-+@ Omega @+-

Final letter of the greek alphabet, final cardname for the month. Grats to Martin for guessing that it's HumAliens...



Well, might as well let HumAliens go out with a bang this month. Those are three of the PET cards that got added to the engine today. That's 119 cards out of 155 cards added. 36 more cards to go. I think I should just get it over and done with tomorrow and finish all 36 cards. At least that's one less distraction. There's still quite a bit of work though, as some of the new cards adds in functionality that the game isn't capable of. I'll leave that for a rainy day I guess, or until such a time when Ed wants this game to be tourney ready.

I did the stats today, and I must say that it's surprising to see that eventhough the number of tokens were lowered from 15 to 5, the total number of games have not changed much. There were bigger swings near the beginning of the year than the difference between last month and this month. That's good news for CCGW I'm sure.

Also did a small update on MND in preparation for the big update coming soon. SP is going out of playtesting, and "Novelty format" needs to get added to the game. Quite a bit of work there, and I guess if I'm doing HumAliens tomorrow, this will probably be for the rest of the week. Hopefully, once I get this out, and get TG onto the engine, I can forget about MND for a while and concentrate on other things.

Yes, the monthly report was written yesterday. 8 games to work on next month. Looks big. I have no idea what I'll work on after these two games. Most probably a combination of Hyborean Gates, Urland and YNDT. People turned up to play Urland today, but I really wasn't that interested in testing the game since I know everything works fine - I haven't modified the game in anyway since the last playtest. I really should put some time into it though. I hate having this huge sword of Damocles over my head with such a large number of games to update and to get up to scratch.

I updated the plates post a bit today, added in a few tidbits here and there and upped my prediction for Origins. Well, that's just a prediction, I'm practically plucking numbers out of the air for the prediction. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong... and that the numbers will be greater than what I've predicted.

Everyone else has been rather busy. Tomi and Logan were doing upates to Yahtzee and Kismet respectively to get them ready for the new engine and to close out a few other things. It was interesting. Mark said to me today that Summer Camp should be public before Origins and since Endeavor is being played in Origins, he hopes to get it done on the engine before Origins too. Somehow I doubt that will be the case, although he has 2 more months to get everything finished.

I tried out Ultimate Combat today too. Not too bad for a freshman attempt, but I'm sure things can be improved. The cards look ugly, but then again, all cards from that era had an ugly design I guess. I wonder how Gray is coming along with GE. I hope he's progressing some...

Yesterday I downloaded some rather good GI Joe scans. Too bad it's a WotC game, but I had a nice time looking at the images. I wonder if I can find the same for the TMNT card scans? Most probably not. Anachronism has been the rage everywhere I'm going - the talk about all the cards being easily available (as opposed to it being in booster form) means that the collectible part is gone, but the customisable deck part of the game is still there, so people are going wild about that. There are some balance issues though, but not too bad. Apparently one of MND's ex Card designer had worked on it as well. Interesting, I guess.

~ Novelty's April Monthly Report ~

A lot of things happening this month, but not a lot of it is mine. I'm also branching out into other things as well though, which means game coding is suffering a bit as well.

Tournaments

The March MND Elder's Legacy tournament had 10 participants, although more signed up. Malovis was declared the undisputed winner. The April MND Elder's Legacy tournament is still ongoing and more players are playing this month than last month. It is very likely that Malovis will also be the winner this month


gNet BOT
nipa did a lot of work there, so I didn't do much this month. Most of it is cleared out now though. Still it gets filled up rather fast, particularly with people asking it stupid questions.


Forums
The forum underwent some major readjustment this month with three new categories being created - Games in Development, Games awaiting Leads and Games Removed. This is to ensure that the current games now available for playing are located near the top of the forum. It also allows the Games Removed section to showcase some of the games removed by the publishers so that people can see what has gone on before. A number of forums were added, a couple were taken up by PLs looking for games, and all game forums now have a cardback icon again.


Games
The focus this month seems to be on games that will get tournament ready and a few things were done in that regard.

ELEM Elemental

The Elemental update attempted to add the new stuff developed for RSP to automatically center a piece in a square. However the method isn't working very well on elemental, so it's disable for the time being.

GOFSH Go Fish
Go Fish had 4 cards added and 4 cards updated, in addition to some plate changes. Otherwise, the game remains the same.

HALN HumAliens
Most of the New Order was added - the only outstanding ones are the Pet Enhancements and the non-Team Actions.

MND Magi-Nation Duel
MND updates this month consisted mostly of new cards to TG and updated images on some of the TG cards. Some corrections to the feature update started last month were made, and a few were extended to other areas.

URLND
Urland had a quick update this month to ensured that it work in the new build. Once it did though, the game played flawlessly, as evidenced by a playtest session I had this month.

YNDT You Need Drew's Truck
YNDT had a quick update to automate setup. Setup could not be automated when the game was first developed. Since then, the engine has moved forward leaps and bounds and have left the game behind. YNDT though received its first update to make it slightly better.

May 2005 Plans

I only did 2 of the 6 things I said I'll do this month. Ack, I'm falling behind. And I'm scheduled to fall behind even more in May, even as I carry forward the 4 outstanding tasks from April.

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 Shadowsfall goes into playtested status, and a semi-major MND update is envisioned this month as the "Novelty rules" take effect on the engine version of MND. Playtesting of Tainted Glimpses continues this month, and hopefully all the cards will be made available - only two regions, Nar and d'Resh needs to get added tot he engine.

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

Urland needs a few updates. Might as well put them in this month.

Likewise YNDT could do with a few automations. Might as well put them in so that the game can flow smoother in a tournament.

Elemental needs to get things fix once Ed figures out what's wrong with the coding.

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, games for this month not prioritized, nor with expected completion dates:

1. Automate some Portable Adventures encounters.
2. Babylon 5 Bold text.
3. Magi-Nation Duel - add in the last 2 regions for Tainted Glimpses. Update game for "Novelty Rules".
4. Firestorm - spoiler and images
5. Hyborean Gates - spoiler and images.
6. HumAliens - New Order updates - Pet Enhancements and non-Team Actions.

7. YNDT - Automate truck. Automate play stuff to donut.

8. Urland - Change volcano to marker, make ichtos to be movable by all, add sound if possible.

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

O. Elemental - complete hotspots and Tidal Wave automation.


Rest of the Year Plans

Aliens vs Predators and Terminator (AVPVT) - Add Atmosphere cards and create the Planetfall scenario. Add Terminator 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. Hotspots aren't working properly yet for Elemental.

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) - 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 probably getting licensed, it'll have to move beyond that.

Firestorm (FIRE) - New licensed game for me to do for 2005, it's going to be delayed to a November 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 and to add in functionality for New Order cards.

Hyborian Gates (GATES) - Hopefully this will go public in June. 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) - Encounters needs to be automated, and then there's quite a bit of work involved with the playtesting.

