-+@ Temporal Warp @+-

See images below?



Just posting 3 images from dino duel with an ultra-rare on the left, the one and only card that I possess in the middle and a battle card on the right. The card back has a magnetic strip which you can swipe on the arcade machine though so the cardback is a bit weird, but not every cardback has a magnetic strip. The logo is also on the cardback. And that's part of my community service for this blog to educate the public about the future in CCGs. Not.

I'm still waiting to finish my last Urland game. It's been 2 days and I haven't even got a chance to make a move. Kev has been slow to act these last few days probably due to effects of too much turkey (yes, there's a protein* or something in turkey which makes one slothful apparently).

And slothful of course is part of the seven deadly sins... not that thing by some English poet or writer, but the new subtitle in the next two MND expansions. I had to check yesterday to determine if Paradwyn is ready for preview next week/month together with Underneath (it is). Universal might join the ranks there if I can finish that by the end of the month as well.

Wait up, then what will Weave go along with? Well, hopefully over the next month or so, I can flesh out my ideas for Cure and let Daniel have a once over at the design just to see what his gut feeling about the design would entail. Hopefully that would appease him, or alternatively it might upset him that he won't be able to sit back and relax. Oh well.

I had a look at Forest Well today after one player singled it out as being overpowered. I think it is as well, particularly now that it starts with Warrada. Urgh. Compared with Overgrowth though, it gives more bang for buck with Warrada in play, but it's a costly investment. It needs to be pared down a bit, but I have no idea how without making it lose its effectiveness.

While I'm on that topic, a few days ago, people were singling out Glowing Sword (OK, one person who doesn't play with relic discard was singling it out) as being too overpowered, until I pointed out that Finishing move can't be used the turn it is played and relic discards should be common in one's deck. Perhaps that should be the solution for Forest well as well? I have no idea.

I guess I can finally say that the new game I'm looking to adapt this year is known as Barathaum. It's published by Sage's Workshop or something like that and is actually being sold (apparently) online. I made (I would say badly) a cardback for it which is shown on the wiki. I wonder if it'll get accepted by the creator of the game, but the cardback is like the first thing I code in any new game. Well, if all is in order, then it should hopefully take about a week for it to be adapted.

* Turkeys are rather high in the protein tryptophan, which can be a relaxant for the body. That's why one feels doubly sleepy after a turkey meal (although some say it's an urban myth) - due to the tryptophan and the rush of blood to the digestive track to soak up all the goodies.. including the tryptophan.

-+@ Deity Status @+-

Who me?



Art credits:
Night Awebaw and Firdhen by Strom/Whyrl
Leaping Osatch by Zastrow

I templated some more images a few days ago and three are shown above. These are for Ancient of Days... but it's still early. I've already removed a Cald template for a later expansion and might have to do the same to a Naroom one. The problem is that with just 6 cards for the first 5 regions, things are pretty much cramped there. Add in a relic cross-region theme for AoD and that's effectively only 5 cards per region. Why a relic theme? Well, we've already have crushing spells and spirit spells and tainted spells so a spell theme has already been done. I could do a creature theme thing, but that's gonna be tricky art-wise. Relics though are easy and I have the perfect image for this theme. I just have to template them one of these days.

Double Jeopardy is already getting it's share of reviews and it's nice to know that the comments that are directed my way are mature and thought-provoking instead of destructive and demeaning. The Wanderers have been hightlighted as a potential issue this early in playtesting, eventhough I wonder why nobody pointed it out during the comments stage. Oh well, I guess people just wanna have broken cards added to the engine or something. I'll have to change that soon I guess.

I've been itching to start working on something that's a bit under wraps at the moment, although I've been bursting to say it here. I can't. It's got nothing to do with licensing though, but it is a game that I want to adapt to the engine, hopefully before the year is out. I need to contact the creator first though to clarify a few things. It's probably gonna be no-fries (aka "no frills") initially, and I have no idea if it'll get automation at this stage. It's all up in the air as the saying goes.

Otherwise, things are quiet. The Mythos tournament has finally ended with Jer(e)(my) (I like spelling it that way) being declared the winner. The other two tournaments will run until the end of the month. Aidan tried to start a game on the forums, but that seems to die horribly and he's giving people an extra week to sign up. I do hope more people sign up.

I haven't put in much time on Ticket to Ride. My ISP is having problems which is causing massive lag on TtR. That's a pity. It is a good distraction when I have 10 minutes spare and nothing to do. Yes, 10 mintues can usually finish a game. That's the huge plus when compared with PBW site (like ludoholic). It has its downside though. Sometimes I have to wait to get a 4-player game, but that's not very often.

I've been playing more LotR instead. It's just for fun, or card-flopping at best. I have a middle of the road deck that will probably beat up newbies bad, and get beaten up by really good decks bad, but I don't mind getting beaten. It's more for the fun of playing the cards and making funny comments like "There should have been an Adam Sandler in Lord of the Rings to pants Sean Austin" and stuff like that.

