Heard about this wonderful tile based solution for the technology and policy advancements in Stellar Horizons created by Darrell Hanning (https://community.consimworld.com/user/darrell_hanning) that he shared over on BoardGameGulag (WARNING BGG LINK). The purpose of these is to allow the player to take the tile relevant to each tech and policy gained and be able to keep the effects chit by their faction board. This way your bonuses are much easier to keep up with than referring back to the large tech-tree or policy board. These even help with those using faction sheets to check each gain and percentage change (as I am).
While his set contains two sets of tech tiles per page and five sets of policy tiles, I only needed a single set for playing solo. So after I managed to track down a copy of his PDF, I edited the layout in Photoshop to get a single set of tiles (both tech and policy) onto a single sheet of letter sized labels or paper. If you’re not playing solo, you’d need to print seven sets (or as many as you have players). To get a full seven sets from the Darrell’s version you’d need six sheets and have extra tiles left over. I bumped up their size as well just a bit to make better use of the full sheet available.
I printed mine on these wonderful labels from Amazon. They don’t smear or tear very easily at all and have a nice coated finish. I stuck the sheet to a piece of letter sized chipboard and then cut them with a utility knife and rotary cutter.
To make setup easier, I wrote the grid location of the tech tree counters with coordinated Sharpie color. Empty locations in a grid row are skipped for consistency, but this should make them easier to lay out on the board. Since I’m playing solo, it works best for me to just put all the markers on their board locations, then remove them to my faction sheet as I acquire them. This way I don’t have to track with faction markers the techs acquired. It would be nice if the cost of the tech were on the front of the counters too, but it’s simple enough to peek under them.
Thanks to Darrell for this excellent idea! All credit belongs to him and any mistakes made on my version of his counters is solely my fault. Be sure to thank him either here on on other sites if you find these useful.