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 and a number of suggestions were developed during playtesting this month including a few functional changes.

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 Firestorm, Hyborean Gates and Triple Triad. I guess that makes it a December 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, automate all cards and automate playing stuff to (replace) the donuts. Sounds would be a good addition too.

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
June - WSS1, HGATE, FIRE, URLND, AVPVT (Terminator)
July - HGATE, FIRE, WSS1, WS (clipping)
August - HGATE, FIRE, WSLS, WS (clipping)
September - FIRE, WSLS, WS (Stormwatch)

High Priority for next 3 months (after March):
* Automate Encounters in Portable Adventures
* Make Hyborian Gates beta

Medium Priority:
* Firestorm
* Add bold text to B5 cards
* Automate YNDT truck moving

In between Medium and Low Priority:
* Add Terminator to AvPvT

* 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:
* Tempest of the Gods
* Armageddon

-+@ Star @+-

As in when you wish on one?



Art Credit:
Glowing Ugger: Holmberg/Shreve
Cloud Castle: Strom/Whyrl
Good Cheer: Holmberg

Still showcasing the Twilight War cards. The Ugger artwork is a bit atrocious as it is. Then again, I took that from the comic of BoA#5 so it was a bit hard taking out the text and the frames which was everywhere. I like that result though, but I'm sure it could be better. Cloud Castle is just something from Whyrl. Note that this is the 2nd Castle card in the set... am I setting up something here? Good Cheer was another left over from Keeper's Quest, it'll be interesting to see what sort of text is made for this.

I made 3 more d'Resh cards a few days ago, and I'll show them maybe tomorrow for the ultimate post ... of the month anyways. Added icons to the forums, and updated the plates post today, but otherwise things are quiet with me.

Ultimate Combat is now in closed testing as things get interesting. Hopefully it'll be out public soon? Tony is attempting to do Highlander, but his source image for his templates are teeny weeny - not a good sign generally. I wonder if he even has any rules for it. Logan has got his custom SR expansion up and running, ads and all. It's good to see another game with a custom set. I think it's the 5th game to do so on the engine, after WS, MND, DT and Dune.

-+@ Klik @+-

KaBOOOM?



Yes, it's HumAliens again, and I added the 11 promo actions that haven't yet been added. That means there's 49 more cards to go including the 13 PETS which hopefully would be done this week. I do hope to get New Order done before the end of the month is out, but somehow I doubt I'll be able to do it. We shall have to see though what happens the rest of this week.

It's been a quiet day otherwise for me - no MND for a change. Well, that's not exactly true. There are still a number of forum posts that I had to deal with, including people plagarising names from other properties for their custom cards which I had to put a stop to by saying that those definately won't get onto the engine... and that's causing rework in, well, one case. People need to realise that naming someone James Bond or Optimus Prime in the MND universe is just going to mean the card would end up being rather silly.

I'm tired of reporting up everyone else, so I won't? Instead I'll just mention today's update - ShadowRun, Grave Robbers from Outer Space and Wheel of Time, in addition to HumAliens, of course. It shouldn't be too difficult figuring out who's doing what from that list.

-+@ Judgement @+-

Have you been found wanting?



The above 3 are for TW. Art Credits:
Immobilised: Art = Goodman, Background = Nov
Sit It Out: Holmberg
Fenix: Whyrl/Strom

That's right, I'm previewing TW images on the blog once in a while. This isn't a slow image day though, because I could have put in the new Go Fish cardbacks for example, but I do really want to preview TW cards on the blog before they get passed on to the designers for the text. Would it encourage people to drop by and read? Probably not. Anyways, I digress.

The Tony in Qwade's tentacle image is a common one associated with quite a lot of things, but it has never been made into a card before... until now. I like how the background affects the entire card, but then again, I'm biased. Sit it Out is probably going to be controversial as a card, but it uses leftover art from Keeper's Quest that I had in store. There's one more piece of Keeper's Quest artwork though, which will probably be revealed maybe next week. Fenix though is one of Whyrl's RP characters on Insiider and although initially I wanted to make it part of EF, I discovered that I had 2 of her Arderial RP characters, so I moved Fenix to TW and there's another ofher Arderial RP magi in EF. All's good. TW is at 51 cards with art. 49 more to go.

So quick summary for anyone who's interested:

EF = now playing
SP = going out of playtesting and into now playing at the end of the month
TG = currently in playtesting, 11 regions on the engine, 5 more cards needs artwork
KQ = awaiting May's KQ#4 to complete the set, then it goes onto the engine for playtesting
TW = 51 cards with art, 49 more to go, then the cards get text.
EF = still gathering artwork.

The MND tournament is winding down now. Oh well, hopefully someone will qualify besides Mitch this month. I announced the KQ#3 winner earlier and there were a number of people who weren't very happy with the decision. Oh well. There's always KQ#4 for them. Otherwise MND is going slow on the engine due to the lack of tokens, but that's biting every other game across the board with the exception of two - Shadowfist (of course) and Star Wars, where the players have all splurged out and bought a pass each.

This weekend was spent mainly on two things - Go Fish had a minor update, with a couple of cards added and the plates tweaked to reflect the current situation. It's getting ready for the end of the month, which will be next week, where a million things, including the plates post, needs updating.

The major update this week hasn't been on the engine but instead on the forums. The forums were reorganised to favour the games currently playing by placing them closer to the top. Since I'm lumping the not currently in play games together, I had to give them a category of some sort, and well, if I'm doing that I might as well do it for all the games. Which ended up to be a tedious task. Then there was game category and after that I thought some of those would look better if I changed the colour so that it stands out... and... well, it was a lot of work, but the end result, although a bit wordy, looks better than what went on before. Thanks to Kev, I also got the scans to most of the cardbacks required for the forums. So that's that. The good thing is that at a glance one can see what games are being worked on and which games needs PLs. I ran past Ed the idea of returning the forums for the games removed and he agreed. They are, after all, only forums and there is nothing wrong about talking about those games. And I'm sure fair use allows me to use the cardbacks on the forums.

What has everyone else been doing? Mark has been tweaking with the Endeavor cardback... it's on the forums now, although I don't think that forum is visible to anyone but him and me since it contains things that he doesn't really want to reveal yet... or probably not until after Origins or something. Tomi uploaded a Mythos update - according to him, Alex has been busy reporting bugs and things that doesn't work. Heh, Alex is good at being annoying at times I guess, and I mean annoying in a good sort of way. Logan is still working on SR. He's really updating it to include all sorts of bells and whistles. He's running into a few brick walls, but there's always workarounds to those. I have no idea what Martin is doing, but he posted a condensed framework for games. Sounds interesting anyways.

