Spirit Island 3D Board (Modular)

This is a 3D modular board system for Spirit Island. It allows players to make custom boards and enjoy raised terrain.

As a kid, I loved the look of 3D Catan tiles. I wanted to make something similar for Spirit Island, one of my favorite board games. However, the Spirit Island boards are too large to print comfortably on most 3D printers and would be awkward to transport. After playing around a bit with aperiodic monotiles, I realized that the irregular shape of the tiles is perfect for representing the organic boundaries of terrain in a game like Spirit Island. The number of adjacencies for each tile is comparable to those on the official boards, and I recommend counting tiles that touch at the corners as adjacent.

The 3D tiles add extra time to set up, and getting the tesselation right can take some practice. I recommend building the board first, then assigning setup tokens and placing oceans once you have something that tesselates well. I've included some impassible "snow-capped peak" tiles that you can use to compensate for mistakes.

Each tile has a small pocket where you put a setup token that indicates both what starts on that tile and the starting board to which it belongs. The 1, 2, and 3 tokens should all be adjacent to the ocean if you want a similar experience to the base game. Or just put things wherever you want; it will change the difficulty, but that isn't necessarily bad.

I've included versions with and without cacti and ships in case you cannot print in multiple colors. The tiles are designed to minimize the filament changes required so that each layer only needs one color.