I've been downloading images to a new computer and I just realised that bowling has a missing image, so it back to the old computer to upload the image before coming back here to work on everything else. Things are difficult when one is migrating over to a new machine I guess... but there's always some good in the tedious process, like finding out that bowling is missing an image for example, which I doubt will be reported at all.

I finally dug up the card I got from the arcade game, and it's called Dino Duel. Apparently it's Indonesian, or at least the website is in English and the Indonesian version of Malay (think American version of English). I'm sure Martin will look through the site and tell me the gameplay depends too much on luck or something (or not now that I've said it). He'll probably be true. It has a good concept and it dispenses cards, but the gameplay is bad, at least in my book. I suppose someone will be coming out with a better machine at some point in the future. You probably won't hear about it here.

-+@ Peripheral Whispers @+-

Heh, this CCG has really great titles.



Those are 3 cards from Eve CCG. I searched online and found that they were published in Iceland. The art's not too bad, but I have no idea about the gameplay though. Maybe Martin would leave a comment about what he thinks about the gameplay if he reads this.

And it's about time to polish off the things I said I'd write about...

Let's start with VteSO then. Nothing seems to be happening there, and I'm not surprised. The merger/takeover/whatever between EVE and WW is probably taking up resources at WW. The players are agitating about things like when's the next cardset gonna show up and better tech support, but really at the end of the day, with WW in flux, I doubt anything is gonna happen in the short term especially with the holidays coming up.

Ed's been busy on what is known as Ludoholic. Basically that's the play-by-web site and within a short time, both Capitol and Urland are now playable with Grave Robbers being in development. That's all Ed doing all the coding work, but I think Mark has been helping out there some. Kev seems to be the main playtesting guy there with a few others. The games there are slow, especially for me, as I have to wait for everyone to take their turns while I'm asleep. The plus is that I get in games. The big minus is that it takes weeks if not months to finish a game. I'm currently on a 4-player Urland game and that will be my last game for a while until something interesting comes along.

The main engine seems pretty much ignored. Tomi has been the only other person that seems to be doing stuff on there. I think Kult had an update, Doomtrooper has the usual tweaks and a new expansion, and Mythos had a few tweaks. Action on those games is mainly limited to Doomtrooper, if the number of questions on the forums is any indication.

Alex started a Mythos tournament, which seems to be going rather well, but it seems as if it's tapering off at the moment so I'm not sure where things are. The big tournament success is the one being organised by Jacob for Shadowfist. There seems to be hordes of players playing it and Shadowfist has seen some of the most spectular numbers of games being played. I think that's a good sign. The other tournament that's ongoing is the Rage one that H.C. is organising. The usual suspects are in it, but it seems to be drawing in new players if forum sign-ups and posts are any indication. That seems to be a good thing.

The other game that's drawing in new players (now that it doesn't cost tokens anymore) is MND, which has got a new generation of players. I played a game with one of them the other day with my comfortable LE-weave deck and LE alone took out LE-bograth, Baa and the other magi practically with flip kills on the last 2. Weave Path with Bungalaloos = 3e to gain 4e, or more if an Uwamar or two is sitting around. An early Brushfire means an easy burn +2 every turn which was interesting. I didn't even draw any cards the last two turns, thanks to a frusk in play which kept my hand filled with cards. It was a fun game and the opponent was friendly. It has been a while since I've enjoyed that.

One of the new players did ask when will DJ get text and I realised yesterday that it was supposed to be this month, so yesterday, I added all the DJ text to the cards already present on the engine. People are still trickling in to read the cards and I have no idea whether these cards will be a success or not, but the general reception seems positive, with exceptions from the usual suspects, of course.

Mid-post picture below. That's the Cookie Jar picture for the MND animation that didn't get rave reviews.


The other new expansion that I've added to gEngine this week are the Ashcan cards for Final Twilight. Some of the images in that expansion was uncoloured which is a no-no in my book, so I had to go ahead and add in the colours to the remainder of those images. It wasn't easy, and I wasn't really motivated to do colours at time, but I think the end result is definately better than the black and white images. I know DJ, the marketing director for the game has been known to give rave reviews about the colouring so that's a plus. One of the images has pigment based on Holly's skintone and I think Ed was showing it off to her. It was definately interesting colouring those in.

A while back though, someone PMed me and asked me if I were still looking for Hyborian Gates scans for the promos. I was and he kindly scanned in the last few promo cards that I needed to be added to the engine. So after 4 years or so of collecting images, all the images for Hyborian Gates can now be downloaded from the engine. Nobody plays the game though, but that's fine. At least we now have the 70s and 80s preserved on the engine.

