The DIY outlets sell a nifty clear hard polystyrene sheet 2mm thick, intended for interior glazing purposes, but also ideal for loose-covering mapsheets. It can be easily cut by the score and snap technique, unlike acrylic, which although arguably a superior material requires careful sawing with a fine-toothed blade. It is not particularly cheap: a 1200x600mm sheet, adequate to cover a magazine size game, costs a tenner. If treated with care should last for years and for me at least is an infinitely preferable alternative to sticking the map down with tape, double-bending the paper folds or any of the other crappy makeshift alternatives proposed by the publishers. To use glass for this purpose, as at least one American gamer would seem to do, is impractical and very dangerous, unless you use laminated glass with ground edges. In that case, questions of weight apart, the parallax effects should be interesting. Mounting mapsheets on a backing board is for me at least too time-consuming and tricky, and good card is expensive. If you still prefer this method, do not forget to fix a compensating sheet on the back of the board to avoid warping (and the consequent need of a plastic sheet to make the whole assembly lie flat). Photograph developers use rather slick acrylic tweezers with wide chamfered blades to handle prints. I have found these are ideal for picking up those ridiculously small counters from the too small hexes they are positioned on. Back to Perfidious Albion #100 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com