In a galaxy far, far away . . .

A long time ago . . . well more like a few weeks ago, I got in an order from Mantic with some prizes for the War Kings IV GT (and a great time was had by all). By what happened to be a lucky mistake, they mispacked the terrain crate templates I ordered. Instead of getting the Fantasy Templates, I instead received a set of the Sci-Fi templates.

As I was taking the pictures (an no, I did not remember to take one before I opened the bag holding everything), I noticed something on the back

This made me very happy. Not even so much due to the cheesy pun (and I love cheesy puns!) but it harkened back to the 1st edition days when everything came in VCR style boxes - and there was a joke in the fine print of every package. The last time I saw one was almost four years ago, on the Nightstalker fiends package (I posted that April 11, 2019).

This was something they slipped in quietly on all their early packaging, but unfortunately it seemed to be a bit too quiet. No one knew it was there. The first time I saw one I laughed, and then went back through all the old packages I had to find others, and there was a joke on every one.

But I guess it just got to much to come up with new gags for every product, especially when no one ever saw them (because they, like any great Easter egg, loses so much if you tell everyone it is there. So it was a joy seeing this (and I still occasionally look for gags - and maybe this is what makes this one so precious, because they are so rare now).

My initial reaction was crap, but then I realized they actually may be useful. I was planning on using some of the sci-fi trees to replace the aquarium plants on my elf board, so why not replace the forest templates with sci-fi ones.

So what do these sci-fi templates look like? There are three building templates, and three forest ones. (Instead of difficult ones, they use things like actual craters!).

When I first looked at these, I just thought they used the same pattern as the fantasy ones - until I checked and saw that no, these are different shapes. Very close in size, but not identical.

So I took some comparison photos of each with the closest fantasy version. (2, showing each on top of the other)

Of course the triangle building/ruin template has no counterpart. The square building is the same size as the fantasy one, but the smaller building is about 25% smaller than the fantasy one.