The plastic can't stand folding. Unless you always play at your own place, you'll have trouble keeping the mini's from falling off due to the bobbling. Would have been five stars had it been printed on cloth or some other material that doesn't suffer from folding it/rolling it up.

Platinum (aka 'WOOHOO!') aspect: The ship has awesome details, especially in the coloring of the weathered decking, the netting and its shadows, straw in the cargo hold, etc. It looks real.

Gold (aka 'Why You Buy') aspect: If there's a water adventure, this is pretty indispensable.

Electrum (aka 'Cool But Weird') aspect: Lifeboats. Nice to have included, but it might be hard getting the one on the 2nd level up to the sea.

Silver (aka 'The Eh') aspect: I'm all for a sea campaign, but the water-side isn't that useful without a ship to sail on it. With the ship on the other side, you'd have to either make or buy your own ship to use it. And that'd defeat the point of buying this mat in the first place. Instead, give us a little island, jungle lagoon, grotto, etc. Something for the lifeboats to go to.

Copper (aka 'Waste of Space'} aspect: Cannons?! The crew bunks should be where the cannons are and a galley or a brig should be where the beds are.

Gem Idea: Make more ships out of this material, even if just the top deck, for sea battles.

The detail of this map is great. Having all layers of the ship displayed means I can run combat at different levels of the ship without issues. As for the cannons I have simply told players that they are ballistas or to treat them as cargo. They in no way prevent me from using the map. I have used both dry and wet erase makers and both come off pretty well, but if you get too much ink in the map folds it can be a little harder to remove. My only reason for not giving this product 5 stars is that the map came folded up. It took several days of storing the map flat with books on top to get it to stay flat, but the folded sections take away from the over all effect of the ship. I really wish their was some way to order flip maps that are NOT folded even if it cost extra to ship.

Although not the same layout as the 'Sea Wyvern', I found this map to be useful in multiple ways. First, I used it for enemy pirate ships (of which there are several in the adventure path) and I used the flip side (which is simply a large stretch of water) to place a cutout map of the Sea Wyvern for all nautical encounters. Very useful, as it looks much better than a plain battle map. As with several of the flip-maps, the plain side is actually more useful than the detailed side.

Yeah, I ordered this one without really taking a close look at it. It is still a cool looking map, but I can't use it in my campaign because of the cannons.

Is this the same layout as used for STAP, The Sea Wyvren? Looks similar in the tiny little preview. Not that it's a bad thing...as I've used and abused that pull out....

FFB