Junior PLs? They have been quiet this weekend, which can be taken as either a good or a bad sign. It depends I suppose. Timmie has been in and out of the engine, playing WoT and B5 mostly. I guess he's bored of SWD for now. Christoph hasn't shown up on the engine for the whole weekend. I wonder what he's busy with. He hasn't been doing much on the game for a while now as well. I wonder what's the deal with him. Everyone else seems to be on a holding pattern. It's going to be interesting to see if Aaron and Julien will produce Sim City and Arcadia respectively. I'm not going to put money on either one of them getting those games out on the engine anytime this year.

-+@ Prism of Change @+-

No, not something for totalitarian regimes...



Yes, I did a Humaliens update today and added in the Technology cards from New Order. Also added in the Alien Aversion ethic which I missed out from the last update for some weird reason. Well, that brings the grand total to 98 out of 152 cards. That's right 54 more to go and I'm about two-thirds of the way there. All that's left are the Pet Enhancements and the Actions. I think I might split out the Actions into two parts just to make them more managable. We'll have to see. I'll be so glad to get all the cards added though.

I did do quite a bit of MND stuff over the past few days, including updating three of the existing TG images with better versions. Two more cards got artwork for TG, a Nar and a d'Resh card respectively. That means only 5 more images are required to complete the set for playtesting - 3 d'Resh images and 2 Nar ones. I think 4 of those are creatures and the fifth is a Nar spell. Hopefully they'll get done near the beginning of next month... it's going to be a busy month next month as SP goes out of playtesting and into play as well.

TW is also making some headway artwise at least... the 6 Arderial cards have been named on the Custom Card Forum, and I have completed the outstanding artwork for all announced cards so far. So that's 30 cards named, all of them with the appropriate artwork. Started working on Core and Universal, but with 8 and 6 cards respectively there, it's taking me quite some time to find art that would fit the theme for both of them. TW also gained the first d'Resh card artwork over the last few days... and that brings the total to 51 cards with art, or over half of what I hope will be the expansion. Of course, that's excluding the promos for the set which I should be thinking about as well.

KQ#3 closed today and although there were less entries this time around, what was on there was actually rather good, or a least that's what I thought in my book. I've got to judge them later today and announce a winner between now and tomorrow though. It's going to be hard to do so, but someone is going to be rather happy with the 5 extra copper tokens. Next month will be the last card in the series... KQ#4 will feature Hidden Puzzlebox... and I best put that up in a bit so that people can start thinking about it.

The tournament is still getting on average a game a day... not many people are playing much though, which is a pity. Mitch has got 9 games... the first time anyone has got above the minimum required to qualify... although he was the only person who qualified in the last 2 tournaments anyways. Hopefully, in the 10 days or so remaining, a few more other people will qualify. The good thing is that everyone who joined in this tournament has played at least 2 games.

Before this becomes a runaway MND blog... I missed my Elemental tour yesterday. It was bad of me. Well, nobody showed up for it anyways so I don't feel too bad about it. Really though, I've got to remember about my tours... or at least the one shots. I see people playing around with Elemental, since it's featured this week. Hopefully, there'll be more than 3 people who'll show up for the tournament on Sunday. Somehow I doubt it... it is after all a silver token game.

I've been testing out a deck I've nicknamed Gruesome or GRUSM to be exact with LotR. It's not very good tough, but late in the game it does build up significantly. Still quite a lot of other decks kill it fast. The good thing is that the "M" part - Evil Men - complete with archery, wins the day most of the time. Still, it's not a power deck or anything.

Otherwise, I've been rather quiet on the CCGW front, unlike most people out there...

Tomi got sounds into Yahtzee over the weekend... that seems so cool though. Mark got his Monster Rancher cards... and I got a cardback. I forgot to take it home with me so I couldn't update the forum and Go Fish with it... it'll have to be after tomorrow I guess... so no points for guessing which game I'm updating tomorrow. Kev finally got Monkeys up. Now for the playtest. I wonder if anyone is playtesting with him... I should probably offer to see if there is a good time for a number of us to get together to play the game. Logan is busy with the fan made expansion for SR and he seems rather enthusiastic about it. Let the good times roll. Eric is back coding for the engine... although he has a secret project in hand... I wonder what he's going to be up to... maybe Ed will announce once things are ready.

While the ghosts (except Martin, who's on holiday) are at a frenzy working on their games, the junior PLs seems to be rather quiet. Craig seems to be the only person to break the trend by announcing that UC is almost playable. JC has got a few Rage bug fixes along the way, but nothing much is going on there. No news from Gray or Tony or Aaron or even Timmie... although Star Wars is experiencing a huge (and by huge, I mean over 200 games in the last 30 days or so) jump in the number of games played. People have been getting game passes to play SWD, which is a good sign. Now hopefully Timmie and Christoph delivers on their promises to make SWD the best online version of the game. Thomas is still trying to get the next DoomTrooper tournament out the door next month. He still has 10 days or so to go before the tournament starts. Hopefully they'll settle on a theme by then.

-+@ Cannon @+-

Hopefully not a loose one...



Art credits:
Kellus by Goodman, background by Holmberg
Cloak of Protection by Werner/Gillette
Puddle Arboll by Holmberg/Sato/Nov

I don't like the end result with Kellus... I had to change the skin colour to blue and I think I didn't do as good a job as I would have liked. Oh well. The cloak is interesting I guess, but rather bland. Liriel's Cape was the forerunner of that cloak. And it's probably ironic that I converted fiery Arbolit to the Puddle Arboll. It definately rings true for the FT "It's an unfortunate half breed" to some extent. Also corrected the images for Darunia and Darunia's Twist as well as Uloron.

With the cloak done, and with the large number of defects raised for MND since Bograth and Paradwyn was added, I thought it'd be good to do an update of the game on the engine, so that was a couple of hours worth of work. No coding change this time around though... nothing small left to add and all the big stuff could cause game instability, not to mention a million lines worth of code to check for all the exceptions, so I passed on those. So as of today, TG has 11 regions and 78 cards up on the engine. Only Nar and d'Resh to go... and with the 2 Nar images above, it means I only need 3 more Nar images and 4 more d'Resh images to finish the set. Hooray!

I've also started work on getting TW organised some and have got the first 4 regions named out on the Custom Card forums - Cald, Naroom, Orothe and Underneath. That's 4 × 6 or 24 cards out of the 100 card set, so hopefully that will draw some interest. Mitch has offered to do Orothe and Nar and I think Frank wants to do something, although he hasn't said what exactly. We'll have to see what happens. I'm doing Paradwyn and Cald, of course, and probably all 6 Arderial cards since I really don't want Arderial to be broken. We shall have to see there.

The tournament is winding down, I guess. It happens whenever Mitch qualifies and everyone else just can't be bothered to catch up to him. Oh well, let's see what happens. Hopefully someone else qualifies this month and gives him a run for his money. Kevex just joined up today bringing the total number of players to 8. I think this is the most that there is since the tournament started, and because of the way things are setup, it got a lot more games played as well.

