Carcassonne: Colony

In the year 23XX, 10 years after the end of the devastating Colony Wars, a discovery has been made. A new planet, and with it the promise of a new life, new riches, and new opportunities. It is a harsh and demanding world, but fortune favors the bold...

The few times I've had my folks over to my little condo, I fear I might've bored them to tears. I got the notion that some kind of board game might fix that next time. Naturally, I wanted to make one before I bought one.

Among others, I found Carcassonne. For those not in the know, it's a German tile game where you build a medieval landscape and claim features as they're created. People like to make their own sets, but I was surprised to see that there weren't any sci-fi variants anywhere. It was clear what I had to do.

• Plays exactly the same as classic Carcassonne, just with more self-satisfying sci-fi references.
• Comes with a free Terraform (rivers) expansion!
• I'm not good with textures and I mostly did it for myself, so I borrowed most of the textures. Also, I've been hyped as hell over the upcoming Homeworld prequel, Shipbreakers.
  • The desert fields are a satellite photo of the Painted Desert in Arizona, processed to hell in GIMP to match the rest better.
  • The city textures were tiled from a piece of the Hiigaran Battlecruiser from Homeworld 2, with simplified colors and features tweaked to fill in unsightly gaps.
  • The roads were traced by hand, but initially textured with a mishmash of satellite photos of various airstrips.
  • The water was just a blue layer overlaid on the desert texture and dotted with vegetation using a stock GIMP brush.
  • The back face was partially traced from a photo of Mars and, of course, the signature "C" of the series.

• I couldn't get a color printer of my own to work, so I got it professionally done.

• The tiles are made from regular mat board from the craft store. I was afraid it'd be too thin, but it worked out almost perfectly. The only problem is it was surprisingly hard to cut.

• In a move that I'm sure has originalists crying "Heresy!" I didn't use the classic Meeple as markers. Instead, I went with companies like you'd see investing in a civil colony's development. Again, I borrowed a bit of Homeworld assets until I can generate something else.

• Also comes with a foam-core carrying case/dispenser. I thought about painting it, but I think I've been looking at the plain black for too long to change my mind.
• I had enough mat board left over to make a little scoring table. I even managed to get it to fold up and fit inside the dispenser for carrying.

And here's where I'll leave the files in case someone decides they want to make their own. A few things I should point out, though:

• The classic River expansion has, as the name implies, a little river flowing through fields. That looked too small for a planetary sci-fi setting, so I made them take up almost the whole tile edge to make it look more like a terraformed lake.
  • I realized towards the end that I goofed and forgot to leave enough room in some tiles to connect fields. It should be okay everywhere except for some of the corner pieces; in those cases, just do me a favor and pretend there's a little nibble of land that connects the fields.
  • Since I'm stingy with my paper and like to get the most out of each print, I included some extra city pieces in the Terraform expansion.
  • Terraform 02 expansion coming soon-ish!
• The starting tile and expansions usually have a different colored back to help you find them. But I'm kinda lazy and didn't make a whole new printout, so I just colored them with Copic markers.