-+@ Ancient's Wisdom @+-

He is no fool to give what he cannot keep and to gain what he cannot lose...



OK, not MND images for a change but HumAliens ones instead. That's because I did a HumAliens update today with the clone cards and these are three of the cards. So that makes it Aliens, Beasts, Clones and Humans from New Order. Robots and X-PETs and Enhancements and Actions are all that's left... and that's the bulk of the work. Well, hopefully next month Robots and X-PETs will be added and Enhancements and Actions will follow soon after.

I also did the sole eXodus d'Resh card for MND - it's the only card with an image so it went in. That card can be seen at the Custom Card Forums, on Insiider or at MND at gEngine. It's not too shabby, although like everything else it can be better. That's 4 regions done for eXodus and I think Exodus Flight is taking shape nicely. So that means I'm working on a total of 5 custom sets now for MND - 2 promo, 3 expansions. Sounds complicated, I guess. Otherwise MND has been quiet and for a change, I'm not going to blog too much about it.

I finally managed to do the montly report yesterday - it's going to be a long read, but it's there. Nothing much new there, it's mostly used by me to keep track of what needs to be done on the myriad of games that I'm handling. And since it's not on the CCGW forums anymore, people can't complain too much that it's taking up space there. I've yet to do the statistics tracking thing yet, it'll have to be done after this.

It's also a quiet day CCGW-wise. I know Tomi was working on Dark Eden because I made a few suggestions as to what would be nice in that game. Nothing special there, just the usual nipa-esque stuff common to his games. I'm not trying to influence his nipa-Martin score there as well.

Martin seems to have been working on clipping VS cards. It looks good as well. He finished BattleGRID yesterday, but haven't yet made it public yet. HotS also might have had an update as well, although I haven't checked. No news though on when we're getting upkeep tracking in DoomTown, but I hope it's soon.

Tony seems to be headed into the direction of multiplayer WoT. It seems as if he has some rather crazy ideas going on and I wonder if he'll be able to carry those out. I have no idea though if those ideas are even feasible, but if he makes it work and if he makes it work well, it might even get copied into other games.

Timmie still seems to be coming to grips with all the weird and funny ways of things. He's let himself out of the loop for 2 years and now he's trying to play a game of catchup. That's not going to be easy though, but I'm sure, like all the new PLs, he'll surivive and cope... at least I hope so.

Logan is probably still clipping Shadowrun cards, although I think Tomi has offered to help him. I hope they finish that up soon so that they can move on to bigger and better things... like starting MoA and finishing DoA.

Talking about licensed games, Kev said that monkeys is very close to open testing. I wonder though does that mean that it's already ready. Who knows. Also, Sandwich Shop might get a complete makeover with a version 2. I made a few suggestions as to how the game could progress. We'll have to see what happens there I guess.

~ Novelty's March Monthly Report ~

A new engine required games to get updated for it, and this month saw the culmination of the new engine, so quite a nuber of games got updated.

Tournaments

The February MND Elder's Legacy tournament had 9 participants, although more signed up. Malovis was declared the undisputed winner. The March MND Elder's Legacy tournament is still ongoing and more players are playing this month than last month.


gNet BOT
Cleared out quite a bit of useless questions and some not so useless ones. Edited quite a few so that they are now compliant with the new look engine and the new tokens system. Quite a lot of questions still do needs answers though so that will get done when I get the time.


Forums
The forums was moved back to the main server, which took a bit of time, but was otherwise uneventful. No new forums debutted this month, although a few of the Vancancy signs have been removed.


Games
New Engine, some games got updates for it.

BOWL Bowling
The game was updated to ensure that the broken things in it were corrected. Also Ed wanted a few things changed around so that was done. I think it'll probably need an update soonish as well to move the message box to local quiet buttons. I already have an idea of how to do that, but I'll need to find images to implement them.

FTWIL Final Twilight
The money and moren counters were reused from B5. No more. They are now graphically correct and shows the images as it appears on the cards. Also fixed a few bugs in the game while I "was looking under the hood".

GOFSH Go Fish
Go Fish had 6 cards added and quite a bit of updates not to the play, but to the sliders which were discontinued in the current engine.

HALN HumAliens
Beast and Clone cards for New Order was added.

KINGS Kings
Kings needed a huge and major overhaul to make it compliant with the new version of the engine. It was one of the two games that the new engine mangled up.

MND Magi-Nation Duel
This was MND month, or so it seems. Anyways it's a good anniversary for me and MND. Yes, I've been the PL for MND for 2 years now. The game got 6 more Tainted glimpses cards and had an update that was more than just bugfixes (although that was included as well). The Brushfire script was redone for the third time, the Bottled City script finally works the way it's supposed to, and there's better handling of the variable X in the pay and play scripts. Increased some more automations to the game which might speed things up a little bit more.

PAD Portable Adventures
Portable Adventures was the other game that the new engine mangled, and as a consequence, it needed a "patch" for the new version of the engine. Bugfixes were also included as well.

WS Wildstorms
The handling of Battlesites were given more options and the common view was adjusted slightly.

WSS1 Wildstorm: Set 1
The image sliders were updated for the new engine and the first 3 of the WSS2 cards were added to the game.


April 2005 Plans

I didn't finish 3 things last month - B5, HumAliens and Hyborean Gates. All three will be carried forward to this month. The plus side is that I completed two optionals.

Babylon 5 still needs to finally get the bold text in for all the cards. This will be a major upgrade for minor benefits.

Firestorm will need to get started this month. This is going to be huge.

HumAliens and New Order goes on for this month. Hopefully they will be finished faster this month, but it's on a do as much as possible status.

Hyborian Gates needs to get spoiler-ified, cards needs to be clipped and processed for the engine this month.

MND Playtesting of Shadowsfall will result in modifications to those cards... and the addition of Tainted Glimpses continues this month, definately with KT and Weave and hopefully with Arderial. Also, creature dice needs to be created on creatures played from deck lookthrough and top of deck.

PAD Encounters automation should start with the first 3 cards this month.

Bowling goes optional this month with the update to change the message slider to buttons.

The regular optional - Go Fish cardback updates will still be retained for the month.


So, prioritised games for this month:

1. Automate Portable Adventures encounters by 15th April.
2. Babylon 5 Bold text by 30th April.
3. Magi-Nation Duel - add in the next few regions for Tainted Glimpses. Update Shadowsfall Promo if and when necessary.
4. Firestorm - spoiler and images
5. Hyborean Gates - spoiler and images.
6. HumAliens - New Order updates.

O. Add Go Fish cardbacks when available.
O. Bowling - change dialog box to buttons.


Rest of the Year Plans

Aliens vs Predators and Terminator (AVPVT) - Add Atmosphere cards and create the Planetfall scenario. Get Terminator scans from website, add it to the engine and create the 2 additional scenarios, as well as the Terminator scenario(s). Quite a bit of work here, but between Ravage and Ryan(Rekkon), I hope to get everything up and ready by the end of the year.

Babylon 5 (B5) - Still on the list of things to do is the automation for replacement and the automated influence tracking and automated initiative determination. Those would take quite a
lot of time that I'll have to schedule to be set aside.

Borders (BORD) - Game is fully functional. It should probably get promoted to Now Playing soon.

Bowling (BOWL) - More playtesting is needed for this game especially after the fix.

Checkers (CHECK) - This is another "no frills", "low-tech" game at the moment. It would probably get upgraded once I have the time, motivation and ideas, but for now it's playable and that would have to do.

Elemental (ELEM) - The tidal wave automation has long been outstanding. I think it's possible
to do this now, but the script is going to be rather complicated. No schedule for this. Not a high priority since the game works well without the automation and I don't want to introduce something that would introduce errors. It will be done when I can find the time and the motivation. Also the next build should see hotspots being added to the game.

FastBreak (FB) - The game is beginning to feel a bit "low tech" now, eventhough it did have a few innovations (when it was first made). Could do with more playtesting and more inprovements, but until I find the time and the motivation, this isn't going to be done anytime soon.

Final Twilight (FTWIL) - New cards are being added on a regular basis so those will have to be coded in. A pay-and-play system and card attachments are also in the works. This game
was originally intended to be "no-frills" but since it's now getting licensed, it'll have to move beyond that.

Firestorm (FIRE) - New licensed game for me to do for 2005, for July public release, or at least that's the plan.

Go Fish (GOFSH) - What do you do when the game plays well and is bug free? Nothing I suppose. However, it'd be getting a minor facelift soon - a tiny crab will be added which will allow an 5 more players to play the game simultaneously. I doubt we'll ever get 13 players into a Go Fish game, but who knows? The schedule is undetermined at the moment, and it's not high priority. As usual, cardbacks will continually be added to this game.

Hamlet (HAMLT) - There really isn't much to do on this simple game except more playtesting... and perhaps a tournament or two. Hamlet is one of the few of my licensed games I'll consider ready for Now Playing status.

HumAliens (HALN) - Once New Order has been added, all that there is to do for this game is massive playtest.

Hyborian Gates (GATES) - Hopefully this will go public in April. It's going to be another "no frills", "low-tech" game though so it might lie fallow until someone with more enthusiasm and ideas comes along to take it over.

Magi-Nation Duel (MND) - Custom cards are still ongoing and I think people are rather used to the gameplay. The only other thing that can be done is to track how energy is gained and used up. However that is a monumental task since every card does it differently and there are many modifiers... which means it's not going to get done.

Portable Adventures (PAD) - There are two card sets that will be added near the end of the year so those will get priority when they are available.

Quartet (QUART) - More playtesting is needed on this game. Not much improvements will be made until further playtesting is carried out. The game seems stable though.