Also updated the posts on the forums advertising TG, but have yet to make that announcement in Insiider... or even on GPN. I should at some point I guess. Also, wrote about image making over at MND at gEngine blog. It's a must read for people who want ideas about how to make art for cards I guess. So now I have 5 expansions in progress for MND - SP will come out of playtesting at the end of the month, and then it's going to be crazy as I update the engine and the website for the cards. TG is currently in playtesting and hopefully all the cards will be up by the end of May. KQ has the fourth competition next month and should see the cards being added to the engine in June. Hopefully, by June, the cardlist for TW will be finalised. And of course EF, although is in progress, really has no hurry to be added anywhere. They are just nice pictures at the moment.

Well, just in case people start thinking MND is my life, it's not. I had the 2nd Urland playtesting session today and 3 people showed up. Unlike the last time, the game is fully playable this time around and we did play a 4 hour game. People enjoyed the game though, which was good and they said they'll be back next week to play. Someone should be around to guide them to play, I guess, but since I'm not here next weekend, it won't be me. No bugs found in the playtesting session, but quite a few upgrades required. And I still haven't have had an exact idea how to do auto scoring, but hotspots is a good hint about where to go from there.

Other news, nipa seems to be working on Access Denied for the tournament later today. Hopefully, he'll get all the kinks ironed out before the tournament. Ed though has been busy holding tours for AD. Hopefully he'll be on time this week for the tournament as well. Logan seems to be having a sweet time tweaking SR to his liking... and the players are coming in droves as well. That's a good sign in my book. Mark has got Summer Camp going last I saw and I suspect he's going to put in quite a lot of the new features. Poor Kev is playing catch up on Monkeys. As I suspect, he didn't get it ready by today, but since he still has a day and a bit before the week is out, maybe he can meet that deadline...hopefully. He's also looking into changes to Capitol as well I think. Martin has gone on holiday, which he really deserves after working so hard on VTES. Knowing him, though, he'd be missing his tweaking on his games... still ME has grown leaps and bounds since he last updated it.

And the non-ghost PLs? Pretty much very quiet. Robert had some activitiy on the forums, after Doug asked for things, but I have no idea if he'll even have the time to code them in. We'll have to see. Tim have been asking a few more questions, but I haven't seen a Star Wars update yet. Maybe he's trying to get his head around things. Craig has been quiet for a few days now, and Tony has been quiet for a long while as well. I have no idea if that's a good sign or a bad sign. Aaron is missing in action again. Oh well, I think it might be a year or two before Sim City even gets started, if at all by him.

-+@ Surge & Grind @+-

That's how the engine updates seems to work - one huge surge and then I have to grind away at it to make everything work again.



Art Credits:
Frostbite Ickle: Ickle by Gillette/Goodman, wings by Werner, background by Holmberg.
Jile Snacks: Hand by Gillette, Snacks by Nov, background by Holmberg.
Nightbloom Cloak: Cloack by Hillgrove, Liriel by Warner/Gillette, background by Holmberg.
I had fun with these images. I think it's more productive to think about the images a few days before hand, then putting everything togehter after I've digested all the ideas. The results look stunning too if I may say so myself. Tainted Glimpses is going to raise the bar a bit over Tainted Glimpses I think. Those are the last of the Bograth and Paradwyn cards. All that's left are 10 more cards that I need to get some sort of images for - 1 Arderial, 4 d'Resh and 5 Nar cards. Those will be harder to pull off, but hopefully this weekend, I should be able to get the Arderial card out of the way. Hopefully.

And with that Bograth and Paradwyn got added to the engine. That brings the engine's complement of TG regions to 10 and thet total number of cards to 72 + 4. So 28 more cards to be added to the engine for TG to be complete. Perhaps by next month they'll all be there. Yay for the homestretch.

Otherwise there's not been too much MND activity today. I did get permission from FlameRaven (Beth) to use her RP card art as custom cards, so that's one more step ahead for EF. Also, I got all the names of the Guardians, so that's another good thing. And before anyone starts asking me about MND expansion abbreviations...

Official Sets
BS = Base Set
LE = Limited Edition
UL = Unlimited Edition
(The above 3 are all the same thing basically)

AW = Awakening
DE = Dream's End
ND = Nightmare's Dawn
VotS = Voice of the Storms
TR = Traitor's Reach*
DB = Daybreak*
SO = Second Order*
*Unreleased

Novelty's Custom Cards
EL = Elder's Legacy
SP = Shadowsfall Promo
TG = Tainted Glimpses
KQ = Keeper's Quest (Promo)
TW = Twilight War
EF = Exodus Flight (consisting of cardnames and images from EX, DS, CF)
NS = Native Spirit
AoD = Ancient of Days

Insiider RP Custom Cards
EX = Exodus
DS = Dreamstorm
CF = Chimefall

Other news? Kev said Monkeys will be playable before the week is out. I asked him if he meant this week as a jest. Really though, I've learnt to take time frames by myself and my fellow PLs with a lot of leeway, to the extreme of considering Venusian days in place of Earth days.

Tomi is still busy on Kult. I'm surprised at what he's achieving so far and his dedication to it. After all, this is Bryan Winter's favourite game and I guess Tomi wants to impress the game designer or something. I've also put up James Bond onto the forums a few days ago (as blogged then) and I think Tomi might be interested. No vacancy has been posted for that though. We'll have to see.

Logan is still hard at work on SR, unsurprisingly. It is his signature game after all. He has been spending a lot of time on it recently and hopefully that will translate into more people picking up the game. He has noticed my MND artwork and was asking if I'd be willing to do images for the game. Well, join the queue of people asking for that. I think he has decided to cull SR "art" from various sources. We'll have to see what happens there.

Martin has been busy on ME and all the changes associated with it. I know how much a game like LotR will probably take and ME is like 10 times as complex as LotR so it's miles difficult to update. Still, I think he's doing a good job as there seems to be some people playing it more. Meanwhile on the DoomTown front, people are being drawn to the game as they experience the unique shootout system. Martin did say he was going to do Upkeep tracking, but not soon. Oh well, I can wait, I suppose.

Mark is still toiling away on GRfOS. I think he should be rewarded with a tournament on the game soon... after he works out all the bugs I suppose. He has a playtest session on Sunday as well to do that, so hopefully he can get some interest for the game. We shall have to see.

And it's been all quiet from everyone else... except perhaps Craig who seems to be pushing ahead with Ultimate Combat rather quickly. He seems to be ploughing through adapting the game rather quickly, which is a good sign I suppose.

Rage is going to a point where they are considering a tournament next month. I think that's good progress of sorts. Hopefully that will increase gameplay some more. I wonder if they are drawing the VTES crowd at the moment... probably not so much, but who knows?

-+@ Replicator @+-

Some days, I wish I can replicate myself...



