-+@ Spear of Deceit @+-

Mostly because I'm showing cards from Treachery and Deceit



Yes, that's from Lord of the Rings and yes, that is the next expansion Treachery and Deceit which has been sent to the printers. This is barely a month after the release of Rise of Saruman earlier this month or something. I guess Decipher is finally putting out cards although it's a little too little too late. Still it's exciting that there are cards being released for the game. It'll do heaps to keep the game alive offline for a little while more.

And I still haven't got any RoS cards yet. Well, they are expensive at the moment and apparently there is a broken card in there as well that's not quite as easy to understand, but it enable Fruit Loops 3 easily. Poor Brad Fruitcake. I understand he's quit fulltime from Decipher as well or something like that. I wonder how that bodes for the game.

What I did get this week in the mail is a box of Bloodlines. That is the 3rd box I've got and I'm still missing a few rares. I updated my trading list at mahasamatman to list the cards that I'm still missing and to put a few of the rares that I got. My mailbox has been singing since with the offers to trade for those rares I picked up in Bloodlines. Urgh.

While I'm on mahasamatman, I finally got Sam, the guy who runs the site to reactivate the Wildstorm list, after Tomi encouraged me to do so by saying that he got Dark Eden revived. All I wanted from the list was to record which of the cards I needed rather than to use it to trade. Well, the list got revived but I have yet to actually do anything much to it. Hopefully, the list won't get deleted before I update it.

Since I'm on Tomi and trading, I was told that he's actually concluded a deal that would trade some of his cards for some other cards that would enable him to complete his Dune collection. I think that's cool. And he didn't even have to trade outside his own continent for the cards. Yeah, that's me in envy... he's in the 2nd smallest continent and I'm in the largest continent and he gets to complete his trade without going outside his continent. Sometimes life just doesn't give you a break.

Talking about breaks, Mark seems to be busy on GRfOS PBW after a long break. I think he may be making up for lost time. Ed is still busily getting the surprise game up to scratch, but I'm not allowed to say which one it is other than that it's one of the over 60 licensed games that he's got permission for. OK, I'll give out a clue... it has no tiles.

And since I'm on tiles, I got my shipment of Carcassonne loot today. 4 expansions and a 5th in last years Games Quarterly. I originally only wanted Traders and Builders for the cloth bag and the bucket of tiles, but when I went online to get it, I noticed the prices for River 2, Scout and King and Count were close to nothing that I picked them up as well. Granted, the latter 2 expansions doesn't really hold any fancy for me, but at least K&S gives a few extra tiles to play with. I have no idea what I'm going to do with the purple count though... maybe start a meeple version of Sesame Street.

And I just discovered this week too that my 6 months subscription to TtR has expired. That sucks. I wanna be able to create games, but oh well. I can still play though, and I got a game today. Didn't complete a ticket of 16 points at the last minute, didn't get the longest track, but still won by about 12 points, which was interesting. It was a cool game where people were blocking, not strategically, but to enable them to get to the destinations that they wanted. And everyone were building long snake-like routes - I missed out the longest route by one train, but there was a difference of like 3 trains between longest and shortest.

Snakes of course brings me to the last image in the series:



Pencils by Joe Araiza, colours by myself. I really like how this one turned out and it was really easy to colour as well. The background is cool-ish, but the slab of thing that it's sitting on... well, not so much. Anyways, I have even created a tutorial based on this image. The MND crazies were going ga-ga over the tutorial. Heh.

-+@ Bane Sword @+-

Heh, someone said it was a poop sword as well.



All images by 2i from the cards. Background by me. Art here doesn't mean picture, but instead it means a fighting style, i.e. in the usual martial arts sense. Anyways, there are 13 of them for AoD - one for each region - and the above are just 3 of them. I'll stagger them with the other image cards as I proceed with the blog.

Nothing much going on. Oh wait... there's one significant piece of news. WSSG got updated recently, but not by Kari. Tomi actually felt bored enough and got under the hood to fix the outstanding issues on that game to make it playable. So yay, it's now all dandy and stuff.

While talking with Tomi though (he's bored, I'm bored during the correct part of the day), I got him to send me cards for free. Isn't he a nice guy? Anyways, if anyone wants to send him cards for free, please feel free to contact him. We (or more accurately, I) also decided to give Ed a new nickname - jörö, and it inflects to jöröillä. Heh heh.

I just want to give a shout-out to Mitch, who has the first of his weblog out on his blog. Mitch, of course, is one-third of the CCGW @ MND blog. I guess we now know the secret of his busy-ness.

