The unofficial Dune board game style guide: every font, colour and texture in the GF9 edition

Seven typefaces do almost all of the work. Copperplate Gothic is the voice of the game: card names, territory names on the board and every title. Candara carries the rules text, and Caladea the longer reading in the rulebook and on the faction sheets. The three display faces are used sparingly: Busorama on the card backs, Desdemona for the names on the player shields, and Advokat Modern for nearly every number.

Three more appear only on the box and the Quick Start Guide: Helvetica for the copyright lines, Lato Black around the logo and Istok for the guide's body text. You may also recognise two of the faces from this site: the text you are reading is Candara, and the headings are Copperplate Gothic.

Play as part of your Battle Plan.
Automatically kills opponent's leader regardless of defense card used.
You may keep this card if you win this battle.
If anyone plays a Shield in this battle, all forces, leaders and spice in the battle's territory die. Any spice dialed and in the battle's territory is lost. Both players lose this battle.

Lasgun

Weapon - Special

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1. NameCopperplate Gothic60 units high on a 900 wide card, white at 94%, one line that shrinks to fit 560 units
2. Type lineTrebuchet Bold40 units, ink #0B0503, title case with a spaced hyphen
3. Rules textCandara40 units on a 734 wide column, ink #0B0503 at 94%, left aligned
4. Title bandThe top 200 units, the category colours over texture 082 with a soft-light shade on top
5. Type symbol125 unit disc, 101 from the right edge, the striped gradient inside a black ring, the icon blended over it
6. Picture window762 by 440 units from 70,249, cut out of the frame over the gold panel
7. FrameOne bitmap, parchment inside a gold rule with the black circle in the corner

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1. BorderGold rule and corner ornaments, one bitmap over the deck colour on texture 082
2. MedallionA 220 unit gold disc, 345 from the top, the deck icon blended soft-light into it
3. Deck nameBusorama90 units in capitals on the line 250 above the bottom edge, gold gradient over a black shadow, shrinking to 680 wide

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1. PortraitA 230 unit square cut to a circle of radius 115, centred 131 from the top, with a 6.6 unit cream ring
2. EmblemThe faction logo in cream, 41 units, sitting on the lower edge of the ring
3. StrengthAdvokat Modern126 units in cream, right aligned 24 from the edge, cut into the ring and the portrait
4. NameCopperplate Gothic29 units in cream on an arc of radius 140, centred under the portrait

The shield is the one place Desdemona appears. Its letters share their pale gold gradient with the words on the card backs. In 2024 a reader on the same thread pointed out that the shield lettering changed with a later expansion and no longer matches Desdemona.

Every faction comes down to two colours: a darker one and a lighter one, mixed through a greyscale photograph so the surface looks printed rather than flat. I wrote about how those layers stack in an earlier post. These are the values dune.zone uses to match each faction's printed pieces.

Treachery cards are colour-coded by what they do: red for weapons, blue for defences, olive for special cards and a dull tan for worthless ones. The colour sits in the band behind the card's name, over a concrete texture that every card shares. The cream of the emblems and rings, close to #E3DBB3, ties all of it together.

Play as part of your Battle Plan.
Automatically kills opponent's leader regardless of defense card used.
You may keep this card if you win this battle.
If anyone plays a Shield in this battle, all forces, leaders and spice in the battle's territory die. Any spice dialed and in the battle's territory is lost. Both players lose this battle.

Lasgun

Weapon - Special

Weapon

Title band#8F2C1C#621D1A

Symbol stripes#CB8E4A#F3E086

Play as part of your Battle Plan.

Protects your leader from a projectile weapon in this battle.

You may keep this card if you win this battle.

Shield

Defense - Projectile

Defence

Title band#29335E#0A153C

Symbol stripes#757DAC#CEDDF0

Play this card to do one of the following:

• Disable a faction advantage for the rest of the phase.
• Pay Guild rates when you or your ally ships forces onto the planet.
• If your hand is not full and it's your turn to bid, purchase the card up for bid without paying spice.

Karama

Special - Instant

Special

Title band#474620#27260C

Symbol stripes#9A9256#EEECA6

Play as part of your Battle Plan, in place of a weapon, defense, or both.
This card has no value in play, and you can discard it only by playing it in your Battle Plan.

