Introduction: Carcassonne: Colony

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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.

Step 1: Make Your Own! (if You're Into That Kind of Thing)

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.