No, I'm not adapting all these games. I just added their cardbacks to Go Fish, which is why they are here. 3 more cardbacks - Sideshow, Towers in Time and Power Cardz also got updated, thanks mostly to Kev who went above and beyond and scanned some of these cardbacks. I also added James Bond to the forums as well, although I'm sure this game will probably get licensed at some point, so I'm not opening it as a vacancy... but I also know that a fellow PL has his eyes on this for more than a year so... let's see what happens...

The HotS tournament on Sunday drew a total of 3 players. Well, that's another 35 silvers out to 3 players. They did enjoy the game though and had quite a bit of fun. I hope some of them will come back next week with the AD tournament. Yes, AD tournament on Sunday. Ed has already announced the tournament and I guess it's about time it gets broadcasted all over the engine. I had to change the image to something that's bigger and better on the front page, but otherwise it's all there. I wonder if he's advertising on the respective games site as well. Hmm...

Meanwhile, Martin is busy fixing ME, and he has great plans for it and for the rest of his games. I wonder if that means VTES is ready for release? Probably so. Mark has got Sideshow beta, is working on GRfOS and now seems to be concentrating on Summer Camp. It's good to see him in the thick of things. Kev seems to be going strong with Monkeys and GE and other things. He's got more than 2 more months or so to get Monkeys to a playable public stage. I hope he makes it. Logan, is still debugging his flagship game - Shadowrun, although, flagship here would probably be a misnomer, Crypt and probably LMS is probably more advanced than that.

Talking about flagship games, the following is a list I made in my head quite some time ago. It has gotten updated as time moves on, but it has remained rather consistant most of the time.

Tomi has got DoomTrooper, the game which you should measure all of his other games against. It has got all sorts of goodies in there, and I remember asking for DT goodies when I was playing DE. I don't think those goodies are in yet.

Logan has ShadowRun, as previously mentioned. This game, besides being complex has some of the more innovative scripts, including the sort hand stuff and the make change stuff that Logan developed for SR. The former has been cannibalised for other games. Have I mentioned lots of good things? Oh, and this is probably one of the first games with custom cards as well.

Martin used to have DoomTown, but he has let that rot along the wayside for a while now. I don't blame him though as his new flagship title seems to be the new VTES. VTES has all sorts of goodies, including the native card attachment and customised fonts. Also, a lot of new methods were created by Ed specifically for VTES, so it's not a huge surprise that Martin is working his *random anatomy* off on the game.

Ed doesn't really have a flagship, but his current game in testing, RSP, is setting the standards for a whole new generation of games. The latest builds of the engine were also written with board and tile games in mind and this shows through in RSP. The ability to play sounds, have successfully crossed boundaries to other games.

And what's my flagship game? Before anyone jumps on and say MND, I'll beg to differ. That game is so low tech and so old, that I'm surprised that people are playing with it as much as they are. The secret there is that eventhough it's low-tech, it gives the players sufficient control over the game to the point where they can "undo" an entire turn, if need be. Sure, a few more automations probably won't hurt, but the players are so entrained in the old ways, that they are forgoing the new automations for the old ways of doing things. Well, that's up to them. Still the game have improved over the 2 years I've held it's reigns - going from counters to attached dice, for example, and the ability to auto-energize magi.

No, if anything, my flagship game would probably be Babylon5, although that is going a bit low tech as well by now. The first game to introduce in game buttons, the ability to show X cards to one player and all sorts of weird and whacky effects that is required by B5. I've let it fall along the wayside though, but the future promises new and updated ways of doing bold text on the cards and auto-influence determination and auto-replacement.

-+@ Asimo @+-

Yeah, some guy named Asimov wrote "I, Robot".



Well, that's right, I did more HumAliens today, and with the Robots in, that means all the HumAliens from New Order have been added to the engine as cards. I can't guarantee that all of them will work on the engine though, as some of them have quite specific mechanics, but unless I get a playtest game or twenty with all the cards, there's no way I can know for sure. So that's 73 out of 152 cards... man and It thought I was almost at the home stretch, I'm barely halfway there. Actions, Pets and Technology left to go with about 40 cards on the latter 2 and the rest being Actions.

Sunday evening/Monday morning is always slow on MND tournament action and today wasn't an exception. Mitch played a game to qualify ... now he's the only person to have qualified, eventhough he's not the first one to have qualified. That's confusing, but Nick qualified, but then more people got added and the number of qualifying games were increased, so Nick has to play catchup now.

I got 3 Playtest reports today for Tainted Glimpses... which reminds me I best post those that needs changing as defects. Had to give them coppers for the playtest reports, one of which was rather good if I may say so. Progress on Tainted Glimpses is still slow though, but I know I'm at the home stretch... and with the next 5 cards planned, it'll leave me about 7 more to do after that. Meanwhile, I've announced, rather ambitiously that I'm going ahead with both Twilight War and Exodus Flight. Twilight War will be 100 cards and will be split among the various regions in the same way that TG was. Artwork will be a potpourri of stuff, but there's still stuff from Holmberg and the various other artists who worked for 2i. Card design has also already started. Exodus Flight will be based on the names and the artwork of the Insiider RP cards - all three expansions - eXodus, Dreamstorm and Chimefall. I'm still trying to get permission from the various artists there, but hopefully they will all agree to this.

And in other news? Sideshow has finally gone public Beta. It's a licensed game too so that should be interesting. Mark is also busy working on GRfOS and Summer Camp, and he's setting up a playtest reward program for GRfOS too. Nice to see that I have a follower in that aspect.

Martin has also been busy - there was a Doomtown fix (and no, no upkeep counter, but that's not a problem), and I think a ME fix. Hopefully, he took out some time to fix HotS as well. Logan is still busy tweaking SR, Tomi on Kult and the surprise today is that Thomas made an update to 7 Seas. It's a good day all around.

-+@ Flora @+-

Nice little flowers popping up in spring...



All artwork by Whyrl. These are the cards for the most probably going to be released fan-made set Twilight Wars. It all depends, of course, on what happens with Tainted Glimpses. Half of the TG cards are already on the engine and hopefully Bograth and Paradwyn will join them soon. I still have 12 more images there to create and the set will be ready to get onto the engine. Let's see what happens there.

The tournament wise, Nick (aka Itchi) was the first person to qualify today with his 7th game. However, if anyone else should join, he'll need an additional game to qualify. Team Marshfield is holding the top 3 spots which is cool since they said they were going to rule about a month ago. Nice to see them finally getting there.

Tony aka KQ#3 has also been getting a trickle of entries, as people attempt to design a good use for him. I have no idea which entry I'll pick as the winner for the moment if asked to choose. Some of them are interesting, others are extremely broken, but it's fun to see what people seem to want for a Universal magi.

