-+@ Grow @+-
and grow we must. Things also continue to grow here, and so too does what I seem to be doing. Well, the only thing that's not growing much is my free time. Oh well.
Those are the new Gondor cards, can anyone say escalation? I thought the new dwarf cards were bad, but this is even worse. Coupled with Noble Leaders of Forts and some of these are just deadly. 12 more days till the online release though. Something to look forward at least. I've already pre-ordered a box of boosters online just to get the physical promo card so that's a good thing... I think.
The MND chatroom was talking about escalation vs progression at one point. People seems to understand escalation very well, but not many people realise that progression does not necessary mean escalation. A card may progress and improve, but if the card is well designed, it's balanced in the game and it keeps the power levels in the game about the same, eventhough it has had an upgrade. Going "sideways", that's my term for it. Bruce's Babylon 5 expansions have been going that way as well, increasing the number of possible decks, reducing reliance on a few copies of a card and increasing options to which to play with. That's something people will have to start to learn to be able to do in a CCG, particularly a fan based one, where sales and profit aren't the motivating factor.
Talking about MND, I'm still doing the fixes for the typos in the adaptation of the TG cards. They are trickling in slowly, which has resulted in the gML being udpated on a constant basis. There are way too many things to check for, unfortunately, which is why the players ultimately pay the price. Maybe that's one of the reason why they don't like playing with the custom cards. Who knows?
The MND tournament is going slower today. Only one game played and it was an interesting one. So that's 3 games so far this tournament. Hopefully there'll be more before the end of the month. I think I should also see if Thomas would like me to hand out coppers for the Doomtrooper tournament as well, if kapa isn't already handing them out. I'll have to ask him when I next see him.
Martin commented to me today that Hyborean Gates images are nice. Well, they were done by Boris Vellajo, so I suppose they should be superb. The criticism was of the 80s hairstyles and the horrible cropping, which is prevalent, but does not occur on every card. The art style isn't my sort of art I'm afraid, but I do seem to find enough pleasure scanning them in - the more I do, the quicker I get to move on and complete other things... like Portable Adventures and Firestorm.
I scanned the next "region" of Hyborean Gates today. No images to be shown because I'm a bit lazy at cropping them properly. Besides, the engine needs a different crop than what I show here. I like doing them in small chunks though, it seems a lot more is accomplished that way rather than looking at the whole big chunk and thinking to myself that I'll never get to finish them. The same theory holds true for the next HumAliens expansion and MND TG expansion as well - little by little, stuff gets added, until a week or two or however long later they are done. Things work much, much faster this way since I'm a bit more motivated to work on them... because the chunks are smaller. I should keep this in mind when scheduling future work.
Talking about future work, I was looking up on Highlander CCG. Again, another game that isn't really in my league, but since there seems to be some interest, I might as well match the lukewarm response and see what I can do. Didn't find the rules online - I wasn't looking for that, but for the card back for the forums, and I found a whole site of custom cards. I have no idea how good those cards are.
Talking about the forums, I added the Highlander and the Terminator forums today... I decided that Terminator fans might want to distance themselves some from the AvP fans. You don't really have to mix and match those two I guess, although it is possible to do so. Also added in Endeavor for Mark to play around with. That's not visible to anyone though, but it's there. I cleaned up some of the old forums as well and moved a few forums around... the end result is only visible if one goes and look for it, which I think is a good thing. Nothing drastic, no evolutionary step changes, just gradual unobtrusive changes.
There's a new ToJH shepherd apparently. He's rather unobtrusive as well. He's signed up for his 3 tours, but I've barely seen him playing on the engine, so I wonder what he's doing. I doubt he'll stay a shepherd for long. The two newer HotS shepherds are already missing tours. Oh well, the system has never worked properly anyways.