Although it's not available yet, I've been told that Titan: Arena might make a comeback onto the engine thanks to the success of talks between Ed and the game creator. This would be the first removed game to make a comeback if it does go ahead. Obviously, the AH images would not be usuable, but I don't think that's a big hinderance - alternative images can always be found. I, personally, think that's good news and it would be a boost to the engine.

I was in a games arcade the other day, and came across a game that actually dispenses out tradable cards. Cards dispensed this way had a magnetic strip which can be swiped on the machine and played. It was a weird concept, but I guess it targetted the card collecting gamers. It sure did work on me. I got a card and it has stats and a magnetic strip on the back instead of a cardback. The game was a boring stone-paper-scissors sort of thing with lots of animation, really juvenile and was a turnoff after the first game. The card was interesting though. I wonder if I can devise a better game based on the number on the card...

The other game I purchased a month or so back was the 2nd expansion of HIStory. This is the CCG that's published in Singapore and is "religious" in nature. I have no idea where I placed the first expansion, but that was basically a shrinkwrapped deck in a cardbox box. This set though is also shrinkwrapped, but it's sold in a 3.25 floppy box of 10 case. That's a good reuse of material I guess since nobody uses 3.25 floppy diskettes anymore.

One comment for Daniel - check the reply to your comment in my previous post.

-+@ Ego Boost @+-

I kid you not, that's actually the title of a CCG card.



Art Credits:
Solar Firagon by Nick Szankovics
Weave Pheygrin by Annette Burke, with background by Rich Werner
Core Firagon by Nick Szankovics

You saw it here first, 3 cards from the next (maybe) MND custom expansion tentatively titled Ancient of Days. Like all expansions, I need to get the images for at least half (i.e. 50 cards) before the set goes ahead. That will be a challenge for this set even more so than the last. I went into the last set (Twilight War) knowing I had more than 30 images. I'm going into this with less than 20. So things aren't really looking up, but there's still time and where's there's a Will there's a Grace?

I templated about 6 cards yesterday for AoD, the 3 above being some that were templated. I'm currently at 23 cards with images wich is barely a quarter of the way through... and this is the easy part of getting and templating images. I have no idea where else I would be getting the images, but oh well, I'm sure it can be done.

Before I go any further, lemme explain why I chose today's card title (Yes, that is a card in the CCG that I've been picking titles from, and I thought it was particularly apt for today). I was on the engine today, just hanging out watching people play some games, when in comes this guy with maniacmadmax as his nick. He went ballistic when he saw me in a good way, of course, and thanked me for keeping the game going singlehandedly. Heh, as if I did such a thing. I told him it was a group effort, yadda, yadda, but it did make my head a few inches bigger. It's not everyday that I get praised like that. I guess there are some people that are just appreciative of all the hard work that has gone into the customs.

And let's do a quick run down of MND custom expansion in reverse order, since I've already started off with AoD.

I still haven't done anything for Cure yet, although I'm glad I waited since I'm getting rather good ideas for the cards. This will be the first time in a while that I'm designing a Naroom magi and I hope it won't be too much of a disaster this time around. Daniel offered to help me with the design (I think he secretly wants to monopolize the Naroom card design) but I have yet to decide if I will take up his offer. Probably sometime after I've scripted out the rest of the Exodus Flight cards...

Exodus Flight is still being previewed for comments and I think the set is shaping out great. 9 out of the 13 regions have been revealed, and 2 more will be out for comments next week/month which would mean the last 2 region would only get out for comments in January. I still haven't written most of the Weave and Universal cards, so that would need to be done before January, and that also explains why those regions won't be ready by December. The plan is to start adapting the cards onto the engine by February for playtesting.

I just completed the text for Double Jeopardy today and uploaded the gML to the engine. That means there's 6 new cards available for play, although the cards are still technically in playtesting. I'm gonna wait for the complaints about them being broken and/or underpowered (well, complaints can only be about one or the other, nobody ever says anything if the cards are just right) over the next few weeks. Fun! Not!

Twilight War is still in playtesting and I think it's almost ready to be made public. I have set the ambitious date of February for it, but realistically, I'll probably hold off till May to make it common with the other 2 sets before it (Tainted Glimpses in May 2006, Exodus Flight in May 2005)

I need to start updating the Tainted Glimpses and Keeper's Quest promos with a printable version soon. Those would have to go up on the website, and probably a pdf version for download for anyone who wants to print them and play with them. That's gonna take quite a bit of time that I won't probably have until about March or so. Oh well.

Talking about the website though, I think I'm behind on the calendars - not that many people are downloading those. I also received all the scanned copies of the Book of Ages from Patrick last week and he expects them on the website ASAP. Nopers, I simply do not have the time to do it any justice at this point in time (and my html skills are rusty anyways - I still code everything in a text editor, so it's a pain). I have no idea when I'll get to them.