Babylon 5 and AvP are the other 2 of my games that seems to be getting some play. Neither has been spectacular, and despite attempts to jumpstart a league in the former, nothing has come to pass there. AvP people are still hoping for more cards - I think they are bored with the current selection of cards. Perhaps once I've finished updating the games that needs an update, particularly the licensed games, I should relly look into expediating Terminator and Atmosphere for the AvP players.

Meanwhile, JC though has been very supportive of the Rage players, as they use the engine to playtest the current version of the next build. Things are being fixed as soon as they pop up, which is a good sign. The partnership between him and HC seems to be a strong one and its a good thing to have this "axis" on the engine, because it's increasing the number of Rage games played.

I do wonder if the DoomTrooper tournament is on life-support. Things seem to be moving rather slow there. Atticus dropped out from being a shepherd last week, so I think everyone is down to having as few tokens as possible. I think the collective DoomTrooper player pool should just go out and enjoy themselves with other games, or chase after the tournaments that Ed is holding every weekend. They are a bit insular as they are at the moment.

Talking about tournaments, the HotS one will be on tomorrow and I seriously hope more than 3 people will show up. I've been advertising them to the MND and the Rage players so hopefully some of them will take note of that and just join anyways for the fun of it. Someone should point it out to the Troopers as well... maybe a bit later when there are more of them on.

-+@ Energy Sphere @+-

Well, if you see one, it's probably mine, coz I feel sorta drained.



Heh, well, I don't live in either of those. Those are just the cards in YNDT, which I updated today somewhat. I see so many possibilities with the game, there's so much to do with so little time. Yes, this isn't on my "ToDo" list for the month, or even the optional list. It's just the bonus something for this month, to simplify gameplay and to enable tours and tournaments to be held on the engine for it. This will make things a bit more easier to play.

The other game I worked on today, rather unsuccessfully, was Elemental. This is also not on my list, but I thought it's about time I tweaked it somewhat to see what recent goodies I can put into it. Well, as it turns out, not much, so I guess, I'll just have to wait until the engine improves significantly to get it down.

MND-wise, the tournament is still going on strong as people are still signing up. People are going berserk playing tournament games, although I haven't observed that many recently. It should be good though and I know some of the players are getting tokens to play in the tournament. Good times and all.

I really haven't had the time to work on new cards - I really should get Jile Snacks (got part of the image, just need to do the rest), Nightbloom Cloak (got the image, just need to edit it some) and the Frostbite Ickle (got the 2 images I'll need to make the picture). Hopefully, I'll get some time tomorrow. Hopefully, I'll get some eXodus cards under my belt tomorrow as well. We'll have to see. And just because it needs some advertising: MND at gEngine blog had an update yesterday for some really cool artwork. Be there or be ... elsewhere?

Martin is still busily working on VTES I know... it's hopefully coming out soon and he'll be less cranky. Who knows why he's cranky. French guys are always cryptic - polite, but cryptic. Which means no DoomTown update for a while... although HotS might be getting an update very soon for the upcoming tournament.

Yes, tournament. Ed has been giving tours every night for a while now. He's really trying to make these tournaments a success. I wish him all the best with this one. He was room hopping broadcasting his tour today, although I think at the end of the day, only one person turned up. Well, one is better than none in my book. Access Denied is next I think, and that might prod (or is that jolt?) Tomi into action... or maybe not. I haven't played Access Denied for a while.

Kev has been working very hard with Monkeys, I think he knows Origins is coming soon. I think he's on the home stretch. I know I've been saying that for ages, but the home stretch is always the longest stretch. It's like it's in time-lapse slow-mo action there, so that we don't miss all the good parts. He's also busy on GE though, and I wonder how that is going. Haven't seen anything from Gray for a while... but that doesn't mean they aren't doing anything.

Talking about new PLs, Craig IM'ed me to ask me about schemas while I was at the busiest phase at work. Urgh. I wasn't able to help him much... schemas aren't my strong point... and for that matter, neither is coding, or anything else that's involved with adapting a game on the engine. I just plagarise what other people have done I suppose... other people including myself, of course!

Have been also busy playing some LotR. I'm bored with the new cards already, bored with all the same old tricks with those cards. One decktype I'd really like to play is ninja gollum, but I don't have the cards for that. Oh well.

-+@ Laser @+-

Beams of lights everywhere. Zon zon ZON!



Yes, those 3 images means I updated HumAliens today with the Ethic Enhancements. Also added in an Alien that I missed the first time around when I did Aliens. So that's another one off the list. Robots, Actions, Pets and Technology are the last 4 groups of cards that I need to add before New Order is finished. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it by the end of the month.

As to the other games I said I'll do this month? MND has got one update, PAD and B5 is still on the queue, although I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to them. Firestorm and Hyborian Gates? Probably they'll get carried forward to next month. We'll have to see.

Tomi has been busy with a Kult update and Kari has been helping them out. I think Team Finland is going strong this month with game updates. I saw Kari playing Hobbits yesterday... I wonder why he's playing with them. Maybe he's trying to be an all rounder.

Team France, meanwhile has been quiet. Julien has computer problems and Eric seems to be MIA, although that's not strictly true. Jean-Claude had a Rage update done last night with the new attach card methods. He's really supporting Rage in a mighty way. Martin though seems to be working on nothing in particular, but I guess he's just busy tweaking various of his other games, including hopefully Doomtown with the upkeep counter... at least I hope so.

And Team Germany? Thomas has been so busy he barely has time to even play in his own tournament, let alone update Frank's Zoo or 7 Seas. The tournament has also sort of died as well and I saw the Troopers moving on to play Shadowfist. Still, some tournament games have been played. Christoph has been quiet as well this month. He was last on the engine about a week ago. I wonder if he's going to give up on Star Wars. We'll have to see. Timmie hasn't updated Star Wars in a while now.

I'm waiting for the Shadowrun update that will be due today. Finally, all the clipped images will be ready for download, and the game will be reopened to the public. I hope the Shadowrunners weren't too inconvienence when the game was out of commission though.

The HotS tournament is this weekend. Yes, this here is advertising. Ed is giving free tours every evening so that people can learn how to play, and there's a 35 token prize pool for the tournament. Hopefully, we'll get more than 3 participants this time.

-+@ Star @+-

What do I and a star both have in common... Hopefully the answer isn't that we're both full of hot gas!



Art credit first as usual: Image by Zachary Morford aka ZaCkO, backgrounds by Holmberg, Zastrow, Werner/Gillette/Holmberg. These are for TG and not TW, so expect them to be on the engine soon. I'm now at the 88% mark of finishing the images, 12 more to go - one each of bograth, arderial and paradwyn, 4 d'Resh and 5 Nar.

