The following review was originally posted at Roleplayers Chronicle and can be read in its entirety at http://roleplayerschronicle.com/?p=35263.

Your characters have checked out of the SciFi Bar, eaten at the SciFi Diner, and blown up the Reactor. It’s time to leave, and what better way than in the Type A Far Trader ? This is a well-depicted battlemat of a small two-level spaceship. Those familiar with the Traveller RPG will feel right at home, but this works well for any space-related gaming venue. The outside of the hull is included as well, perfect for scrabbling over the surface in zero-G or blasting away in the spaceport before struggling into the ship!

OVERALL

The Type A Far Trader is an excellent battlemat, allowing the players to indulge in mayhem on the inside or outside of a sci-fi spaceship. It is complete with an upper upper deck, lower deck, air raft bay, and top outer surface of the ship.

RATINGS

Publication Quality: 10 out of 10 Scrying Eye Games has done an excellent job of sizing the map segments across multiple pages. My suggestion for the best final result is to cut the white edges off after printing without scaling, since the original scale is set to one square equals five feet. Laminate the pieces, then use glossy tape on the butted edges so that, once assembled, nothing shifts or stains when players get excited and scatter snacks in their haste to sweep the decks with plasma weapons.

Visual Appeal: 10 out of 10 This map depicts an excellent environment for a high-quality sci-fi experience. There is a visually-appealing main cargo bay, with two levels of corridors, crew compartments, equipment storage areas, and nice tactical features. It also has a clean sci-fi look, just the sort of thing for a nice blaster pistol duel or neural net hacking job. The various levels can be used for game play whether the characters are with or without gravity or atmosphere.

Desire to Use: 9 out of 10 I’m more of a high fantasy player, but the next time I use a spaceship this battlemat will come into play! The Type A Far Trader “HIMS Easy Money” is the perfect place for aerospace intrigue and heroics, should you have even the slightest interest in the sci-fi genre, so grab your plasma rifle and blast away or just hurl a nice antimatter grenade across the cargo bay and seal your suit before the atmosphere blows!

Overall: 10 out of 10 The Type A Far Trader is an excellent addition to your sci-fi environments and a quality piece from Scrying Eye Games. This battlemat provides an excellent site for an encounter, or an appealing means of interplanetary propulsion for the characters or their foes.

Traveller players have long been familiar with the Type A Far Trader, it's a real workhorse of the star lanes in the far future... but here is a delightfully-detailed set of floorplans showing an entire ship in 25mm scale ready for you to print out (or visit a copy shop - these are beautiful enough to warrant getting a professional job done!) and use, especially if you use miniatures in your game.

One useful feature is that the OUTSIDE of the ship is included as well as the more usual deckplans of the interior. Maybe you could skirmish in space - a boarding action by some dastardly pirates to beat off, perhaps (or BE the dastardly pirates, your morals are your own affair!). Or maybe you want to leave port right now and customs officials, the repo man or whatever local disturbance has led to your hurried departure needs to be played out across your hull before you raise ship.

Or even, whilst this is NOT recommended, you may have occasion to go EVA when in Jump space. A fault in the Lanthanum grid might need attending to... or some other problem that a Referee dreams up... space rot eating your hull?

This is a ship to be proud of, your home from home in the spaceways... enjoy!