Cold Comfort is a simple area-control game about hospitality in the Yukon gold rush. We’ve been working on it for about two years now. And we think it’s pretty good.

Background: Life can be tough for a prospector in the Yukon: frozen soil, bitter weather, and slim pickings in the ground. Their only relief is a trip to Dawson City for hot soup, sharp tools, and top-grade hospitality. As frontier hoteliers, you and your opponents have sailed to the frozen north to offer respite for weary prospectors in exchange for a little of their hard-won gold. So build your hotels, fire up the hearths, and dish out some comfort in the cold.

Cold Comfort is a city-building game of hotel management. Players will earn money by hosting customers in their hotels, and score points by building up neighborhoods and keeping them full.

Printing-and-playing this will be more challenging that most of our games, but we have some helpful videos below. Of course, the ideal path would be to find a publisher who loves making things, but that’s hard to accomplish even in the best of times. Meanwhile we will just keep playing it and making it better.

Here are the files you’ll need to make your own copy of Cold Comfort

• Cold Comfort City Deck (30 tiles, 4 pages, v3.9 2/18/25)

• Cold Comfort Cards (Characters and Citizens, 2 Pages, v3.9 2/18/25)

• Cold Comfort Hotels (and scoring tokens, 2 Page, v3.9 2/18/25)

• Scoring Track (40 spaces, 1 page)

• Cold Comfort Rules (6 Pages, v4.0 9/7/25)

Making the Components:

The City Deck contains 30 tile cards that are 2.5” x 3.75”. You can print these on full-sheet labels and affix them to sturdy cardstock, then cut them down to size. That file also has one box label, since there was space for it.

The Cards file includes six player reference cards and twelve citizens. These cards are never shuffled, so you could make them like the tiles above, or use any other reasonable method.

The Hotels are small squares that you can affix to cardstock, and then cut to size. This file has two pages, in case you want to make your tiles double-sided, and it also includes art for scoring tokens if you need them.

The Scoring Track is a simple one-sheet board that you can print and affix to cardstock.

In addition to the components above, you will also need 36 matching dice, some money (tiny poker chips are best), and a ship token (literally any small object will do). If you are using the citizen rules, you’ll also need six tokens and twelve dice of various colors, as described on the cards.

Here are some of our how-to videos, related to this project.

• Video: Cold Comfort 1 (Building 72 hotels - note that this method is NOT right for the files above)

• Video: Cold Comfort 2 (Building the City Tiles and Developing the Town Rules)

• Video: How to Make Tile Cards

• Video: How to Make Cards (Three Ways)

• Discount Poker Shop, our source for these great little chips

If you play this game, or need help playing it, please send us your feedback.