I was just thinking earlier that Kev said that he'll get Monkeys ready for Origins. Well, I'm sure he has got plenty of time till then, well, maybe not him personally, but there's lots of time between now and the end of May. Then again, I know how time sorts of creeps up on someone and says "Boo!" in their face, so who knows what will happen. I'm still looking forward to a game of Monkeys though.
No new expansion from Christoph today. Timmie is still going all out to play games on the engine though... each time I see him he's in a game with someone. What's the point of being a PL if you can't play the game, right? I wish I had people like Christoph on my games too. Then they can do all the work and I can play 24/7. Yeah, that sounds fun... not.
I don't think I've mentioned that Nate has asked me to help Neo playtest the next set of cards, or something, for Final Twilight. Well he seems to be a busy beaver. I was a bit surprised to find out that his co-conspirators were non-US people - one's in Canada, the other is in the Netherlands. Kinda reinforces my theory that the US starts everything because it's like the largest market for things like this, but all the skills involved are foreign... or something like that. That theory will hold even less water than nipa-Martin though, I'm sure.
Mark was on earlier, although I have no idea what he's working on. He's got Summer Camp, of course, but in addition to those, he's been recently working on Nodwick, as the update yesterday shows, as well as something called Sideshow from Red Tag Games and now this new game called Endeavor. Yeah, it seems that everyone has multiple project these days... even Martin, I think.
Ed has hinted that he's starting work on the next new build of the engine. Hopefully, it'll be just bug fixes and nothing too big that will break the engine... again. Someone told me the engine looks like Halloween, and I have to agree, the orange on black just doesn't put people in the mood to game. IMO the black should be a nice shade of grey for starters, but what do I know?
I played quite a bit of gToons today and saw my rank go back up to the top of the 800s again. Well, it's going to stay there until next week, when I'll be force to repeat this episode again. Still, I won against a deck with a Liberty Belle, so my deck must be doing alright. I also picked up a few more cards today since there seems to be a bug with the codes - some of the expired codes are now available again. Between the two links on the left in the gToons section, one should be able to get all the freebies available. Yes it's a bit addictive too I'm sure. I try to restrain myself from playing too much these days.
Those are the new Gondor cards, can anyone say escalation? I thought the new dwarf cards were bad, but this is even worse. Coupled with Noble Leaders of Forts and some of these are just deadly. 12 more days till the online release though. Something to look forward at least. I've already pre-ordered a box of boosters online just to get the physical promo card so that's a good thing... I think.
The MND chatroom was talking about escalation vs progression at one point. People seems to understand escalation very well, but not many people realise that progression does not necessary mean escalation. A card may progress and improve, but if the card is well designed, it's balanced in the game and it keeps the power levels in the game about the same, eventhough it has had an upgrade. Going "sideways", that's my term for it. Bruce's Babylon 5 expansions have been going that way as well, increasing the number of possible decks, reducing reliance on a few copies of a card and increasing options to which to play with. That's something people will have to start to learn to be able to do in a CCG, particularly a fan based one, where sales and profit aren't the motivating factor.
Talking about MND, I'm still doing the fixes for the typos in the adaptation of the TG cards. They are trickling in slowly, which has resulted in the gML being udpated on a constant basis. There are way too many things to check for, unfortunately, which is why the players ultimately pay the price. Maybe that's one of the reason why they don't like playing with the custom cards. Who knows?
The MND tournament is going slower today. Only one game played and it was an interesting one. So that's 3 games so far this tournament. Hopefully there'll be more before the end of the month. I think I should also see if Thomas would like me to hand out coppers for the Doomtrooper tournament as well, if kapa isn't already handing them out. I'll have to ask him when I next see him.
Martin commented to me today that Hyborean Gates images are nice. Well, they were done by Boris Vellajo, so I suppose they should be superb. The criticism was of the 80s hairstyles and the horrible cropping, which is prevalent, but does not occur on every card. The art style isn't my sort of art I'm afraid, but I do seem to find enough pleasure scanning them in - the more I do, the quicker I get to move on and complete other things... like Portable Adventures and Firestorm.
