TerraTactician Expandoria

About the game

TerraTactician Expandoria is a tile-placing strategy game on a hexagonal map. You draw cards from a hand, each one a type of terrain or building, and put the tile on the board in 3D, where you can turn and zoom the camera freely. What makes it a puzzle is that placement is everything: wheat grows best in a cluster of nine, windmills turn the wheat around them into more food but the wind is blocked by trees, houses want neighbours but not too many, bees look for flowers and forests, and quarries need a stone tile beside them, and a bigger stone tile pays more.

The game keeps score in three resources, food, money and materials. In the challenge mode you play against the clock: every round has a target for each resource, and the targets only grow, so a layout that worked in round three will not be enough in round ten. Zen mode takes the clock away and advances when you reach the target, which is the relaxed way to learn how the tiles interact. In Creative mode there are no goals at all, only an inventory and a landscape to design.

The game was made by an open-source team, comes with an interactive tutorial that explains the camera, the first tiles and the rewards you collect from your buildings, and is translated into many languages. The look is soft and colourful, and the music is a gentle set of tracks that play in the background.

Playing it here

Click Play, then click once inside the game and wait for it to load (the game is large, about 40 MB, and downloads once). Settings and progress are kept in this browser. It uses 3D graphics, so a computer with working graphics acceleration helps; if it runs slowly, open the settings and lower the shadows or turn off animations. The tutorial is the first thing to try: it is in the campaign section of the menu and teaches the camera first. The in-game ambient sounds of the original game are replaced by silence in this version.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Read the tile descriptions. Every tile explains what it needs. The game is mostly about reading them and arranging tiles so that they feed each other: wheat next to windmills, bees near forests, quarries touching stone.

Take the rewards. Small objects appear above your buildings as they produce; clicking them collects a reward, and they are worth the click.

Plan for the next round. The targets only go up. Leave room to expand and avoid boxing in a cluster that wants to grow.

Use Zen mode to experiment. There is no time pressure there, so you can try different layouts and see what each tile does.

Credits and licence

TerraTactician Expandoria was made by the terratactician-expandoria developers and is released under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later. The tile art and icons are theirs under CC BY-SA 4.0, the 3D models and many sounds are by Kenney (CC0) and the Moai model is by Thimira (CC BY 4.0). The music is by Alexander Nakarada (CC BY 4.0): for this site the tracks were re-encoded at a lower bit rate to shorten the download. The ambient sounds of the original (taken from a site whose licence we could not confirm) were replaced with silence, and the buttons that opened the project's web site were removed. The complete licence texts, the source of this build, the patch and the build script are linked from this page.