Starfinder Flip-Mat: Basic Starfield [RPG]

One of the things that players and GMs who are familiar with Pathfinder but new to Starfinder have to prepared for is that starship combat uses hex-based movement rather than square-based movement.  That means you need new tactical grids!  There are a lot of other RPGs and miniatures games that use hex mats, but in lieu of buying one of those, you can pick up the un-excitingly named Basic Starfield.

I've used this flip-mat for a handful of starship combats now, and there's some things to like about it.  First, it's big (27x39 inches, or the same size as Pathfinder's series of "Bigger . . ." flip-mats).  Second, like all Paizo flip-mats, it's a durable product: you can fold and unfold it a bazillion times and don't have to worry about it ripping.  Third, (at least in theory), you can use pretty much any marker on it: wet, dry, or even permanent.  This reduces the stress of realizing you've screwed up your flip-mat forever by grabbing the wrong marker.  However, as some posts in the product page note, the background is so dark that it's really hard to draw on it and have the drawing be visible (unless you had one of those weird white markers).  When I've run Starfinder Society scenarios that have obstacles like asteroids, I've had to use blu-tack and pop can tabs because drawing stuff in just isn't practical.

One side of the map is what the packaging refers to as "a starlit void in deep space", and that's pretty fair: it's basically a dark black background speckled with tiny white dots to represent stars.  In a sense, it's bland, but space . .  . is mostly empty, so I can't really blame the designer too much. The other side is pretty much the same but for patches of "the brilliant radiance of a nebula."  The nebula is too vague and ill-defined to really serve as any sort of "terrain feature" for starship combat, and the patches are so few that it's easy to forget they're there.  If I had my druthers, the flip-side would have something more interesting--some asteroid fields, a moon, the curvature on one end of a planet, etc.

Overall, for basic starship combat, the Basic Starfield is bland but serviceable.  If you already have a hex grid from some other source, your starship combats will not be noticeably improved by this flip-mat; but if you don't have a substitute, this product is better than nothing.