Terraforming Mars 3d Tiles Painted

[Athenasby Regalado]

OKnot really painted painted, but touched up. I went in on the Terraforming Mars 3D tiles kickstarter that shipped earlier this year, and while the terrain markers for this game looked pretty cool as sculpted, they were missing somthing.

The wrinkle here is that your engine can serve you supremely well for two-thirds of the game and then suddenly just... stall out. For instance, ramping up heat production is great. Every player has the ability to spend eight heat cubes to raise the global Martian temperature by 1 degree Celsius, so if you're earning five new heat cubes a turn, and your opponents earn only one each, it's a good strategy to raise the temperature quickly. (Raising the temperature not only gets you close to game's end, it also boosts your total points/MegaCredits level.)

Making each play even more different is the fact that players have a "corporation card" outlining their own company's specialties. These can have a dramatic effect on gameplay. For instance, take the heat example above; in one of my games, my corporation had the ability to spend heat cubes as money, so building an insane heat-cube engine did actually pay me dividends throughout the game. Given the sheer strategic variety on offer in Terraforming Mars, the corporations can provide some useful guidance in developing your initial resources.

The game's card-based engine-building combines with a spatial, hex-covered map of Mars on the game board, which is the other main source of points. Certain cards let you construct ocean tiles or city tiles or greenery tiles, which in turn provide points and other bonuses (playing a greenery tile, for instance, also lets you boost the atmospheric oxygen level for one percent). At game end, controlling cities and the green space around them results in points, and where you place your tiles matters.

Thus, at the end of the game, all players have a nice tableau of technologies and buildings played before them, while jointly watching the surface of Mars undergo a visual transformation. The total effect is strongly thematic; you can see Mars changing as money and resources are spent to improve it.

The game isn't perfect, of course, and it's certainly not for everyone. As discussed above, the visual design isn't Terraforming Mars' strength, but the real issues that will break this one for some people are the length and the complexity.

Let's talk length. My first game, with four new players, took a whopping 3.5 hours. The first 2.5 hours were terrific fun; the last hour devolved into the "come on, just play already" zone. This playtime will of course come down on future plays, but be warned that learning can go slowly, and the game is unlikely to ever get below two hours, no matter how many people play. (The game also comes with a huge second stack of cards that focus only on the economy and technology, not direct terraforming; they can add significantly to the game's length and complexity.)

As far as complexity, the rules are straightforward, but the combined effects of all played cards can get tricky to remember and to calculate as the game progresses. By game end, play tends to slow as each player is forced to consider card prerequisites, the Martian map, played effects, personal actions, awards and milestones, card "tags," and more. When Terraforming Mars ends, steam should be rising from every player's head under the burden of all this calculation.

The Settlers of Catan designed by Klaus Teuber is an award-winning strategy game where players collect resources and use them to build roads, settlements and cities on their way to victory. The board itself is variable, making each game a little different from the next.

We are a couple who often host game nights with our flat. We have seen custom Catan sets made frequently and decided we wanted to make our own custom designed, 3D printed and Painted set to make the game more immersive.

We designed custom 3D game pieces in Blender version 2.79, an open source free CAD program. If you haven't heard of it, we highly recommend you check it out! However that is beyond the scope of this Instructable. Download Blender here:

One of the files we have included for you is a blank hex tile. You don't need to print it but if you decide to learn Blender or already know a CAD program, you can use it it build your own custom tiles on top of.

When a 3D print is finished printing there are often some small issues with the part that need to be addressed including stringing and a flared base. The severity of these issues depend on how well tuned your printer is.

A flared base is when the bottom few layers of the print flare outwards and are larger than they should be. This occurs when the bed is high and/or the bottom layer flow rate is too high. Bed/nozzle temperature also has an effect. We deliberately use settings like this to increase the print's adhesion to the print-surface. We would rather have a few minutes of post processing to do on the parts than have a multi-hour print fall of the bed and fail!

Washes are a technique used in model painting that when applied to selective parts of a model with a small brush and allowed to flow along lines and gaps create a look of depth and shadow where the detail is too small to have its own shadow.

You can buy premade washes for painting models available here. However, since we were not too worried about attention to detail we mixed acrylic paint with tap water and used that instead. We used a 2:1 ratio of water:paint e.g. 1 of teaspoon paint to 2 teaspoons of water. However, feel free to add more or less water as desired, we printed some extras of models and tiles so we could test things like this.

Using a soft brush dip the paintbrush into the wash and cover the parts of your model/tile you want to have shadow detail. For the cities the whole model was painted with a black wash, but for the settlement, only the ground area was painted to avoid the houses showing up too dark. After application use a tissue or paper towel to wipe off the excess. You should be left with shadows and dark areas around crevices.

The second step for washing the parts is to wipe off the excess wash. Wipe the model with tissue paper, therefore removing the wash from the high areas of the model and leaves the dark shaded crevices.

To paint the player colours we decided to only paint the roof of the cities and settlements so that the detail from the wash and dry brushing was maintained. The player colours were based on the colours used in the original Catan. We used two coats of acrylic paint for each city, settlement and road.

Once everything was complete we assembled the whole board to see how it looked as a fully formed game. We think the 3D pieces and the range of colours brings a lot more depth to the game and makes it a lot more visually appealing. We are excited to try it out for the next game night!

Hi everyone! its been a long time but we've finally made the water tiles for the set.

Using the same techniques described above, the base coat for the water was a dark blue, rocky edge was a mixture of light and dark grey, and the docks were a medium brown. I used two layers of paint for everything. I used a black wash, and white paint highlights for everything. Here are some pictures of the process! :)

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