getting another sale from the OP. At least make the effort to fix the issue once; take an in house picture of the replacement and see what it looks like when it arrives. Try to make it right. It pays off in the long run.

I am mildly curious how common this actually is with TableWar products. I bought a snow mat from them ages ago and its always kind of been more blue than I'd like and bluer than what I thought I ordered. Of all the mats I own its the one I'm least happy with as anything snow themed I put on it looks too white and makes the blue worse. I assumed it was a scale thing where at full size the blues stood out more but seeing this and a few other mats I'm curious if its a common problem or if they are designing these things around lighting they have that doesn't translate well elsewhere.

 BuFFo wrote:
It's odd how in one picture, your matt looks blue, while in your other picture, the cut corner one, the matt looks the same as their advertisement pictures.

What's going on there?

The picture where it looks closest to theirs, and I still think it ain't all that close, was under light that was practically orange. Unless I'm mood lighting for a dungeon, I've never played a wargame under those conditions. If that's what it takes to make it look right, then TW is pulling some deceptive gak.

 LunarSol wrote:

At least make the effort to fix the issue once; take an in house picture of the replacement and see what it looks like when it arrives. Try to make it right. It pays off in the long run.

I am mildly curious how common this actually is with TableWar products.

They were adamant that any mat they sent me would look exactly like what I had, that they all looked like that, which was exactly what the designer and artist intended it to look like. I just don't believe a word of it. Not with so many pictures of other people's prints of the same mat that look nothing like mine in any pictures.

This is the first TW mat I've owned though I've seen others which seemed fine. I've got a Deep Cut Studio mat that looks exactly as pictured, and that's the level of quality I was expecting. I've ordered their equivalent of this mat, 10mm SF urban city for Dropzone Commander, and I'll get some side-by-side pics before I sell it off for my shipping costs ($15) to a local Battletech player that's already called dibs.

Final followup on the Table War blue mat. Two weeks ago, I found an eBay auction for one of the mats, and the guy selling it's pics looked normal, and it was going for $30 all told, so I bought it.

It arrived last night.

https://i.imgur.com/C8DXL4l.jpg

It's not the lighting, Table War were just lying to me.

Well, that seems pretty definitive.

Wow, hard to argue there.

A picture truly worth a thousand words....

Still easier then GW. I got a FW Malcador which was oozing release fluid (I think?) They wouldn’t do a return since I had cut the excess resin off already. And before they would exchange it I had to go out of my way to pick up specific cleaning products to show that the fluid wouldn’t come out. In the end they told me to do some more stuff and at that point I said screw it, it’s not worth it.

Hmm yeah definitely gaslit you. And that, is an egregious business error. The kind where I easily learn from your experience and write them off completely.

Just nope.

Sorry you had to deal with that, and thank you for the heads up.

Were they at least polite with you or did they come across as “I don’t give a damn”

What were they thinking? Was it really worth to have their reputation damaged with silly action like this?