Yes, that's the first image from Zack on a custom card, and I must say it's not too shoddy looking. It could be better, I should have gotten the facets of the crystal to reflect light properly, but I got a bit lazy, so this is the end result. Also, Luglee is Justin's second effort for TG, at least that I can recall. His other card was the alternate Kyg'n. No extra points for anyone for guessing that's the staff with Hasseth. It was a no brainer to do as well. Next up, Puddle Arboll, Jile Snacks and the Midnight Robe. I already have an idea on how to manipulate an image for the last one, and am considering a Bozyc image for the next to last. Puddle Arboll would be difficult, but I think a Green Stuff with... but that would be telling.

Some tournament games went on today too, although, the big issue were MND players being childish. Sheesh, some days I wish they would all grow up or get along or something. Really though. I had to pour cold water down some of their backs just to keep them from tearing each other apart. Sheesh.

Things are slow I guess. People are working on their games, but I have little to no idea what's being done today. I know Martin is working on something, perhaps a secret project, while Timmie is still trying very hard to improve Star Wars. Otherwise there's nothing much to see.

Played LotR with the horrible Sam deck, and won since I could do a ring toss. Smeagol is really good at controlling sites though. Speaking of which, there should be a new X-list up soon. I better let Kari know as well, since CCGW Forgers, although sucky, would have to stick together.

-+@ Cling @+-

some things are just too clingy...



Yup, I did another HumAliens update today, but instead of doing Robots, which is the last HumAliens factions, I did the subset of cards known as Team cards. These are the ultra powerful cards in the game, so most of them are rare, if not promos. I think Justin Hillgrove did some really good images there though. It's a pity that this set was never published.

The MND tournament started today as 8 people signed up. Team Marshfield got the first 3 games and won. It's not surprising though, the other players in the field are almost novices when compared with Team Marshfield. I'll have to do the standings table probably after a day or two, but I'm sure Team Marshfield will rule the field in this tournament since it's not as strict.

Ed announced the next official CCGW tournament. It seems HotS as I call it affectionately, or Honor of the Samurai will be next on the hitlist on April the 10th. Prizes are silver tokens - 35 of them to be given away, which is good. I'll have to start convincing people to play in it. Hopefully the Doomtroopers will show up to play there as well.

I thought Logan has finished up the redesign of Shadowrun. He's not. But things looks interesting. He's documenting things as much as possible and it seems he's really enjoying all this. Sounds good to me.

Tomi's expected Kult update finally got released and I think he had to scale back a few things. It's a pity though. I wonder what he'll work on next. Kari is still trying to get his LotR Gondor Wraiths to work. I think it's funny, but it's something he enjoys playing, so why not, I guess. I played a game with the Fighting Hobbits and discovered something interesting. I think I'm going to make a variant of that deck when I have the time.

Otherwise it's a quiet day.

-+@ Neanderthal @+-

Well, you'll have to go a bit further back than that for the game I updated. But first:



Artist, from left to right: Gray, Whyrl and Gillette/Shreve/Goodman. These are for the may probably happen TW, but somehow I doubt it will be soon. We'll have to see what happens. Maybe by then, the game will be so dead that TW won't be needed anyways. Who knows?

Yesterday, I added the TG Weave and KT cards onto the engine. I think they were rather well received. Maybe it's just because the cards are new... maybe people are just happy to be seeing new cards? I have no idea. Also added a few other minor gameplay things into the game to make things go a little bit faster in play. They won't be used much though, but when they get used, I'm sure the people who uses them would appreciate it.

Seven people have signed up for the tournament. If one more person signs up, the tournament automatically begins. It's a pity that people didn't sign up in time to take advantage of the fact that MND was featured. Oh well. Some people are rearing to start that tournament. We'll have to see what happens there as well, but hopefully, it'll start soon.

Tomi has been busy with Kult lately. An update has been posted. He's going through his games like a hot knife through butter. I wish I could do that too. I wonder what he'll be working on next. Hopefully he'll be enthused enough to finish DoA. Or maybe even Heresy. Who knows?

I saw Kev with Monkeys earlier. I wonder does that mean he's working on it. Would be interesting to see though because according to him, it's "almost finished". Logan has also been busy. He wrote a long treatise about coding stuff and posted it. It's amazing how much work he puts into his games as well. Lots of hard working people this weekend I'm sure.

Ed is still busy working on the VTES client. I'm alreading seeing the fruits of some of his work there on the website and it's beginning to look interesting. Hopefully he'll finish it soon and the VTES players will get happy playing there. I wonder if there'll be a huge influx of players again though. Most probably. I'll leave it to Martin to handle them this time around. Should be easier this time too I guess, it's going to have its own dedicated server.

Kari gave me a belated birthday gift today. 5 booster packs of Mount Doom from LotRO. It's a nice gesture and no, he told me I don't want to know how many booster boxes he bought. I did play a couple of games with new and even suckier decks than usual. Moral of the story - stick with what I know, not whatever cool stuff I want to play with.

And before I forget, I upgraded Urland today to work with the new build. Pretty much the same issues as with Portable Adventures, but unlike Portable Adventures, this time I know what I'm doing. The same fixes, the same series of scripts and voila, game was updated. Wrote a few lines of new scripts as well to handle Urland's mechanics. Not too shabby, I'd think, but Urland can now be so much with all the cool stuff in the engine.

Also added one game to the forums as a new forum. That place is building up way too much now. Still, it's nice to see the entire list of cardbacks there.

-+@ Way @+-

As long as it's not "No Way!", I'm happy.



Yup, I did a HumAliens update today. X-PETs was the theme of todays update and that's 3 of them there. I also downloaded all the rest of the cards from the site so about 6 more updates - Robots, Action, Team Actions, Ethics, Pets and Equipment and New Order would be finished. I'll give it a 10 days to 2 weeks for it to be finished.

Just a treat for Ed, who's been hunting for my personal blog (I don't have one, honest!). I got one of these for my b'day:

which is cool. It has glows in the dark bits and has a pull back engine. I have been busy bricking up a few other things over the course of today - it's great fun too.

Kari asked me for a game of LotR so I decided to play with my really really bad Hobbit deck. Well, I won, only because it was a bad matchup. He was playing archery elves against my enduring Naz and didn't have his burdenating Orcs against my Birthday Present Hobbits. Game wasn't really challenging, I just made my way slowly to Site 9 for the win. Oh well. I hear he's trying out a Corsairs deck now. Now that is scary. There are only a few fellowships that can deal with that - Gandalf or Elves mainly - so he'll probably win the next time we play. Or not. We'll have to see.

Tomi was busy working on Kult, but then he realised he didn't have a Doomtrooper deck for a game he has later today. So I suggested a Beginner's Cybertronic just in jest and he was probably horrified. Well, I've never gone beyond that so I have no idea what's good with Doomtrooper. Oh well.

Logan finished his Shadowrun stuff last night, after a long night, so I'm going to guess an update is due soon if it's not already out. I'm surprised at the speed he accomplished what he did - less than one week. I would probably have taken 2 to 3 months at my current ongoing speed. Oh well.

