Boardgame Quick-Tip: Edging those Tiles

So I was setting up another game of Brimstone the other day and something struck my eye. I notice it with every boardgame with similar kinds of cardboard map tiles (Ravenloft, Doom, etc.), and that is the edges of those cardboard tiles that you pop out of the big templates. They're so bright white. The rest of the tile has nice art on it but I feel like the unpainted edges really detract from the effectiveness of the art on the tile. Everything is outlined by this glaring white line on the map, which is distracting.

So what do you do about it? Well, if you backed the Kickstarter for Shadows of Brimstone you've already signed yourself up for a boatload of crafting, miniature building, and painting, so why not do a little more work to really bring it home? That's right, I'm talking about edging each of those cardboard tiles to make them black and not so outlandishly bright.

Here's what you'll need:

1) A Sharpie.

I prefer the chiseled-edge kind of Sharpie, but it doesn't really matter which one you get because you'll totally be using it up and will have to get a second to get through all the tiles in the Core Sets. All you need to do is drag it across the edges of each and every tile (but you don't need to do it on the connecting sections. Like so:

Its an easy enough task to even pass off to your kids, if you have some and are so inclined. They might as well be doing something besides trying to eat all the screws from your Ikea furniture or whatever kids do these days. I'll be honest, everything I know about kids I learned from warnings on package labels.

It doesn't take that long really but it really tones down the edges.

I used the flash on the camera so the edges don't look great in that pic, but at least you can see the difference between that and the first picture. In real life they look completely black. They really look great on the table under standard lighting, and help keep the focus of your eye on the tile artwork and miniatures.