Reversi (RVRSI) - Since Tomi added the left-click functionality and upgraded the images, it's done and has been upgraded to "Now Playing". No work required.

Triple Triad (TRIAD) - Scanning has finished, but I have no idea when I'll have the time to code
this. There is also a rather good site to play it online anyways, so it might be moot to adapt it to the engine... but it'll make a good distraction for one the the months when I need a distraction. I only have cards 1 - 90, so if anyone wants to scan in the rest of the 18 cards, for me, they are
most welcome. Please PM me for more details.

Urland (URLND) - It could use some scoring automation at some point in the future, time to
be determined.

Wildstorms (WS) - There's the plan to add my custom StormWatch expansion sometime this year, probably in the second half of the year. Also the cards needs to be clipped and blanked. That will have to be done first.

Wildstorms Legends (WSLS) - This game is going into the queue after Bowling, Firestorm, Hyborean Gates and Triple Triad. I guess that makes it a November public release game.

Wildstorm: Set 1 (WSS1) - The WSS2 update is still planned, although it hasn't gone ahead. The game also needs and auto-score if the defender wins. This will be done with the WSS2 update. Schedule: June - October.

You Need Drew's Truck (YNDT) - I'd like to automate moving the truck, and automate the initial placements of the donuts. I'm going to wait for the grid system that Ed has promised
though before working on it.

Yukk (YUKK) - This game feels rather low tech, but it works well. I think I'll leave it
as it is.

I have way too many games on my plate. No new game announcements from me until at least until June, unless it's a game like Final Twilight which will be a one week distraction.


2005 Plans
May - ELEM, FIRE, URLND, AVPVT (Terminator)
June - WSS1, YNDT, AVPVT (Terminator)
July - WSS1, WS (clipping)
August - WSLS, WS (clipping)
September - WSLS, WS (Stormwatch)

High Priority for next 3 months (after March):
* Automate Encounters in Portable Adventures
* Make Hyborian Gates beta
* Card templates for Silk Road and playtest. Finalise rules.

Medium Priority:
* Firestorm
* Add Terminator to AvPvT
* Add bold text to B5 cards
* Finalise Shadowsfall Promo Magi for MND

In between Medium and Low Priority:
* Add hotspots to Elemental
* Automate YNDT truck moving
* Automate scoring in Urland, add hotspots
* Add AI to Bowling

Low Priority:
* Triple Triad
* WS Legends
* WSS2 expansion for WSS1
* Stormwatch expansion for WS
* Atmosphere for AvP
* Crab to Go Fish

No Priority:
* Highlander
* Tempest of the Gods
* Armageddon

-+@ Eebit @+-

Weebit? You decide.



Art credits: Gray, Holmberg, Gray. These are potentially the cards for TW again... and I think these are the last set of the cards that have been previewed elsewhere. Next up are either never seen before card images on this blog... or something else. I'm going to guess something else.

Some thing funny happened to the MND images during the server move. Somehow, somewhere they got resized or something. The result was that although people spent hours downloading them, there was no way for them to view those images. I finally managed to convince Bug to move everything over again from the old server and that solved the problem. Three cheers for Bug.

MND tournament is going nowhere, or so it seems. People seems to be away on spring break. However, since MND is now featured, people have been playing silly format games. It's fun to watch though. Quite a few new players are coming on, some of them being introduced to the engine by word of mouth of the existing players, so that's a good sign I guess. I just checked the 30 day stats and MND has topped at 20% of all games played. The last time I saw that was just before the death of the game 2 summers ago. I doubt it'll last long, but I've been telling all the MND players to take advantage of the game while it costs no tokens. They are happily doing so. Mitch even posted in the MND at gEngine blog about this. I think he's enjoying himself.

Ed is now hanging out in the MND forum these days - I wonder why. Probably because all 3 of the people in his ToJH tournament plays MND. All 3 of them were in the MND room today as well, all at the same time. The results have finally been posted and people have been given their silvers. I think there'll be some rejoicing and stuff. After all, getting even 5 silvers for 3 coppers is a good deal, at least in my book. NKX got 15 at the expense of 2 coppers.

Talking about NKX, I asked him about the feasibility of getting Myths and Legends or Mythos y Legendas onto the engine. He said he'll get cards and see if he can scan stuff and do the translations for me. So that's a good sign. He has been good to the MND community at large and I think he'll be a great asset to the gEngine community as well if we can harness his energy properly. But we'll have to see. Some people lose interest after a while.

Yesterday, I did the mockup of Silk Road, the MND knock-off that we are trying to design. The question is how to make the game similar enough to MND without making it identical. Well, as we found out today, it's very difficult. Chris and I played a game on the engine with MND cards as proxies, and I got tired of it after the first magi-equivilent. There are simply too many things to track and that seems to bog down the entire game. Couple that to the lack of resources as the game progressed and it was bad. I said as much at the end of the game and we decided it needed more work. The fun thing is getting to see MND cards being used for another game.

Tony and I chatted briefly today about WoT. He's still progressing there slowly, but surely, and he hopes to build up a WoT community that will build custom cards and stuff. Well, it's hard work, but he seems determined to do it, so I wish him well. We also discussed his interests in other games.

Talking about other games, Julien has taken up Arcadia, which seems to be a good thing, since he's itching to work on a game and Shadowfist is like close to perfect. I checked with Martin who had no objections so I went over Ed's head and gave him the keys to the kingdom (aka the Arcadia forum). I hope, and I'm almost sure Ed will have no problems with that.

Talking about Martin, he said he's working on BattleGRID for the moment which sounds like a good thing. I really have no strong preference for that game so I can't say much, but knowing Martin, he's probably go all gung-ho (pun intended) and put in quite a few surprises. Sadly, no news yet if DoomTown is going to get an Upkeep counter any time soon.

Kev has been finalising the fonts for Martin to use in VTES. I saw the preview and I must say it looks nice so far. Kev seems to be in great demand now that he's like the font guru and has been asked to make fonts for various other games. He seems to be enjoying it.

Timmie has been asking all sorts of weird and funny questions on the forums. I think it's part of his diabolical plan to convert Star Wars into the best Star Wars platform online. Well, I wish him best as well. He's facing some hard competition in that area. Also, someone should point out that the venerable Apprentice is still around, sad as it is. I've tried my hardest to convince the MND apprentice players onto the engine and have had moderate success in doing so. Hopefully Timmie together with Christoph's help might be able to do the same.

Tomi did another Doomtrooper update yesterday. No surprise there since that's his favourite game. I don't think he's working on DoA at the moment... he's mainly doing stuff to update his existing games. That's really sensible, and I can't disagree with that since I know I'm doing the same thing. I wonder if Dark Eden will be next. There are some things I look forward to there.

Logan has finally started clipping Shadowrun cards. I thought he did them late last year, but apparently I was mistaken. He's got a lot of work ahead of him. I hope he's not gonna get any repetitive stress injury (TCS?) with the clipping. I told him to head to bed after he had a moan in my direction earlier today. I think he needs the sleep more.

I played a few games of LotR today. They were forgettable. I'm already getting tired of my decks and there's still like 3 more months before I'll get to see the new cards. Oh well. I did see someone playing a Promise deck which looks interesting, but against Uruks it's not going to be too happy. Oh well, that's some good deck ideas anyways. Maybe I should start playing expanded at some point...

I don't think I'll be able to do the B5 update this month. I've got a few other admin stuff to do tonight - plates post update, game stats, forums admin and Alphabet Game admin which will probably take up most of my spare time. And the Alphabet Game seemed to have burst back to life. That's a good thing, but since I have to prepare the updates on a regular basis, it's a bit of work for me every 2 days or so. That's not a complaint though.

-+@ Collar of Despair @+-

Right... despair round my neck... as if I need more doom and gloom in my life...



Art credits from left to right: Burke, Nov, Burke. These are TW images, if that set is even going on ahead. No idea there. Also, there's been 2 votes for the name of the set after Twilight War. Ancient of Days and Eventide is neck to neck there, but it's still early days yet. Will there be a set after Twilight War? Ask me that if I start working on Twilight War in ernest.

I worked on some of the images for Exodus Flight yesterday. The results of Fog Crij can be seen on MND at gEngine blog. I think it looks better than what it was. Also did up Kiradan and renamed Stardust to something else more appropriate for the image. Previews will be coming along soonish I'm sure.

No MND tournament games today, eventhough the game is featured. Instead, people have been going crazy playing games and I think MND is going to give Shadowfist a run for its money this week. Or maybe not. Who knows. I'm getting ready for the next Keeper's Question already... 3 or 4 more days before it's open. People are going to want to win those tokens hopefully, which is still currently at 5 coppers. Not a lot, but now that the free monthly tokens has been dropped to 5 total, suddenly 5 coppers seems rather attractive.

I played and won for the first time in a game of Catan (that's Settler's of Catan for those who are wondering). It's not too bad a game, but nothing as exciting as... say Dark Eden. Yeah, Dark Eden seems better somehow to me. Hopefully the Shepherd will get more people to play. Hopefully.

I had to do quite a bit of work on the forums today to keep it up to date I guess. This all started because Mark is taking over Monster Rancher. That started me on a path of modifying a few things down the road that needs to be done and the forums are a bit more streamlined for a few people. And yes, Mark is taking up Monsther Rancher, a CCG after his recent bouts with card games. I hope he'll enjoy it. He was also adding the new attachment stuff to GRfOS today which was a bit hairy, but I think he got through all that.

Tomi has gotten a partial spoiler for Heresy now. Hopefully he'll get a full spoiler before the day is out for him. He's also uploaded the new AD screenshot to the server. I haven't seen it yet because it needs to be linked up, but hopefully he'll do it soonish. He's also been busy working on Doomtrooper... and ToJH.

