"No, I did not see you playing with your dolls again, sir!"

I did it. I finally sold out. I went and bought brand-name dungeon tiles -for tiling my dungeons. I had been so good up until this point, going with indie-brands like Fat Dragon, hand-crafting my floor tiles from printouts glued to foamcore, and my overlays glued to discarded pizza boxes (how stereotypically nerdy is that!?) I had an addiction. I piled my closet with discarded pizza, cereal and beer boxes to use as backing for my bootleg tiles with which I could lay down cardstock complexes to draw my players into the game and quell questions like, "wait... where's the balcony again?"

My players loved the added richness. I loved designing and laying out little sets... and it seemed so cheap! Just $2 for many of the Fat Dragon tile sets. Cheaper when they were bundled for charities like Gamers Help Haiti. But the indie sets had hidden costs. Time lost, rooms littered with discarded strips of Cheerios box, and the toner. Aye, there's the rub; toner, as one of the most expensive substances on earth, adds an enormous hidden cost to the papercraft hobby. So, when I realized that I could purchase not one, but two master sets of industry-standard tiles from Amazon for $27 with free shipping, my heart was turned.

The new tiles don't warp with humidity. They don't delaminate. They're even shiny! Shiny! I'm afraid I've taken the first step on a dark path that may have dire consequences for our bathroom floor.