WarLock Tiles: Stairs & Ladders and EZ Clips Review - WizKids Prepainted Miniature Terrain.

This video is brought to you by The Deck of Many and their Heckna 5e campaign setting book, on Kickstarter now and it's brought to you by the Roll for Combat officially-licensed Paizo podcast beginning their new Agents of Edgewatch adventure! Hello and welcome back to the Gallant Goblin! Today we’re taking a look at the Stairs & Ladders expansion for the WizKids WarLock Tiles collection.

This set promises to add some verticality to your build. I’m really excited to see how it works! Each of these initial WarLock Tiles expansion kits has an MSRP of $49.99 and this set is available now. We’re also taking a look at the new WarLock Tiles EZ clips! The original clips work just fine and are extremely sturdy, but depending on the method you used to connect two tiles, they could be a little rough on the fingertips.

These alternate clips promise to alleviate that particular problem. So we’ll use them today and see how they work! But otherwise, let’s open this set up and take a closer look. First, let’s see what’s included. The stairs are divided into wood and stone, matching the town and dungeon starter sets respectively.

For each material type, you get two staircases with an attached landing, two standalone staircases, two 5-foot landings, and two 10-foot landings. There are also two stone spiral staircases, two short ladders, and two long ladders. Let’s talk about the ladders first.

They’re designed with little notches that allow you to slip a small- or medium-based mini into them, so you can remember who’s in the process of climbing to safety when that roper attacks. The long ladders have three notches for a mini, while the short ladders only have one.

Most of the Icons of the Realms minis seem to fit into the slots just fine. Depending on the exact shape and size of the mini, some may slot in better than others. I did find it was a little bit more difficult to get the Nolzur’s or the premium minis to fit in the slot.

Their bases are slightly less thick and there's that little bit of terrain that they stand on that can sometimes get in the way. Again, some fit better than others. It’s probably beyond the scope of this project, but I would have loved to have seen if the ladders had come with those little rubber booties at the end to keep them in place more easily.

As it is, they can be a little bit precarious, so you’re just going to have to be a little careful. The staircases also have a slot included on one of the stairs so you can put the base of a mini inside which is great for when your players end their turn on the staircase.

I didn’t have a problem fitting any of the small or medium sized based minis into the stair slot. The landings are where things get really interesting and I’ve been spending some time trying to really wrap my head around them. Each landing comes in three pieces that allow you to adjust their height.

You can rearrange the various pieces to get the landings at just the height you want for that particular arrangement. The various types of stairs have slightly different heights, but they all match up to one of the various adjustable heights of the landings.

So you can mix and match to find a lot of different configurations to keep things interesting. You can even make yourself a very long staircase like this if you want. It’s a very versatile collection of pieces. When I first saw this set I was wondering if it would encourage setting up stackable rooms, but it doesn’t really seem like it’s designed for that purpose.

Generally, if you had a multilevel building, you would just have each floor as a separate WarLock terrain map all kind of next to each other. Even if you did have stackable rooms, you’d have to eventually separate them in order to get at the minis for the map to be functional.

But what you can do is use the landings to boost your rooms up a bit. You can use this to more intuitively show which rooms are on the second floor or maybe to represent small houses on stilts near a coastline perhaps. Anything that breathes some life and character into a build is always appreciated in my book.

And of course the stairs and ladders are also useful if you have other kinds of maps or terrain, like Dwarven Forge. Like all the WarLock Tiles, the stairs and ladders arrive painted and ready to use out of the box. Now let’s talk about the EZ Clips, which really improve the WarLock Tiles experience in my book.

The original clips are extremely sturdy and hold the tiles together really tightly, but the downside is that they’re a little tough— a little rough on the fingers to work with. If you watched my original review, you saw me saying that you may want to bust out a pair of pliers if you have to remove a bunch of the clips from a set of tiles because it really does get rough on your fingertips.

Even connecting two tiles together like this requires a fair bit of muscle with the old tile clips like this, but the EZ clips fit together much more easily like that. They’re a bit more pliable, which makes them far easier to work with. Putting two tiles together, putting the clips in, and taking the clips out is just so much easier, and as far as I can tell, they hold the tiles together just as well.

Here’s a room held together by the original WarLock clips. Then I replaced all the clips with the EZ clips and, as you can see, there’s no real discernible difference. They still seem plenty sturdy as well. I don’t expect any of these to break on me.

Going forward, I’m planning to use just the EZ Clips exclusively. You can get a set of 100 of the new EZ clips for about $5 and they should be available in October 2020. Stairs & Ladders is a great set and a logical expansion for your WarLock Tiles sets.

They managed to pack a bunch of versatility with the adjustable landings that you can use as just landings or as platforms, or cabinets, or stilts, or stages, or extensions of your staircases. The ladders are a fun addition as well, and I very much appreciate the thought that went into having these work with your minis.

Having a spot for your mini to stand on the stairs or on the ladders really makes the pieces actually functional in your encounters and not just set dressing. The Stairs & Ladders expansion set is available now, and the EZ clips should be hitting store shelves in the coming weeks.

We talked about some of the future WarLock Tiles sets coming over the next year or so in our news video which you can watch by clicking that little "i" in the corner of your screen. But coming up soon, we have Dungeon Tiles II: Full Height Stone Walls and Town and Village Tiles II: Full Height Plaster Walls.

These will add two-inch tall walls to your builds in lieu of the original one-inch walls. The wall height is more-or-less a matter of taste, but I know several of you were waiting for the full height walls to dive into the system. Each of these sets will come in two varieties, a full version with floors and an expansion version with just the walls, doors, and accessories for those of you who don’t need more floors.

We’ll talk more about those sets when we receive them but they should be available in October as well. Let me know what you think about the Stairs & Ladders expansion and the EZ clips in the comments section down below. Let me quickly share with you something cool we have coming out very soon here! Kill Bhaal is our next adventure coming out on DMsGuild.com on October 2.

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