Only 3 people turned up for the ToJH tourney today. Not much of a tournament if you ask me, but I guess 3 is better than none. The results are still unclear if Doug or Frank won, but they sure seemed to have fun. A few crashes here and there and a game report by Doug on the forum seems to serve the game well. The biggest loser? Ed, who has to give out 35 tokens while only 9 were used. Sorry Ed.

Myself, I played quite a bit of LotR today. Non-solo Smeagol with Evil Men Archery was interesting, and the usual Dwarve n Bes deck ploughed its way to site 9 with the Dwarves running. Those legs may be short, but they do run fast. Otherwise though it has been a quiet day. I hope to get some HumAliens stuff done later, as well as the d'Resh eXodus cards. We'll see how much gets done.

-+@ Dessicate @+-

That's drying out for those who don't know what it means. Sort of like me and ideas.



As usual, artwork credit: Whyrl, Whyrl, Santana/Tate. That's 3 fan made artwork there. Whyrl is still busy doing stuff on her site which is where I found her. Her artwork has progressed quite a lot from the MND style. Eric is currently working with Holmberg on stuff, so that's all good and everything. These cards are slated for TW, but as that is still up in the air, it might not come to pass. And I know I'm sounding like a broken record, but I just want to be pragmatic and realistic, whatever that may entail. I haven't done much work on MND this weekend, but then again, can be evidenced from the images on the blogs for the last few days, I have been rather busy in that regards earlier in the week.

MND starts being a featured game today. What was supposed to be a one day thing ended up to be a week long thing. Oh well. I think players would be happy with it over the end of the month till the beginning of next month. Haven't seen any tournament games yet, and Mitch is still the only person who's qualified. This weekend seems slow though, but hopefully it'll change over Sunday evening server time.

I have been busy on engine stuff though. I closed out over half the BOT questions - as usual, a lot of them were frivilous and did not merit a reply. Some of them, however did require a reply and top among those were the token questions. Oh and there was a question asking BugLaden if he would marry them or something like that. I wanted to give a witty answer to that one but decided in the end to lump it with the other frivilous ones.

The major story for me today was that Portable Adventures was broken with the new build. I didn't even see that coming. I spent most of last night and early this morning (up till 4am! Yikes) and late morning and early afternoon fixing it. Oh while doing that I closed out some reported bugs as well. That game is a major headache for me. At least it's fixed now. I'm going to have to update it next month for at least 4 Encounters too. I'm not looking forward to that but something has to be done.

I've been getting tours over this time as well. I got Aidan (picks-at-flies) to teach me how to play Rage. Can't say I like it - it was boring at best. I'm sure there must be something that draws people to it, but whatever it is, I don't see it and thus it can't draw me in. Oh well. I also had Brian (bpd9383) teach me how to play Dark Eden. Now this I like. What's the difference? Close to none I guess. However the Doomtrooper style of play plus the Civilisation resource management seems to go well in my book. I really enjoyed the game I played with Brian. So maybe one of these days I'll have to build my own deck and play it. At least I'd have gotten further with it than with DoomTrooper.

The first of the ToJH tournaments was earlier today. Nobody showed up apparently. Oh well. Hopefully someone will show up for the evening one. If only 3 people show up, they will each win some silver tokens. Sounds fun. Ed was also asking me about the possibility about holding a sanctioned MND tournament. I told him to hold off until May because it'll need a lot of work to advertise it... and even then, there'll be no guarantee of success.

Tomi was working on AD today. Showed me earlier some of the screenshots and I must say it looks good. He's getting cliparts for the cards and modifying them. They look a bit cartoony, but nicer than having no images. He's not sure if the images are appropriate for the game, but they looked fine to me. I guess it's up to him if he wants to keep them or not.

Mark got a tutorial for GRfOS setup and ready. I haven't tried it yet, but from what little bits and pieces I've seen of it, it does look good. Well, I must say everyone is getting their games into shape and it's finally nice to see Mark get into the hang of things with GRfOS. He's got quite a bit of stuff on his plates though. Who knows, he might get things done before Origins afterall.

Played some LotR today... didn't do too well. One thing I discovered is that I can't play the game for too long since everything runs into a blurr after a while. Sometimes it is that boring. I'm using a Shadows Orc deck that isn't too great, but in casual play it's wrecking havoc on the alternate ring bearers. One reason to always use Frodo, I guess.

I just checked my list of stuff to do for this month and I'm still 3 short - B5 needs bold text, Hyborean Gates needs images and spoilers and HumAliens needs second order. The latter 2 are going to get bumped to next month. Hopefully, I can finish B5 sometime in the remainder of this month. The plus side is that two of the optionals have been closed out effectively, so I guess that makes up for something or other. I don't really know at this point in time.

So no new games this month, just 3 new PLs. Hopefully they'll inject something of a sense of fun into adapting games for the engine again. I was just pondering about WS again and how it's like left on the wayside. I really have to find some time to pull it by the straps up to somewhere where it gets played and stuff. Hmm... sounds like a plan. Definately not this month though, and I doubt I'll have time next month, since I'm working on Portable Adventures encounters and HumAliens New Order. I think those 2 should get priority because they are licensed games and I best get them out of the way so that I don't have a sword of Damocles hanging over my head. Then I can move on to do things I would enjoy. Sounds like a plan anyways, but all plans go awry and nothing is written in stone yet, or signed in blood or what have you not.

-+@ Ebony Mirror @+-

Sometimes we all need a mirror to look at ourselves...

Art credits: Werner/Gillette, Szankovics, Werner/Gillette. These are probable TW cards. I think I've got to start saying which sets these cards are from since there are a few that are in the works. I think these 3 cards fit the War theme rather well, and as the comments on the Custom Card forums show, people are expecting new mechanics from these. I have no idea though what shape these cards will eventually become, but it promises to be interesting.

Not much happening for MND today. It's a bit quiet this weekend, presumably people are taking advantage of the long weekend or something. No tournament games, although some people did show up in the MND room, particularly one who said he only showed up because he got an email from Bug. And I'm starting the story from the end - Bug sent all users an email with quite a lot of info on it to advertise about the new build and stuff. Hopefully we'll get a few more players returning over the next few weeks.

I did the Core cards for eXodus today. The big surprise is that the quality of the art for Core is much better than say Cald or Bograth. All the cards can be seen at either the Custom Card Forums, Insiider or MND at gEngine blog, as usual. I think Exodus Flight is definately going to go ahead then based on the quality on the Core cards. Whyrl and Angetiger's stuff is nice and Blitz's artwork gets better as I proceed down the region list. Cards that will definately be used for Exodus Flight that have been done so far - Orbit, Lunar Aversion, Conder, Kiradan, Lava Lasp, Acid Morgg, Sergen, Spiny Beeb and Shadow Chain. I'd like to use Rayalon Scholar, Toxic Mushroom and Coal Mask as well, but FlameRaven is rather protective of her art stuff. We'll have to see. Of course, those cards can't go in as they are now, some of them would probably need renames, and all of them would need to have the text reworded properly and balanced for the card games (instead of balancing them for RP, which is what they were written for).

I updated Wildstorms today. Found something odd with it though. Hopefully it's fixed. The game really needs linked dice and attachments, but the former is icky to do properly unless I'm prepared for it and the latter is very much icky - I'll wait for the next build and do it next month.

Also updated the plates post today, but that's neither here nor there. The Go Fish update yesterday served its purpose rather well. Now that we have new stuff from the new Engine, I thought I'd update the look of the images in the plates post as well. Nothing revolutionary or anything there tough.

The Rage moot attracted quite a number of players today. Not as high as I've seen it go though, but still it's good enough that someone is playing a dead game. Rage players have also begun putting out feelers to the other games - I've seen them playing Doomtown, Mythos, MND and ToJH.

Talking about ToJH, Tomi has been working on it to close out all the bugs that Ed has been discovering in his tours. The ToJH tours are really popular though, probably because of the time that they are held, but also because of the upcoming tournament and the 20 silvers top prize. 20 doesn't seem to be too much, but when you consider that it's 4 months worth of free tokens, suddenly it takes a whole new meaning. I definately hope that more than 3 people show up to play the game though.

Kev has been doing amazing font things for Galactic Empires in preparation to coding the game. I'm sure between him and Gray, they'll probably knock out a good version of the game. I wonder what sort of level they will make it to, I doubt that the "no-frills" approach will be used here.

Tony is still working away at WoT, using a font file that Kev developed and stuff. That game is still steadily getting improvements. I wonder if he's added attachments yet. That's a huge big chunk of scripts that's required for that, and not all of it is working as well... which makes me wish for the next version of the engine. Was suppose to be yesterday, then today, but nothing happened, so maybe it'll be tomorrow. Who knows what will happen?

Martin was busy working on those attachment scripts and getting VTES ready for the big beta release. I'm sure people will be wowed when they see what else he's done for that game. Talking about Martin, I've yet to try out Doomtown with the new upkeep counter. I wonder also if Martin has put in any other changes, like increasing the bullets to 9 studs and stuff. Also, I still think there should be faction tokens in that game. I'll have to ask for them at some point, maybe after he's reasonably happy with the completion of VTES.

Apparently Bug is going to be holding tournaments every Sunday. ToJH is this weekend and HotS is in 2 weeks time. I wonder if he's going to do PAd next Sunday. We'll have to see. I haven't even fixed the bugs there yet. Maybe I should bump that up and give it some priority soon. And I just realised that for the whole of next week MND is free. I better ask the MND players to use up their copper tokens by today otherwise it'd be a waste.