There's a new version of Star Wars... weird... I guess Timmie has been busy incorporating all the goodies he's been wishing to have so that Star Wars can be the best platform to play on the engine. It's been busy too. It has about the same amount of games as Babylon5 for the last 30 days which is nothing to scoff at. Babylon 5 though, surprisingly stands at over a hundred games in the past 30 days as well. I haven't even pushed that game at all anywhere, but according to traffic on the yahoogroups and the CCGW B5 forums, it's mainly due to people discovering the engine and then going on to test out the game interface and stuff. I'm glad that the engine is a whole lot stable now. I've probably mentioned it to everyone who's been making a comment to that effect, but I'll mention it again - I played a 2 hour B5 game the other day and it didn't crash. That's a 2-hour 3-player game with no exceptions on my side, all in one go. Gotta love that.

Someone brought up adapting AEG's Warlords on CCGW. I told them that we are still waiting for AEG's reply and they would probably have a quicker answer pestering AEG for it. A post was made on The Temple of Lore where people expressed their interest in playing the game with a pay per play (and not a pay per booster) concept. Well, it's ultimately up to AEG.

MND-wise, one person signed up to the tournament today, bringing up the total to 6. I made a rules change this month so that the tournament automatically kicks off when 8 people have signed up, so that means 2 more and the tourney is a go. I know FlipChef is interested, but he is too lazy to register for the forums. Nothing I can do there.

What has drawn traffic is KQ#3: Tony. I'm seeing some good entries being posted for that competition, which is in direct contrast to KQ#2: Slumber. I think it's going to be hard to pick a winner this month, but it'll be fun to see the entries. Also, it's good to note that the collective card-design capabilities of the MND players are slowly but surely improving thanks to these Keeper's Questions. Maybe I should start a Novelty's Questions next.

I also announced that SP Playtesting will close at the end of the month, and SP will get finalised next month. I'm also planning a few other things there that I'll be announcing next month, so things might get ... interesting, next month. Due to that, I had to create a TG Playtesting Rewards program... and all the announcements had to be made everywhere. Totally chaotic but fun at the same time.

The Urland playtesting session will be on in about 90 minutes time. I've got to review the rules before the game. The game is a bit "long in the tooth" as well, which is sad. Hopefully, the playtesting session will show where things needs to improve... time has been penciled in next week for the update. I just hope that the game works in the current engine.

I also want to get a MND update in by today - TG Weave + updates to Romura and errata to Amara, Beauty.

Otherwise it's a quiet day.

-+@ Multiple Link @+-

A new month, a whole set of titles for this month. As usual, 5 novelty points to the first person to guess which CCG this is from.



Artists, as usual from left to right: Holmberg with backgrounds by Werner/Gillette, Burke, with backgrounds by Holmberg and Nov, Holmberg. Thease are new, never before revealed images for TW. OK, So I lied. The image on the left is a reused image which I thought fit better for Bograth than Core. The one of the far right is one that shouldn't be a stranger to most gEngine players, although this is the first time that is has been "carded". And the Torsk? Not one of Burke's better images, but one she has contributed for this and I though it'd be nice to include it in this set... if this set is getting made. It might not.

Well, if you thought MND month was over last month... it's not. Today has been a busy day, being the start of the month, for MND. First up, last month's tournament was won by fellow MND at gEngine blogger Malovis with 8 games played and 4 wins. He gets 15 copper tokens of course, for his troubles, and trouble it has been. Mitch has been actively canvassing people to play tournament games with him.

The new month brought the new tournament format of course. 6 people have already signed up for it with 5 confirmed. It's a more relaxed tournament format than last months, which means it'll be more punishing for the weaker players, but it'll be interesting to see where things go there. The signups and stuff are at the CCGW forums.

Of course, being the beginning of the month the next Keeper's Question has started. Tony is the card that people are trying to design for and to guess and gander at. There has already been 2 entries by one person. Some people are really into competitions like this I guess. Well, I think after Keeper's Question is finished, I might go on with something else. What else I have no idea, but then again, I don't have to do it until the 1st of June.

Of course, all that has been spammed all across the relevant sites - the front page of CCGW, the WGO in the engine, on the CCGW forums, on the Custom Card Forums, on Insiider and on Game Players Network. That last site is a new one, and since I'm being a bit more daring these days, I'm branching out I guess.

Besides all that, I played a couple of MND games myself. Didn't do too well there. Also played some LotR. Did better there. Not many games got updated, but I did update the CCGW forums with a few more games that I think are do-able on the engine. Hopefully someone takes those up.

Grave Robbers from Outer Space got its major release today. I'm sure Mark must be relieved that it's finally done. It seems he added everything including the kitchen sink into the game. Makes it really good I'm sure. The tutorial has also been made public as well. Hopefully someone will play it. Maybe it'll be a tournament game this month.

Martin has been busy working on VTES fonts, or so it seems. I think he's finished teh font and is now working on getting it into the game. I guess that means we won't see a DoomTown update anytime soon. Oh well.

Tomi finished the DE update. I can't wait to see... wait... there isn't much that's changed in there I think. Oh well, I haven't checked it yet, but hopefully the pay-and-play works. The discard/annihilate, which I suggested, wasn't added it seems. Well, Tomi is always busy anyways and with the return of BJ, he's now busy on Kult. I won't be surprised if there's a release tomorrow.

Logan has finally finished clipping the SR cards and is now onto getting everything to display properly. It's good when he stsrts things like that because at the end of the day, lots of new things are "discovered" and "exposed". I'll have to dedicate some time to go through his end result to see what gems there are there.

Eric contacted me via PM today and he wanted something from the forums. I gave it to him, and it makes me wonder why he'd want that. Oh well, curiosity killed the cat and in this instance, I don't think I want to be the cat.

Kari is thinking of signing up to the LotRO sealed deck tournament this weekend. He really enjoys playing the game. I don't want to know how much money he's spending on the game though. I'm sure it's more than the daily income of people in countries like Nepal or something.

Tony contacted me and asked which other games he could do. I suggested the orphaned games - Buffy, Imajica or the Disciples games - would be something that's easy to pick up and won't take too much time making. He seemed pleased with the idea, but is still considering it. Hopefully he'll take up one of them.

Kev is still busy on GE stuff. I think he's working on the spoiler, not all the cards, just the first set or something. He's got the scans as well. I think Gray is waiting for either one or both. I have no idea which.

Ed hasn't been too busy himself with the engine. He's been otherwise occupied... He did however write an April's Fool (not) article about dropping the tokens to only 5 complimentary a month. The expected big stink from that hasn't hit the fan yet. MND players are expected to pay to play sooner or latter and the 5 that they are currently getting would probably seem like a godsend to them. Rage players are way too used to paying to play. Doomtroopers are a weird breed, but apparently they too are talking about paypal and paying to play.

So this weekend... let's see... some HumAliens, probably a lot of MND, some B5. Sounds like a plan.