-+@ 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.