Right, I think it's time for a quick game of LotR. I feel like smashing things up with some Besiegers.

-+@ Storn Storm @+-

What can I say? When it rains, it pours...



Three more cards previewed on the Custom Card Forum. Artists are from left - Goodman, Werner and Holsten. These are some of the probably cards for Twilight War. Well, I'm thinking about it anyways. Was also thinking of names for a few future sets. I like "Ancient of Days" which sounds a bit grand, but things like "Time after Time" or "Time between Times" fals flat somehow. Also, was mulling the possibility of making some of the RP cards into a custom set... the working name for that is currently "Exodus Flight".

Tournament wise, Mitch was the first person to qualify by playing his 8 games. His 8th game was a win against Pirategirl... I didn't realised he blogged it yesterday at http://ccgwmnd.blogspot.com blog. It's a good read and one of the first blogs to get 2 comments there. Quite a few people are reading that blog too, and I'm a bit surprised to see that.

Otherwise, it has been a quiet day on the engine mostly... there was a period where there were only 2 people on the engine. Good Friday must be taking its toll or something I guess. I've been busily updating the games for the new engine. Go Fish desperately needed that update, and while I was there, I couldn't resist updating the "optional extra". WSS1 also needed an update - I pondered going text only as DoomTown did, then I pondered going for a better scan, but when I saw how perfect the new system is, I retained everything and just let it go as it is. Also added the first three cards of the second "custom" "expansion" - WSS2. This set departed from the WSS1 format (since WS was an established game by then), but it had many of the basics of WSS1 on the cards and I thought it'd be nice to give the characters appropriate stats and add them to WSS1. So that's being done. WildCATs were the 3 cards today. Stormwatch is next. I considered doing some HumAliens today, but decided that they can be left for a rainy day.

'Twas a busy day for the forums and the engine in general in terms of admin work. Obviously, the end of the month is coming up so there's a lot to prepare for. Also, it's beginning to sink into everyone's head that I'm the forum guy, so I'm getting requests to do stuff - minor stuff that I don't really mind doing. Like putting up vacancy signs for some of the games. That has been a good thing, as not one, not two but three of them have been taken up. The ghosts seems pleased with that as well.

What has been done? Tomi decided to start work on Heresy today, after Kev said he'll do the spoiler, so between them, I think we'll get Heresy out sometime this year. I doubt anyone will play it, but I hope to be surprised. Whether it'll be a "no-frills" adaptation (Martin isn't using "no fries" anymore, so I don't get to tease him about that anymore), I have no idea.

Martin himself has been a busy bee, and he's finally added upkeep tracking to Doomtown. Sometimes nagging works. Othertimes, we just all have to gang up on Martin and make him realise that there are things we want in a game. He's also got MECCG and VTES all kitted out with bells and whistles it seems... one of these days I really have to give MECCG a twirl.

Alex's tour today went rather well in my books. 3 people showed up, not the half dozen that used to show up, but it's a start. Hopefully he can build on that. I did tell him all about the new tools at his disposals - calendars and tour notifications and news notifications. Hopefully he'll make better use of them in future since he thinks he'll need them.

Julien's Shadowfist update has been grabbing the headlines... well, only because I put it up as news in the FPN and WGO. Jean-Claude has also been busy getting his games ready, particularly the Rage update before the March moot. Well, moot coincides with Good Friday this year... I guess the werewolves, moon worshippers, nature worshippers and Christians will all celebrate that day.

Tony and Timmie were both having troubles uploading stuff to the server. Timmie got Christoph to do the deed. Sometimes it's nice having a slave, er... junior Project Lead, to do stuff you him. And as for Tony, all I could do is direct him to Ed and hope for the best.

Ed has been, besides busy giving out his ToJH tours, busy also in fixing the bugs that are cropping up on the engine. Sure, these are small and little things here and there, but they do stack up and I'm sure they take a lot of time to find out and fix. Quite a few people has been impressed with the new engine so far. Praise doesn't go to me, but to Ed.

The big news though is that we have a new PL. RevCAJohnson will be starting work on Galactic Empires with help from Kev. Gray told me on the chatroom that it's almost like going back to school with all the amount of stuff he'll have to learn to get the game up and out of the way. I think he has an original game that he wants to adapt for the engine as well.

Well, at least Aaron has one leg up in that aspect - Martin did most of the Sim City scans and completed them yesterday. Now it's just up to Aaron to clip them and to incorporate them into the game. No easy job there I guess. I don't envy him though, I've got to do the same thing to Terminator and Hyborean Gates soon.

And since we've gone full circle back to my games, I've got to really get moving if I'm to complete what I said I'll do this month. B5 and WS hasn't even been updated yet and those really do need an update. I think I'll push B5 back a month to next month. WS though should be getting an update before the month is up, hopefully.

Talking about B5, I played a game today with a relative newbie. Not that I'm an expert or anything. It was fun. Faced an experienced player with a vorlon deck and it was difficult not being able to use my voting cards because Kosh was out. Nevertheless, since no one was playing with a Crusade pile, I was able to bully my way with that and win with the conflicts that only Crusade characters can participate in. I had so much fun playing, I didn't even realised I could win until it was pointed out to me that I could win. Heh. I really have to build more B5 decks that suits my playing style.

Also played a couple of LotR games today. Solo smeagol seems to still be very much played. I've been using Besieger swarms to deal with that though, althuogh evil men & archery would do equally well there. Dwarves and Gandalf seems to be everyone's choice of fellowship these days, I haven't seen Noble Leaders for a while. Fighting Elves and Rohan still see some play. And starter deck Hobbits are everywhere. Some days, I feel so bad when I beat those starter deck hobbit players with my decks.

-+@ Rod of Coals @+-

So hot, it burns...



I might as well show off the TW cards that has been shown off elsewhere. These three are by Holmberg, whose permission I now have to use his art for the custom cards. I'm not selling them or anything though and I do mention his name everytime I show off his art. If you want to see more of his artwork, head over to *plug* Matt's Underworld which is also listed under the usual links on the right, unless you're syndicating this.

The big news today, at least for me, is that Werner replied to my email and gave his permission to use the artwork on his site for the custom cards, as long as I don't make money off them and as long as he is credited with the images. So that's the third artist this week to have given their blessing. I hope I make it 4 for 4 with Lou Holsten. Oh and since I'm doing plugs for people, Werner has an interesting site complete with quite a bit of eye candy. I posted about this earlier in the http://ccgwmnd.blogspot.com blog and there was some rejoicing in the gEngine forums.

Talking about that blog, Mitch made his first entry there. He was telling everyone about stealing a Cawh in his non-tourney MND game so I encouraged him to brag about it on the blog. He did and it was a fun read. Have I told you it's a good experiment to do group blogging? And on a sidenote, I can't believe I have a paragraph in this blog talking about another blog... heh, great waste of space I'm sure.

Since we are on MND (well, that's all I seem to talk about these days, isn't it?), the tourney finally had a couple of games after I wrote my last blog entry. I don't think those two things are connected, and I don't mean to imply anything by linking them together, but I know the tournament people are reading the blogs these days. Ack, there I go again talking about blogs when this is supposed to be about CCGs. Anyways, Mitch was the first person to qualify for the standings making it 8 games out of a possible 11. Good stuff and all there. I hope he won't be the only person to qualify. I know Daniel will be trying to qualify and Joe is just one game away from qualifying as well. Frank, surprisingly lost to Daniel earlier today, I know that Naroom deck was difficult to play against, but I never realised how bad it was. And one of the key cards? Evu's Bookworm. Wow. Talk about someone being supportive of the customs.

Tim (godofchaos) finally came back to play a game on the engine today after he saw the custom cards. For those who don't know, Tim placed 3rd after Welling and Bart in the last MND worlds way back in 2003. I think Wawek was enticing or something although he didn't realise taht with the current set of erratas, Wawek can't use Cawh. He also pointed out that I need to update Wawek on the Custom Card site. I better do that a bit later.

I did some more RP cards yesterday, Cald being the that batch of 5. The images ranged from the moderately good to the absolutely horrendous. I think I manage to save some of them from looking too bad, but I doubt I succeeded too much. I've posted them back to the RP section of Insiider as well as to the Custom Card forums and to MND @ gEngine. The cards can all be seen there, so I won't post them here (today). If and when they are slated to go onto the engine, I might post them here.

I think that's enough MND news for now. If you haven't already figured it out yet, and nipa did early last month, the titles are from MND for the past 2 months, and I guess that's really appropriate since all I seem to be talking about these days is MND. I really do have to find other things to talk about.

Did I mention that Ed is organising a ToJH tournament at the end of the month? He's been really serious about it too, holding tours nightly. And he's been successful. I've been encouraging the MND players to go for it since there's a prize pot of silver tokens to be won. Stick and carrot seems to work, the stick being that next month they are only going to get 5 tokens free as of the new build. Poor them. Well, that gives move impetus for people to win the MND tournament of course. 15 coppers is nothing to laugh about now. I also did say that I'll give out 5 coppers to everyone who qualify - it won't exactly compensate them for the games since they'll have to play 8 games to qualify, but it'll get them back some.

And there I go back to talking about MND again. I really have to try to talk about something else. I did manage to talk to Alex today about his Mythos tours. He does admit that things are going well, but not as well as they were before. He's busy with a million things though. I offered to help out with a few things - things that shouldn't get me bogged down too much, but he didn't take me up on the offer so I think I'll let it slide until he brings it up again.

