-We experimentally demonstrate that critical Casimir forces in colloidal systems can be continuously tuned by the choice of boundary conditions. The interaction potential of a colloidal particle in a mixture of water and 2,6-lutidine has been measured above a substrate with a gradient in its preferential adsorption properties for the mixture's components. We find that the interaction potentials at constant temperature but different positions relative to the gradient continuously change from attraction to repulsion. This demonstrates that critical Casimir forces respond not only to minute temperature changes but also to small changes in the surface properties.In 1978 Fisher and de Gennes pointed out that if two objects are immersed in a fluid close to its critical point, long-ranged forces due to confined critical fluctuations act between their surfaces [1]. Such critical Casimir forces arise due to the confinement of fluctuations in the order parameter of the fluid between the objects. In the case of e.g. a classical binary liquid mixture close to its demixing point, the order parameter corresponds to the concentration difference between the two components of the mixture. The strength and range of critical Casimir forces is set by the fluid's bulk correlation length ξ which diverges upon approaching the critical temperature T C . Therefore, close to T C , the interaction strongly depends on the temperature as has been recently confirmed in several experiments [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9].In addition to their temperature dependence, critical Casimir forces are very sensitive to the boundary conditions (BC) which are determined by the adsorption preferences of the mixture's components at the confining surfaces: not only the magnitude, but even the sign of critical Casimir interactions can be altered by corresponding symmetric or asymmetric BC. So far, theoretical studies largely concentrated on BC, where one species of molecules in the binary liquid mixture forms a saturated monolayer at the confining surfaces [10,11]. Depending on whether both surfaces strongly adsorb the same (−−) or different species (−+), this results in attractive or repulsive (a)