Baliset

Worthless

Worthless

Title band#887849#6F6034

Symbol stripes#A9945D#F5EFB4

Every card

Rules ink#0B0503Title#FFFFFF at 94%Cream#E3DBB3Gold#FAF8EB to #CFAF45

Each faction has one emblem, a solid heraldic silhouette with no outline and no inner shading: a hawk for the Atreides, a griffin for the Harkonnens, a lion for the Emperor, crossed crysknives for the Fremen, three rings for the Guild. Details are cut out of the shape as gaps rather than drawn in, so an emblem still reads at the size of a fingernail. On the tokens and shields they are printed in cream, close to #E3DBB3, over the faction's colours.

The pictures on the treachery cards follow the same idea. Each one is a black silhouette on the gold panel of the card: a weapon, a tool or a figure caught mid-action, with highlights cut out of the black. A few cards, such as Weirding Way and Chemistry, add a second colour, a pale tan.

Recreating them took two options on every decal. An outline puts a cream halo around the silhouette, which separates it from the panel and from any decal behind it. Muted draws the decal as a flat olive-tan shape, #847954, behind everything else, the way the printed cards push scenery into the background. With those two switches and a position and size for each decal, a card can stack several pictures the way the originals do.

Play as part of your Battle Plan.
Automatically kills opponent's leader regardless of defense card used.
You may keep this card if you win this battle.
If anyone plays a Shield in this battle, all forces, leaders and spice in the battle's territory die. Any spice dialed and in the battle's territory is lost. Both players lose this battle.

Lasgun

Weapon - Special

Lasgun

1. lasgun-extra.svgplain, scale 1.2166, offset 0,100
2. lasgun.svgoutlined, scale 1.2166, offset 0,-50

picture window 762 by 440 at 70,249
decal slot 439 square at 450,470

You are not allowed to play a Snooper card in this battle. You may play any card that says “special” on it, including Chemistry.

No Snooper

Voice

No Snooper

1. snooper.svgmuted, scale 1.2158, offset 0,0
2. block.svgoutlined, scale 0.7, offset 0,0

picture window 762 by 440 at 70,249
decal slot 439 square at 450,470

Under the colours are photographs of stone, concrete, fabric and paper, stored in greyscale so any colour can be laid over them. Two of them appear on every card: a scratched concrete behind the titles and the backs, and a bold stripe inside the type symbols.

A handful of parts are still bitmaps rather than code: the parchment, the card frame with its black corner circle, the gold panel behind a card's picture, the gold border and medallion of the card backs, and the frame of the player shields.

• Parchmentcard.jpg753 x 1050 px
• Card framebase-full.png900 x 1263 px
• Frame with windowbase-decal.png900 x 1263 px
• Picture panelfront-decal-bg.jpg900 x 1263 px
• Back medallionback-underlay.png1464 x 2036 px
• Back borderback-overlay.png1464 x 2036 px

Shield frameshield-base.png3216 x 1611 px

Every leader follows the same rules, whoever drew them: a bust in a circle, turned three-quarters, outlined in ink and lit softly from the front. The faction lives in the clothing. Atreides wear green with gold trim, Harkonnens black and orange, Fremen sand-coloured cloaks over stillsuit browns, and the Bene Gesserit blue and white. The portraits appear on the round leader tokens and again, larger, on the traitor cards.

midline123456

1. CropHead and shoulders, cut off by the lower edge of a circle. The head sits in the upper half, with the crown of the head or hair touching the top edge or close to it.
2. PoseTurned three-quarters to the left or right, eyes level or glancing aside, mouth closed. Expressions are calm and serious; nobody smiles broadly.
3. LineA dark brown to black ink outline around every shape, with a few interior lines for the nose, cheekbones, eye sockets and folds of cloth.
4. LightOne soft light from the front and slightly above, so the far side of the face falls into a warm shadow.
5. SkinWarm tones: peach, tan and brown, shaded with deeper orange-brown rather than grey.
6. ClothingHigh collars and fitted tunics, uniforms, robes or hoods. Gold trim, buttons and diamond-shaped insignia are common, and the clothing carries the faction colour.

The bust and the pose never changed, but the drawing did. Ixians & Tleilaxu kept the illustrator and moved from hatched, marker-like colour to hard-edged blocks of shadow. CHOAM & Richese brought a new artist and smooth digital shading with a thin outline. Ecaz & Moritani added a heavier, brush-like line and far more ornament. Because the pose, the circle and the warm skin tones stayed the same, the new leaders still sit comfortably next to the old ones.

Together they make a cast of 68 leaders, all on dune.zone, ready for anyone building their own faction.

Atreides 6Harkonnen 6Bene Gesserit 6Emperor 6Fremen 6Spacing Guild 6Ixians 6Bene Tleilaxu 6CHOAM 6Richese 5Ecaz 4Moritani 5