Tony also pinged me today to complain about the upper view cards all in a stack bug. I pointed him to the solution and told him to keep track of the Technical Help forums more. I hope PLs keep track of the stuff in there, even when some of it is like way over the head of most people. Now I need to find out why NIS kicks me out of the engine immediately after I login, but not after a while. Perhaps it's got to do with the ping?

Martin has been a busy bee today, uploading updates to VTES and MECCG. One of these days I'll have to try MECCCG just to see how much better it is when compared to LotR. It should be better though, although I don't know how. What I suspect I'll miss is the LotR interface which is what I'm so used to.

Talking about LotR I played a game with the Bes again. Lost due to a number of stupid mistakes, but that's what casual games are there - to learn from mistakes. I do admit that a tournament player needs to know the cards roughly almost by heart though, otherwise, one wastes too much time reading them or making stupid mistakes. Playing a CCG competitively is almost like school - you have to study for it.

Haven't played a game with Kari since that fateful game where I humiliated his Rohan, but we are doing something else - doing nasty things. He just removed his first shepherd today who hasn't been giving tours for a while now. I had to go clean up the mess in the forums every time a Shepherd is removed. It takes work to add them as well. I'm glad the entire program is over. Now all that needs to be done is to remove them and to handle them when they go on vacation. I hope the system is implemented in a better manner at some point down the line.

What I was telling Kari as well is that we need to reinstate the pacmans... not as the do alls, but just as the local rules expert. I think those are sorely missing these days. People need rules direction and have no one to turn to. Well, maybe when VTES ges public, we can finally rethink the direction about shepherds and pacmans and ghosts and stuff into a whole that will make sense. Hopefully we'll retain the nostalgia of it all. Oh and have I mentioned that I'm very very pleased with the navy blue scheme that the engine has re-adapted? It's been so integral to the engine for so long, losing it was weird.

Did I mentioned I corrected the forums so that all the forum images now point to the main server? Well, most of them. I couldn't do the one that's at the top of the forum, so hopefully either Eddie will do it, or he'll tell me where to find it to change it. I'm still finding my way around this forum though, it's just so very complex compared with some other forums.

I really should get some CCGW work done today, so I best make this short and say a quick adieu. Or fromage frais! Fromage frais is always good!

-+@ Snowed In @+-

Spring is finally here, but some days things get so snowed in...



Three images by Whyrl up there, three cards possibly for Twilight War. We shall have to see what happens there with that expansion, but I've been showcasing card stuff anyways. Two of these has already been posted elsewhere, the third is shown here for the first time today. And the reason why I have 3 of Whyrl's cards up there is because I got her permission (in writing) to use them in the custom sets, as long as she's credited. So that's another good piece of news for the custom sets.

After all the weekend action, MND tournaments are going slower now. Freigabe is currently leading the pack, although Mitch (malovis) gains the greatest chance to qualify first, which reminds, me I've got to do an update. The custom card competition finished over the weekend and people are still trying to wrap their heads around the idea of Slumber being a delayed action play a creature card. We'll see what happens there as Keeper's Quest takes shape. Next month, Tony will join the fray as the Keeper's Question. MJ has done some really nice sketches, but I haven't have had the time to colour them yet. Hopefully soon.

The new doomtrooper tournament has just gone underway, and it's getting quite a bit of play, with people signing up to be Shepherds just to play... it means I'll have a lot more work adding... and then removing them later when they drop out from the Shepherd program. Oh well. According to Tomi, they have been busy trying to look for broken combos as well. I guess it's just in their competitive nature to want to win. Well, if it's getting more people to play sure and fine I guess... but it's definitely not getting people to pay to play, not when there's a free Shepherd system anyways.

Next month though, when people only get 5 free games for the first time, there'll probably be a large rush to join the Shepherd program. *sigh* Shepherds have so far shown themselves to be ineffective IMO in getting people to play. I pity Joe (chocobo134) who's shown up religiously for his HotS tours and has probably given lots, but nobody plays that game despite all the tours that are given. Some people just login and sit in the chatroom while they are away from their computers so that they are "logged" as having shown up for the tours. Nothing much to do about that I guess. Hopefully the entire Shepherd will be done away with in favour of organised tournaments.

Talking of tournaments, Bug is holding the first official one at the end of March. It's for ToJH, the game which has taken his fancy over the last few weeks - I'm actually rather grateful that it's not one of my games. First there was Yukk and then Elemental and then Portable Adventures. Now it's ToJH. Yay! Anyways, the winner gets 20 silver tokens so I've been encouraging the token hungry MND players to go learn the game with Ed's tours and to play in the tournament. Hopefully that'll be a success.

American Idol was just on... season 4... I wonder if they'll ever make a Card game like season 3. I won't mind getting cards of some of the hottest babes in the comp there - Carrie Underwood in 80s hairstyle is just so hot! I think that is way too much info there for most people. My best performance tonight? Jessica Sierra with Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Well, that was an attempt to fill things up since we can't do any updates on the engine due to the freeze associated with the server move. Quite a few bugs have been popping up including one where opponent's cards aren't being broadcasted to other engines. Martin suggested that a left should fix the problem and it did. So yay for Martin.

Martin also was doing odds and ends for VTES. He's doing a great job there, and I'm not just saying that because he's paying me to (OK, he's actually not paying me to say that, but I have always wanted to say that in this blog), but because it's the truth. Hopefully it'll be available for everyone soon though - people are still asking me about it, although I now have a thread to point them to.

JC has been uploading his games to the wrong server and has posted them as being updated. Poor fellow. I guess it's a bit frustrating for him probably to have to wait to upload his games. I know Timmie and Christoph and Julien are all queuing up to get their games updated. Poor Ed must be feeling the pressure right about now.

Haven't played gToons for a long time now. The lack of new cards is a dampener on the fun there. I notice that less and less people are playing there as well. LotRO, OTOH, has been seeing quite a bit more play... by myself as well as many others. Bojo, the head guy at Decipher, actually dropped by in my game today to ask me how things was. I guess they are trying to gauge how the player's are reacting to the new stuff. One thing they don't figure though... the ones still playing are the ones who really don't mind the direction that Decipher is moving. Those who hate what Decipher has done has probably given up months ago.

I was called cruel with my choice of decks today - I played Nazguls, not my usual choice, but I got tired of playing the Besiegers for a while since they win most of the time. Naz though are a bit different to play when compared to the Bes. Whereas the Bes are really hampered with the loss of Hate and Terrible as the Dawn, the Naz have got new tricks up their sleeves in black riders, with mounts and what nots. Of course, being a Shadow culture that is still getting cards, and by that I mean more than a couple of cards, helps as well. People have already found their feet with the BR cards so things are moving along rather interestingly. I guess it's time to look forward to Bloodlines.

I did play a LotR game with Kari... he's no longer taking ages to read the cards, which is a good thing. He was playing what I've come to call a Timmy deck. It's good and all against other Timmy decks, but I don't play Timmy decks, I have Johnny decks which feed off all the good stuff thrown away by Timmy decks and make them suffer really, really badly. Poor Kari. What he needs to do is to learn how to create a Timmy/Johnny deck like Noble Leaders...

I got to try out GRfoS the other day. I must say Mark has done a good job with the sounds. They were a bit low on quality, but I'm going to guess that's to minimise file size. It's still impressive though. I wonder if his other games are getting the same treatment.

I really should get back into the coding game... that's coding besides adding additional cards to my games. I know MND and HumAliens needs those new cards, but B5 and WS needs to get new codes before the month is out. Next month, I think I'll jumpstart Urland to see what I can do with the new toys we got. Automated scoring will probably possible and stuff. YNDT too will benefit from all the new stuff. we'll have to see.

-+@ Tropical Rain @+-

It's refreshing and stuff...



Artist from left to right: Holmberg, Bozyk with Holmberg Background, Holmberg. All three cards are possibly for Twilight War, which may or may not be made. I have no idea. The two on the right were made just earlier today, which is why they are showcased here. The middle piece is Gwen's second donation for custom cards. It looks good though I also got news that we have Holmberg's permission to use his artwork on the custom cards, as long as he's credited and stuff, so that's another piece of good news. I also got Zach drawing a TG card for me - a nice teardrop. He's doing that better than the Hyren he was drawing earlier. Relics aren't too difficult to draw, it's the creatures and the magi that are always a headache. Talking to Eric and he's getting tempted to do MND artwork again. Hopefully he'll contribute a piece or two to the new custom set. We'll have to see.

Not much activity for the MND tournament today, but 2 games were played earlier in the morning and Pirategirl got on the scorecard. That means it might be possible to get 8 games after all. We'll have to see how the tournament goes. I've got to nag WindRider to go play his games as well. Hopefully, I'll see him on.

I also did a semi-major MND update for the engine and added the new TG naroom cards, but forgot to add in the bit where if one plays a creature from discard or deck, it'll get a creature dice at zero. Well, next update probably. The update also saw the first errata for EL - Festive Furok got modified to make it friendlier in play. Hopefully people will play more with it now. That makes Amara, Beauty as the only other card that might need errata. We'll have to see. Also updated the Furok card on the website. Next up though would be to finalise SP by the end of next month.

Also updated Kings... it was a simple update until I tested it out in the soon to be released new build... where it broke. So I spent most of the day upgrading it to work for the new build. I've got to remind myself to do the switch-over manually when the new build is released as well. It wasn't fun doing the same change three times, since there are 3 different language versions of it.

Played Yukk and Bowling with Kari today as well and won at Bowling but lost at Yukk. I decided to upgrade Bowling a bit while he went on to play ToJH with Tomi and Ed. I think it's about time I removed the random number requester popup and I finally have an idea as to what to replace it with. Probably next month, I'll put it in... I know I said I won't work on it since it's a waste of time, but since it's turning out to be an interesting idea, I might as well put it in.

