Pathfinder Flip-Mat: "City Streets" [RPG]

With some urban adventuring coming up soon for an adventure path I'm running, I was lucky enough to get for the holidays my first product in the Pathfinder Flip-Mat line: City Streets.  The mat is a good size for the gaming table: 2 feet wide and 2 1/2 feet long.  One side is blank with 1' squares, while the other side is, as the title would indicate, streets of a quasi-medieval city full of buildings, cobblestone roads, and sewer entrances.  The Flip-Mat is treated so that it can take equally wet erase, dry erase, and permanent markers, which is pretty cool.

On the whole though, I'm not particularly impressed.  Instead of a blank side, I would rather have another part of a city landscape with different types of buildings to keep things fresh--I have enough blank mats for game play.  The city streets side is pretty bland, as there's not a lot of interesting decor for the players to interact with--things like water barrels, wagons, refuse piles, and more would go far to giving this the feel of a real city street.  I'm not a fan of how the buildings are depicted; because it's a true top-down view, you can't see doors and windows, tell what the different buildings are supposed to be, or have characters burst into a building (because the designers left the roofs of the buildings on).  Unless you're really into rooftop adventuring (and even if you are, the grids don't extend to the roofs), I've seen other products of this sort done better and with more interesting features.  It's passable, but not up to the level of good.