I scanned the next "region" of Hyborean Gates today. No images to be shown because I'm a bit lazy at cropping them properly. Besides, the engine needs a different crop than what I show here. I like doing them in small chunks though, it seems a lot more is accomplished that way rather than looking at the whole big chunk and thinking to myself that I'll never get to finish them. The same theory holds true for the next HumAliens expansion and MND TG expansion as well - little by little, stuff gets added, until a week or two or however long later they are done. Things work much, much faster this way since I'm a bit more motivated to work on them... because the chunks are smaller. I should keep this in mind when scheduling future work.
Talking about future work, I was looking up on Highlander CCG. Again, another game that isn't really in my league, but since there seems to be some interest, I might as well match the lukewarm response and see what I can do. Didn't find the rules online - I wasn't looking for that, but for the card back for the forums, and I found a whole site of custom cards. I have no idea how good those cards are.
Talking about the forums, I added the Highlander and the Terminator forums today... I decided that Terminator fans might want to distance themselves some from the AvP fans. You don't really have to mix and match those two I guess, although it is possible to do so. Also added in Endeavor for Mark to play around with. That's not visible to anyone though, but it's there. I cleaned up some of the old forums as well and moved a few forums around... the end result is only visible if one goes and look for it, which I think is a good thing. Nothing drastic, no evolutionary step changes, just gradual unobtrusive changes.
There's a new ToJH shepherd apparently. He's rather unobtrusive as well. He's signed up for his 3 tours, but I've barely seen him playing on the engine, so I wonder what he's doing. I doubt he'll stay a shepherd for long. The two newer HotS shepherds are already missing tours. Oh well, the system has never worked properly anyways.
I was just thinking earlier that Kev said that he'll get Monkeys ready for Origins. Well, I'm sure he has got plenty of time till then, well, maybe not him personally, but there's lots of time between now and the end of May. Then again, I know how time sorts of creeps up on someone and says "Boo!" in their face, so who knows what will happen. I'm still looking forward to a game of Monkeys though.
No new expansion from Christoph today. Timmie is still going all out to play games on the engine though... each time I see him he's in a game with someone. What's the point of being a PL if you can't play the game, right? I wish I had people like Christoph on my games too. Then they can do all the work and I can play 24/7. Yeah, that sounds fun... not.
I don't think I've mentioned that Nate has asked me to help Neo playtest the next set of cards, or something, for Final Twilight. Well he seems to be a busy beaver. I was a bit surprised to find out that his co-conspirators were non-US people - one's in Canada, the other is in the Netherlands. Kinda reinforces my theory that the US starts everything because it's like the largest market for things like this, but all the skills involved are foreign... or something like that. That theory will hold even less water than nipa-Martin though, I'm sure.
Mark was on earlier, although I have no idea what he's working on. He's got Summer Camp, of course, but in addition to those, he's been recently working on Nodwick, as the update yesterday shows, as well as something called Sideshow from Red Tag Games and now this new game called Endeavor. Yeah, it seems that everyone has multiple project these days... even Martin, I think.
Ed has hinted that he's starting work on the next new build of the engine. Hopefully, it'll be just bug fixes and nothing too big that will break the engine... again. Someone told me the engine looks like Halloween, and I have to agree, the orange on black just doesn't put people in the mood to game. IMO the black should be a nice shade of grey for starters, but what do I know?
I played quite a bit of gToons today and saw my rank go back up to the top of the 800s again. Well, it's going to stay there until next week, when I'll be force to repeat this episode again. Still, I won against a deck with a Liberty Belle, so my deck must be doing alright. I also picked up a few more cards today since there seems to be a bug with the codes - some of the expired codes are now available again. Between the two links on the left in the gToons section, one should be able to get all the freebies available. Yes it's a bit addictive too I'm sure. I try to restrain myself from playing too much these days.
Labels: Babylon 5, MND - Tainted Glimpses
posted by Novelty @ 7:19 pm
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