So, I've still have to finish up HG, WS, B5 and HumAliens. I like the slow pace of HumAliens so much I think I'm going to stretch it over the next few months. WS and the beginnings of B5 will probably get done tomorrow, I guess. Hopefully I'll h ave to time to work on them.

Played two games of LotR today, the first one with non-solo Smeagol, the second with the dwarves. Dwarves sucks against swarms and Naz... actually Naz can be really strong. I still enjoy playing Besiegers though - Gandalf and Elves are discarding their stuff, but I don't have to worry about the smirking Galadriel anymore because they X'ed her. I've got a hankering to play the bouncing Hobbits though...

Tomi was working on AD earlier and then on TOJH. I have no idea what he's up to. He's also offering X-Files away. Maybe he's just getting busy. Who knows what's next? Mythos to Alex maybe? Kapa has been busy playtesting everyone else's game. I think he should be made like official playtester or something. I saw Logan earlier as well working on CC, but I have no idea if an update is imminent.

Ed is hurrying out finish the next version of the engine, and to get VTES out ASAP. It's good to see a post about VTES on the forums... it'll stave off the questions from the players hopefully. Really though, some of those VTES players can be a bit impatient sometimes, but I guess they just really badly want to play. Martin said something about wanting whatever he's coded to be made available as well, so I am guessing that WW or Ed is the bottleneck. I have no idea there though and I'm not about to hurry them... afterall, perfection takes time!

Tony IM'ed me to say that the linked dice from Final Twilight works great. He's been upgrading WoT so much though, and when I tested it yesterday, the dice was too low-tech, so I suggested he get them upgraded as well. He's really burning it up with the updates. He's on errata now... and maybe later he'll be doing attachments. He's definately moving and shaking.

Haven't heard from Christoph lately, he's probably spending a bit more time offline now that Star Wars is done. Haven't seen Julien's Shadowfist update as well - I hope he gets that out soon, people are playing decks with proxy cards already. Someone should really ping Robert and Aaron to see if they are still alive. I haven't heard from either in ages.

-+@ Wildfire @+-

which is what MND seems to be like today...



So I got bored of the usual images... I thought I might do some HumAliens and use those images today, but see, no HumAliens update, so no images used. Besides, I'm sure a change would be appreciated by those long time blog reader here. Those 3 are Call of Cthulhu cards... don't ask me what they do or what they are for, I don't play that game. See, the reason I got them is because... about 2 weeks ago, Martin asked me to help him with something that will win him some cards. Martin didn't win - poor guy - but I got to see the CoC cards. I'm not too impressed though, but one thing they have in their favour is that they aren't pink!

See, this is my blog and today I'm going to go into all the mundane stuff. Alex was having his usual Thursday Mythos tour and the curse of Cthulhu didn't hit the engine today. So that's one up for the engine. I have no idea what happened in his tour, but he did ask about deck sharing which isn't working. Oh well, I'm surprised that he doesn't know about that since that is posted about in the Tech Help forum for quite some time now.

Tony apparently stayed up all night coding WoT... and it failed in 2 player mode. That poor guy. He's really devoted to the coding stuff though and he's really script orientated. He's got some learn from the books background, or so it seems to me, but little to no practical experience... I had to give him pointers on a few things, but once given, he was taking to them like a fish to water. Anyways, he finally managed to get what he was working on to work after I made a small suggestion to simplify things a whole lot more. Less is more in this case. I think that as one gets more experienced, one writes less code to do the same amount of things. Heh, guess I better start cracking, since from the amount of lines I write in my games, it makes me look so unexperienced.

Tim apparently had problems getting onto the server. I wonder if that means he has a version of SWD to upload. I hope that's a good sign. He's been pimping the game out today and has got quite a few games under his belt today from what I see. He definately wasn't hanging out in the MND room, that's for sure.

And the MND room has been busy. 5 tournament games completed on day 1, but that's not even half the story. Apparently it's mid-term so there are hordes of people logging in to test things out and we had to teach a few newbie MND games. Had quite a bit of fun playing a newbie game and watching them learn things through trial and error. It's not too difficult a game to learn.

Didn't play LotR, didn't play gToons, didn't work on coding today... so there's not much to say there. I spent the day mainly chatting with people in the chatroom today... although I did take a gander at the staff page to see that it has been updated. That's Christoph on the left and Tony on the right. And I think that will be all for today...

-+@ Resonate @+-

and that's not just because I've just watched American Idol...



Well, time to showcase more artwork done over the past few days - they have been blogged about previously, but not yet shown here on this blog so I thought it's fair game to show them here. From left to right, pencils by Hicks, colours by Nov, background by Holmberg. Image by Burke. Flower by Nov, background by Holmberg. The two Ploombs are TG and will definately go onto the engine. They Pheygrin is TW and might not see play at all. I have no idea about TW so far... well, that's because there's 3 sets that needs to be finalised before then, but we'll see what happens for that.

Zach (ZaCkO) is supposedly doing a Cald Hyren for a card, not exactly for me, mostly for himself. I wonder how good he'll be. If he's better than Nick that would be a good sign. Frank is also trying to get into the card design business - he's got ideas aplenty I guess, it's just that I'm more hampered by art than I am by ideas so we'll see where those go.

Slumber ends in a few days time and I'm surprised by the quality of some of the entries. This is going to be one difficult competition to judge. The MND tournament is schedule to start tomorrow and I know there are people rearing to go, so I said they could start a few hours early on the 16th after I've given the word to go ahead. It's going to be an interesting evening that's for sure, for some people. I don't think it's so much the free tokens as the chance to play competitively.

Talking about free tokens, my Sandwich Shop event is schedule to start in 4 hours time. 5 free copper tokens if they beat me at a game... which isn't too difficult to do since I'll be using starters only. The thing is, would anyone even bother to ask me for a game? I somehow doubt it. Kev has uploaded the new stuff again, which is good. At least we can read the rules and stuff. Ed has said he'll ask me for a game later, and that's a good sign... I think.

I haven't been working much on the engine really, although I should. MND and HumAliens should really get new cards added onto the engine. Perhaps tomorrow, definately not tonight. I know I also have to do the bold text for B5 as well at some point, but that takes a weekend of sit down time to do the tedious work of sorting everything out. I'll have to schedule in the time.

Mark asked me about Terminator, and I offered him the job of doing it as a co-Lead or as a full lead. I really have no idea when I'm going to start on them... just the other day I was thinking that maybe I should clip AvP first before I add Terminator. The plan was to get a co-Lead all enthused about the game to do the clipping. We'll see where that goes.

Martin is still doing the final tweaks on VTES and if I haven't said it before, I'll say it again - it looks nice. I also told him that the J, Q, K images were still not fixed on the engine... and the reply I got from him was that he thought that they were already fixed. Hmm... maybe the image server ate something up.

I haven't got any news from Kari telling me about his LotRO purchases for... the past 24 hours now. Quite a change really. He's already spent a bomb on it, money which could be better spent on other things IMO, but hey, it's his money and he can do what he wants to with it. I hope he's gotten better at playing as well - you can only blame your losses on weak decks for so long (and yes, it is viable to make a deck with very few rares and still get it to win).

I've been playing LotRO myself. Testing out Dwarves currently and I'm not too impressed with them. I've paired them up with Besiegers and that's a novelty these days - I'm more often winning with a shadow kill (against solo Smeagol, against dwarves, against rainbow elf/men/hobbits, but not against straight/gay elves!) instead of the dwarves running to 9, something which I was doing with ease before BR came out. I guess Orcs and corruption is just too much for poor Gimli.

I've also been playing with gToons lately, although I'm less inspired there, since there aren't any new cards or new strategies. I lost to a very good PPG deck just today, but won a shadow-match against an animal deck, only because I had the better draws. I got quite a few cToons as well so that's a good thing.

Thomas just asked me about the kit. It seems he's having some trouble with it. I told him how to do what he wanted done manually and he seems happy to do it that way. Well, unlike Martin, for me if Plan A fails, there's always Plan B, then Plan C, then Plan D, ad infinitum.

Talking about Martin, I've been meaning to do a nipa-Martin for Tony for a few days now and haven't really got on to it. So what have I learnt about Tony? He's a coder first and foremost. I'm surprised at how easily he's taking up coding, as if he's had lots and lots of experience with it. All I have to do is to explain something once... sometimes just the first line of the solution and he gets it almost immediately. Hence he has a high nipa number. However, he's not too good with the layout things and hasn't been using the interface to solve his problems... so TonyLuzzi n6M1. I haven't seen Craig's coding yet, so I can't give skandall a number. It'll be interesting to see how that goes.

I don't think we'll get updates from Tomi for a while. He's busy sailing and doing other things like meeting Queen Amidala and Jar Jar Binks. I doubt we'll see DoA fully playable till about winter time. Oh well. I hope I'll get surprised, but like many things these days, I'm just too big a pessimist.

Well, 2 more hours to go for me. Have a happy St. Patrick's Day tomorrow.

-+@ Entrench @+-

I guess that's how I feel about certain things...



Black Riders releases offline this coming weekend, and here's the former hobbit everyone hates to love... or love to hate. Not too many fellowship side cards, or shadow cards either, but this one culture is unique in having cards for both sides. It pretty much summarises the Smeagol/Gollum dichotomy.

I tried Noble Leaders over the weekend. Coupled with men they were average. I suspect men would be good with Rohan, but I don't have all the crazy rare Rohan rares, nor do I want to get them since they'll be rotated out in online play in October. Oh well, guess I just have to make do with what I have.