Insiider has died out completely... slightly later than usual, but dead is still dead nevertheless. The RPers are talking about taking their RP to someplace else (LJ, I think) to "finish" it and there hasn't been any posts other than trading stuff for a while now. That makes the Custom Card forums the most active MND forum out there now, with CCG Workshop's MND forum coming in a close second. The MND Yahoo group is still alive as well, and can probably compete with the CCGW MND forums as being the 2nd most active MND site.

Cookie Jar Entertainment finally released an image of the upcoming animation, and in my book, it doesn't look promising. The cancelled computer generated animation looked much better, although the animation quality probably won't be as good. But then again I'm not the target age of the cartoon, so I guess I'm not qualified to judge. There's still no announcement yet that the cartoon has been picked up or will air anywhere, but based on the fact that it was just sold this year with half a season, I'm going to guess it'll only start showing the earliest by Autumn 2007 since it's too late to be shown Autumn 2006 or as a mid-season replacement in Spring 2007.

There's more MND stuff, but there's also some other time. I know this is just item 1 of the things I said I'd post yesterday, I'll just have to do some of the rest some other day.

I'd like to end by thanking Martin for that comment on the last post that White Wolf has been bought by the EVE people. I read about that, but since it didn't affect me, I promptly forgot about it. Well, things are now up in the air about VteS and EVE both targetting the same market... will they halt the production of one of those CCGs? Who knows?

-+@ Dead Magic Zone @+-

Whoa, long time no update!



Decipher's Lord of the Ring cards from the Wraith collection. Yup, that's half of the last expansion from Decipher for LotR. Just 6 cards in the expansion. The above 3 images are from WETA workshop, hence the bug in the lower right. However, the images aren't very "movie-like" which has prompted someone to comment that they seem more photoshop than WETA workshop. Oh well.

These cards are not available on LotRO though, thanks to the Sony takeover. Stupid Sony, I guess. Meanwhile, Decipher has already confirm that the next expansion, Rise of Saruman, is in development. Thankfully this time, the set will revert to the usual 100+ cards (140, IIRC), but it will be chok-a-bric with Sarumans (or 4 instead of the usual 1).

I did get all 6 cards from the Wraith collection since the last update, as well as probably half a dozen booster boxes from various expansions - they were going cheap. My free time was spent opening and sorting those cards out though, which probably explains why no blog update was done. I don't seem to have too much free time these days anyways. Still, I made some nice pulls of rares and foils and I'm ever closer to getting my collection complete.

I also got 2 boosters and a starter box of WARS, but haven't managed to open it yet. It's sitting there, calling out my name to get them opened, sorted and stuff, but I know that's gonna take time. No point doing a rush job and not enjoy the satisfaction of doing it properly. I'll get to it some day.

Got about another half dozen MND booster boxes, not only to fill my collection, but to get cheap commons for self-made customs. I don't want to blog about MND today though, because that will just take ages. Perhaps tomorrow when I get the time, I'll talk about all MND happenings and going-ons.

My 1910 expansion just arrived yesterday. This isn't for a CCG, but the boardgame Ticket to Ride. Nevertheless, it's just a cards-only expansion and it comes in a metal tin. I like the tin, it's nicely done, and it's probably done to attract people to buy the tin. However, as someone pointed out, it won't fit in the box for the original game, so I'll have to forgo the tin and just place my cards into the box at some point. Oh well.

Also got my starter pack of The Spoils sometime back, and I must say the cards seems interestingly designed. I don't like the bicycle-deck cardback though, and since what I got are beta cards, some of the images does not have any colours on them. However the coloured images were properly done, and I would say even better than comparable games like Mystical Empires. I haven't played the game yet, or even read through the rules (don't have enough spare time to do either), but based on the images alone, I'd recommend it to someone (who's CCG savvy) looking to pick up a new game.

Talking about new games, Stargate has been pushed back to next year apparently. I don't think anything is happening there at Comic Images or whoever is publishing the game. It's a pity because I was really looking forward to the game. Oh well, next year is a few weeks away.

There's also this new CCG based on a computer game. It's called EVE, and I have no idea if it's one word, or if its an acronym or something. Rich Riley, the only active rules team member of MND has been promoting it almost everywhere, including on the CCG Workshop forums which is where I heard about it. I wonder if there has been any progress getting permission to adapt it. Probably not...

Hmm... this would be a good time to talk about CCG Workshop, but I'm running out of time, so things to talk about in a later blog:
1. all things MND (including Insiider)
2. CCG Workshop - main (including nipa and Mythos)
3. Tournaments
4. Final Twilight & Hyborian Gates
5. Ludoholic (Capitol and Urland!)
6. VteSO
7. Dinosaurs Arcade & Tabernacle?
8. WA post Sony
9. Days of Wonder
10. Remember the Titans