Talking about dichotomy, I'm of two minds regarding gToons these days. I've probably dropped to the lower high 800s by now, which isn't a pity. However, lots of people are still searching for the codes to the really really sought after cards there - jawbreakers and slams. Unless you have a lot of moolah, don't bother getting them. You can, however, beat slam and jawbreaker decks with a properly built deck - it's not easy to do so, but it's more rewarding to do it that way.

I've been working out quite a bit with MND the past few days. Made more cards for Twilight War and some of them looks rather good. I don't know if that's going ahead or not. I finally got the pencils for the Ploomb from Robert (stalker) and proceeded to colour it in. The results are on the MND on gEngine blog, so I won't repeat it here. I'll have to modify it slightly and recolour it for Paradwyn though. No idea when I'll do that, but definately when I find the motivation to do it, it'll be done.

Three more days till the start of the March MND Elder's Legacy tournament. I've been playing against quite a number of decks in test. I finally saw Amara, Beauty in a deck, although the deck didn't even do anything interesting with her. Still, she might be well protected in a deck with Good Ol' Ashgar and perhaps Gar or Barak. Then again, maybe not.

I've been helping Tony out with more coding... he seems very enthused about the whole thing. I still remember that honeymoon stage of first being a PL - the feeling of being invincible and stuff like that... it's a good feeling. Hopefully, he'll stick around for a while and not only finish up transforming WoT into something that's updated and slick, but will also go on to do a few more other games that's a bit long in the tooth.

Martin finally upgraded VTES to the next all singing, all dancing version, or so it seems on the forums. I haven't had the time to test it out yet. I think it'll be going up as an official WW beta in a few weeks, once WW are satisfied with everything. It sounds exciting I guess. Hopefully, the images server will be stable by then... if it hasn't already been moved to the main server.

Mark has been busy incorporating the new features into Sideshow. I got a peek at it, but since it's not yet public, or anything, I won't spoil anything for anyone. Well, I can be cryptic and say it's a Lord of the Rings sort of the thing, in the more traditional meaning of that phrase.

Kari was telling me he hopes Tomi will get DoA up soon. Well, I doubt it somehow. It's not as if that's an easy game to code. I should have told him to offer to help out though... then again, maybe help out might be something Tomi isn't after. I have no idea. One think Kari did tell me is that he's being motivated to learn how to code further and finish up WSSG some. Yay for him.

Logan was busy over the weekend reupdating most of his games to the server after they resetted it back to what it was about a week ago. That must really suck IMO. I had to re-upload 4 of my games as well, so I know how that feels. It's a good thing I know when I updated what just by going through my blog, so this has been a helpful tool for me.

Ed has been busy working on the engine for WW, and I think most of that will spillover to the main engine as well. There seems to be quite a number of stuff developed specifically for VTES and RSP, which have a variety of use outside of those 2 games. I really need to find my game adaptating muse soon to enable myself to take advantage of those cool stuff. I had Martin explain quite a number of them to me, since most of the stuff has been developed for VTES. Overall, it seems really, really powerful. Portable Adventures will probably be the first game to make use of them... once I get my act together to start working on it.

I'm more motivated on working on the forums, and other admin stuff these days, instead of doing actual coding. Does it suck? I think not. Well, if anyone wants to crack the whip at me, and by anyone here, I don't mean just Ed, let me point you to the score of other games I've adapted for the engine. (Just for Martin: score in that last sentence doesn't mean "points", but it means 20, a score of eggs = 20 eggs, just like dozen = 12. Of course, there are other meaning for the word score, besides those 2.) Anyways, the forums are still getting a few minor tweaks here and there, it isn't easy being a global moderator. As I told the rest of the ghosts, with great power comes great responsibility...

There's admin, then there are tournaments and events. I've reported the MND one, and I really should get ready for the Sandwich Shop one. Kev said he'll re-upload the revised rules and the updated game with the new promo on Tuesday. Hopefull that'll be enough for me to get up to speed on everything. I doubt anyone will approach me to play a game, but who knows, there could be some desperate people looking for tokens. Then again, probably not. Most people barely use up all 15 of their tokens a month... and of course, the silver just carries over and over and over.

Of course, there's always custom card making. I'm knee deep in MND with one set in playtesting, and getting the 2nd set onto the engine as well. Then there are the Keeper's Questions which would define the entire set - I'll probably need to tweak the final results there to get them into something that would be interesting and fun to play with on the engine... that'll be in 2 or 3 months time when the competition finishes it course. Of course, there's also Twilight War which may or may not go ahead, but still some work is being done there to determine the feasibility of the whole project. So far the results are encouraging.

Then there's Silk Road or Project CHuckie CHeese. I finally decided how I want the card templates to look, although without any art, they might suck. We'll have to see how advanced my graphics skills may be (or not as the case may be). If and when they are done, I'll probably post them up here as a preview for everyone else to see. And no, they won't be done in time to post them here.

So there are lots on my plate... as always. And this is only a small part of my life! Honest!

-+@ Aglow @+-

of which a few things seems to be. People should stop going around lighting fires under a bushel.



I did some Tainted War card templating "for show" last night and have been pleased with the result so far. Posted some images on Custom Card forums, on MND on gEngine and now here. First off, artist credits: Whyrl, Whyrl and Holmberg. Not too difficult there. Some of the cards have already gotten rave reviews from the people who've seen them. Yeah, I really do like these cards. It's a pity 2i isn't going to print these out anytime soon.

Played a game of MND, which has been blogged at MND on gEngine, and a game of LotR against a rether interesting Gondor/Gandalf deck. Lost that game, but it was fun. Chatted quite a bit with mostly MND players as they are getting ready for the tournament that's still more than a week away. People are excited about it though, which is a good thing.

Kari is still trying to get his LotR deck to work. He's fixated on the good cards and the uber decks. I guess once a power gamer, always a power gamer. Haven't seen him in action yet, but I did have to explain to him all the niceties and the ins-and-outs and the finer details of the game to him. I think he's really enjoying the game too. I hope he hasn't bought any new cards.

I asked Kev about the rule change for Sandwich shop today and I think he's updated the rulebook. I better read that before the event on St. Patty's day. I think he's done a screenshot as well.

Tony IM'd me and asked me to help him with what ended up to be 2 different pieces of code. I had to explain some of the language to him and teach him a few of the finer points, but I think he learnt quite a bit by the time he went to bed. We might get a Wheel of Time update later so I'll keep my eyes peeled for that. He's also got large ideas for the game. Well, I didn't want to bring him down to Earth, so I just left him floating around on Cloud 9 for his honeymoon. He'll come down to earth quickly sooner if not latter.

gToons has a new code on it's main welcome page for 250 points. That's a good deal IMO. Didn't get to play today, and my rank is still in the mid 800s, but that's good enough for me.

-+@ Twunk @+-

what makes a twunk sound?



Three out of the 5 beast cards I added today to HumAliens, and the slow progress of the New Order cards gets added online. Next up will probably be X-PETs, as Clone got quite a large number of cards for this expansion. One can say this is the Attack of the Clones...

It's been a quiet day today. Finally took a look at my gToons rank and was pleasantly surprised to see it hovering at about the same level I left it 2 weekends ago. I guess people were busy, maybe like me playing with LotR Online. I did get 2 games today, lost my first one, won the second one. Nothing special there, but I doubt I'll get out of the mid-800s soon.

Talking about LotRO, Kari seems to be enjoying it there. I think I got my fun decks about ready now... next up will be to build those tougher tournament decks. Well, I do have enough of the rares and rare plus and ring foils to create an interesting deck, but hopefully the first few of my tourney decks will be based on something a little bit less used. We'll have to see.

I'm sorting out my 2 boxes of MND cards as I'm typing this... it's so hard to blog while dividing up cards into different piles, but it's progressing. Next up I've got to file everything away and box up the rest. I should have a few spare boxes yet, although I'm sure in about a month or two's time, I'll probably have to get more boxes from cardhaus.

I built an interesting MND dice Core deck for Shadowsfall playtesting, but I won't talk about it here since it is blogged at MND on gEngine. I still wonder if I'd be able to pull off the weenie Cald swarm with Fiergo. Oh well. Dartax seems to be busy building up his tournament decks as well, the second one which he wrote about seems to be a Weave/Cald one. I've got a few ideas there, but since I'm not in the tournament, I'm not so inclined to build those decks. 2 more people joined the tournament bringing the total fixed players at 9 with 2 more maybes. Currently, it's 6 games to qualify for the win, although if either or both of those maybes join, they'll bump the total up to 7. It should be interesting to see how things build up to the 17th.

I saw Mike (grover) today on the engine, but we didn't chat. It's a pity how Doomtown seems to be getting less and less played. Perhaps one reason is that Martin hasn't given it the attention that it should be getting. It's almost a year since it was last updated, and the K, Q and J images are still not yet fixed, eventhough that has been pointed out to Martin quite a while back. Hopefully he'll fix it soon.

Tomi was telling me that Craig has started schemas - well, I wonder if that means that he's the now mentor? Curious minds and all that, but probably not. Tomi is the schema guy and probably writes some of the best schemas that I've seen. This, combined with his artistic skills (although he'll claim he's not an artist and that's true to a degree), makes his cards really good to behold and gaze upon. Urgh, and there I go into ye olde english!

There's probably a few other things that I could say, but I'm more interested in sorting out my MND cards now... maybe I'll post more later... if at all.

-+@ Equilibrate @+-

or finding the balance...



That's right, I downloaded all the events for Terminator today. Went a bit faster since I found a better way to do it. There's still quite a lot of cards to go through, and then after that, there's the coding to apply before it can be a playable game, but it's progressing along. You can also see from those images how some images are better than others.

Today's main event was recoding Bowling to hopefully fix the 2 player bug and to change the pins so that they actually look like dice. I thought the dice would look bad, but it actually doesn't look too shoddy since I'm using 3D dice. The dice are a bit blurry though, but at 50 by 50 pixels there isn't too much blur to distract and it's still very visible what things represent. That's Bowling for the time being. Until it gets greater gameplay or until someone finds some defects in it, it's not going to get a workover any time soon.

I also spent much time converting the cardbacks into icons for windows for my own use, including the AGoT one that I scanned in yesterday, and a LotR one that I had from ages ago. The forums also benefitted as i found 2 more cardbacks - for Ruinsworld and for Wing Commander. So that means only Monster Rancher and Banemaster require icons for the forums. I've deliberately ommitted the sports games - Nascar Racing Challenge, Top of the Order and Red Zone from the list because they do have pictures of people and logos of the respective sporting bodies and those might prove a little... contentious in the long run.

Otherwise it's been a quiet day. nipa was working more on stuff today, including fixes to Imajica. He's like the orphaned game person or something. I told him that the Disciple games are missing types as well and I have no idea if he fixed those. I know he was also working on DoA earlier yesterday, but I haven't seen an update yet. Maybe he hasn't got to them yet.

Logan and Mark are on the engine right now working on Crypt and Nodwick respectively. Well, not the real engine, but the test one that we've had for a while now and we are hashing out a few things. It's nice to be working as a group. I really don't have any "wants" from the engine other than that resumed games can be resumed, decks can be shared and that the whole thing made more user friendly. I've been told that that is being done, but I haven't seen anything yet, but who knows, it may be in.

Kari is still busy on LotR, and he challenged me to a game earlier. I killed him on site 4 (it was a fluke, I had really good cards, but I suspect he also played badly to let me win). He's now playing with what is known as "money cards" - i.e. cards that cost a lot and are the most sought after. He's getting there I think.

Julien seems to be busy working on Shadowfist, or at least the forum have exploded into some activity. The game is going strong on the engine, although the players don't seem to interact with the rest of the other players.

I think Christoph must be relazing this weekend since all the SW cards have been added to the engine. Timmie is still pimping the game in the other rooms, which is a good thing. He's not getting much success though, but he does get some once in a while.

Tony seems to have quite a lot of plans for Wheel of Time. I hope he's taking the time out to study what's being done before. Knowing Daniel's coding, I'm sure he'll need some painkillers for his upcoming headache. He hasn't said much though, either over IM, in the chatroom or on the forums, so it's interesting to see how things goes.

Craig, though have been canvassing to be made a PL, so he's probably ripping into the coding and the scripting this weekend. Who knows, Ultimate Combat might be made a game by the end of next week... or not. Hopefully, this time, we'll get a game out of the PL.

-+@ Overgrowth @+-

and the one word headings continue...



I added 6 cards to Go Fish today, or rather 6 card backs. That's 3 of them up there, and those 3 are the 3 least known games that was added. Also took the opportunity to update a few display stuff in the game, althuogh when the new build goes up, it'll need to be redone again since there's quite a few things that got changed there.

Talking about the new build, we might see it before the week is out... or probably not. I'm putting in small suggestions here and there to make it more user-friendly, so hopefully it'll be a little easier to use. We'll have to see what direction it progresses from there.

Since I'm on engine news... 2 new PLs were added today - Craig (skandall) and Tony (TonyLuzzi). Well, all the best to them, and they'll be taking up Ultimate Combat and Wheel of Time respectively. I see that my "Vacancy" notices on the forums did find some use after all. I had to edit the forums to remove those notices though for the 2 games and add them in as moderators of their forums, but all in all, that was done rather quickly and I must say I'm getting good at it.

Talking about the forums, I got some cardbacks from Tomi and added a few more forums with "Vacancy" notices to increase the clutter, including two non-CCGs. Age of Heroes and Groo: The Game are both card games, but they have many elements found in a CCG and I think they would be good games on the engine. The other 2 forums I added were Ani-Mayhem and Power Cards, and Arcadia and Towers in Time got new cardbacks for the forums. Yes, those are the 6 new cards for Go Fish. I scanned in A Game of Thrones and Medabots as well, just to make icons for my desktop, but I doubt those will get added into the engine any time soon.

With the new PLs, it's not just forum changes that were required, but it involves a whole host of things... like the Go Fish update and like the update to the plates post. One PL was also removed today *cues omnimous music* since nobody knows what he's doing and nobody has heard from him for ... oh, almost a year. Sometimes people get so enthusiastic about making a game that they don't realise how much work it actually involves. Just because I can do a game in 3 days doesn't mean it's not tedious - it is, but as I've said before, I've got experience and a whole library of code/scripts to copy from and modify if necessary. Anyways, everything for the plates post was done today, including the charts and all the age calculations. That's a lot of work usually reserved for the end of the month, but I thought I might as well do it now while it's still fresh. And that reminds me, I need to start the origins countdown.

Final Twilight finally got updated onto the engine as well, and I ran into the png not rotating bug. That was annoying since I had to create a whole set of images and update the coding to take into account of that. Sure it's only a 5 minute piece of work, but I had to berate myself for not remembering something so significant. I did get to try out a game with Nate though, which although we didn't finish was a good exercise. The room was littered with people who've logged in to play the game and didn't find any opponents. Poor them. I don't know if the Twilight Spring Equinox tournament will be underway... I hope it will.

Talking about tournaments, I've just created a Sandwich Shop "Event" for St. Patrick's Day this year just for the fun of it. Hopefully, people will be drawn to the game and will learn how to build decks in that game. Yes Martin, you get to build decks in this game. Kev was kind enough to add in a special promo for the "event" after I got permission from him to hold the event, and he might even sponsor the cards he printed out two years ago. Now that is just cool IMO. I posted things up in the forums and on the front page and the WGO. I hope it sees some interest.

Also updated a few things on the WGO and the FPN today just to keep things moving and to demonstrate that the engine isn't a stagnant place. It's actually good that we can do those two things now, as those are the 2 most visible updates to both the website and the engine. People seem to be using it and that seems good. That reminds me, I need to send off a PM to Christoph to tell him I've uploaded his ad to the images server.

Yes, the images server is finally up and working properly again, so there's a sudden rush of activity. Besides Final Twilight and Go Fish and the new forum icons, Timmie and Christoph have also posted up the virtual Star Wars cards. They are trying to have a selling point over other SW online gaming sites with the engine and they'll be advertising, presumably on the other SWCCG sites. I have no idea what they have planned, but hopefully, it'll bring an influx of SW players to the engine.

I have already mentioned the Sandwich Shop update by Kev, and I'm really grateful that he's going out of his way to do that in support of the "event" that I'm holding. He's got quite a bit of stuff to do on Monkeys as well, since he is trying to get it done before Origins at the end of... May... or is that June? Well, 3 more months might seem a long time, but from experience, I can say that it isn't from a coding point of view. Anyways, I wish him the best on his endeavours there.

And talking about Endeavours, the Red Tag Games Endeavor is getting art and colours professionally done in anticipation of the event at Origins. Mark is really pouring money into this game and I hope he'll be successful with it. I think he's also trying to push to get Summer Camp finished before Origins as well, although I'm not sure if that's actually the case. Origins seems to be the deadline for everything.

I think Logan will be finally relieved that he can update Crypt with all the cool new stuff in that game. I really like his implementation of the game, including all the interesting tricks he used in there. I would say that game is almost midway on the nipa-Martin scale which shows that Martin's influence has been rubbing off there since traditionally Logan tends to swing towards nipa on that scale. Well, I wonder if Ed has sent Logan the MoA stuff, I think Logan is ready to start on MoA now.

I haven't heard from Martin recently, I can only guess that he's busy with VTES for a final push to make it beta on WW's "dedicated server". I wonder if WW is giving him or Ed any pressure there. I hope not... you can't rush perfection... or so the saying goes.

Tomi has been working on DoA today, I have no idea on what, but when I took a sneak peek today, I must say I'm impressed with what's being done so far. He told me about the pattern generator yesterday, and that's a new trick I never knew about... until yesterday. I haven't gone overboard with the pattern generator yet, but I think Silk Road will probably be the first game to benefit from that.

Kari has been busy on LotRO though. He started a guild called CCGW forgers for all CCGW players there and I got invited. Whee! Apparently, he's bought 2 boxes of Black Riders and 1 box of Reflections, bringing his total purchases to over $300. Wow. That is some serious spending. I hope he can afford it all. They updated the LotR client to handle the new standard as well so people are playing it. I've got my 2 hobbit decks to work relatively well, although they'll go down fast against anything that's tournament standard. I guess I'm not the type to build tournament standard decks... rather I've got these 2 fun decks, and a third non-solo Smeagol deck which takes ages (and a lot of skill) to play.

Oh and I haven't yapped about MND in this blog today. Well, that's because nothing much is going on. Mitch has joined the writing members of MND on gEngine sometime yesterday, but I haven't seen anything from him yet. I wrote a quick entry about NightmareMJ's hijinks today there. This isn't going to be a sad blog where I just talk about my other blog, and I'm definately not going to repeat myself (too much). Basically, tournament is still waiting for signups, and the competition is still going on with even weirder entries than the first one.

I just discovered my blogs are getting longer and longer, and I have no idea if that's a good thing. Anyways, if you want to buy a part of my blog, head over to BlogShares. I've got to warn you though, each share is now worth $14.39, up from the beginning price of 20 cents. Heh, someone really likes my blog.