OK, still showcasing artwork...


Someone decided to submit art for their MND cards. The image above was what Doug (aka Douglas Brown, aka Ultradoug) drew, and people actually called it good. Okaaaay. I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I got some not so nice comments as well, and I pointed out that it could be improved which... well, didn't go too well. I guess some people just couldn't take the criticism.

Anyways, Joe decided to draw a different version of the sword, and I did actually find the time to colour it in sometime last week, and here is the version that will go into someone else's custom card set sometime next year or the year after.


Pencils by Joe Araiza, colours by myself. This was more a test try of a few things. One is the rock background which I think didn't come off too badly. Next was the shaft of light which was supposed to encompass the sword. I couldn't get the sword in the beam of light though... at the end of the day, the sword seems to be floating in front of the light irrespective of what I tried to do. Oh well. I think I'll have to experiment to see how I can put things into a cone of light, like under a lamp-post, for example...

-+@ Headwound @+-

You can see what I mean here.



Art Credits:

Drasx by Matt Holmberg
Thalia by Jennifer Reed
Golab by Cody Shipman

Three more from AoD, and the images are rolling fast and furious here on the blog. I haven't been creating any new ones recently, so I'm using up the backlog of images, but oh well, there'll be more - about 30 more to find and make for AoD, and then I might call it a day for the custom cards since I'm running out of images... or maybe not...

One thing is that Joe Araiza has been so good with supplying me with pencils that have been inspiring to colour. They have been posted over the past few entries and I'll probably do a few more in the month to come. The other thing is that Anthony Bode, the guy I was talking about in the previous blog, actually got himself a scanner and photoshop and is showing quite a bit of potential. Check this out:



That's not too bad, and he has promised to keep on going at it so that in a year's time, he'll have a whole backlog of images for me to use as custom cards. I can't wait for that to happen.

The big CCGW announcement today is that the Shadowfist League is finally starting again for this year. Sign-ups has to be by tomorrow and games will start this weekend which is cool. Apparently this is an official league of sorts with prizes and points and stuff so it looks really cool. Add to that the fact that Tomi has updated the game and I hope things start off smoothly this weekend.

I'm still waiting for things to be announced on Ludoholic and VTESO. No news there yet, but that's not surprising since it's the same person who'd be making that announcement and I think he's rather spread thin. Of course, there's been a slight Ludoholic front page revamp which makes it looks more organised. I like it.

-+@ The Silver Crown @+-

Silver, thorns... what's the difference?



Art by... well Nintendo. These are all screen caps from the Game Boy Game. Due to the lack of images though, they were used for AoD... or will be in AoD. Currently I'm only at something like 68 out of 100 images. I hate getting the last 30 or so images because that's usually the hardest, but these days, I've got Senior Araiza to help out, I think...

A new artist has shown up on the custom card forums with some rather good sketches. Alas, he doesn't have a scanner for one and two, he's below 18. He's offered to do art for the custom cards, but I had to turn him down due to his age for legal reasons. Well, the good side is that he now has 2 years to prepare sketching and drawing MND style.

The Rage people have finally decided that the tournament that they were in had run long enough and have called it a day. The results have been published on the forums and I had to copy and paste it to the main page as well. Not sure I did a good job there, but at least it's giving the game some publicity. The sad thing is that I don't think there's a tournament to take over from this one. Oh well.

I asked Tomi today about Colossal Arena. According to him it's done, but it needs playtesting and it's not available public yet. Like I mentioned previously, it's just a variant of Titan, with different rules, the same way that Yahtzee can be played with the standard or the Scandinavian rules. That's exciting though.

Going through the image showcase, here's one I did a while ago. It's Pok from the card, blown up so that I can fit the circlet... or crown of thorns on his head. The only bit that's new is the circlet, everything else is from the card. I thought this image was fitting since some religious groups celebrate some historical guy wearing a crown of thorns yesterday.


Pok by Gillette, pencils of circlet by Joe Araiza, colours of circlet by myself.

-+@ Forestry Development @+-

I like the card names in this CCG...



Art by Holmberg on all 3 pieces. That's the Kouba, a new creature type in AoD named after GoC. He seems stoked to have an entire creature type named after him. It follows from Wymitch of course, which is named after Malovis. If the trend keeps up, I'll have to create creaturetypes for Bobby and everyone else.

The final push for getting TW finalised is up and running for a while now, but I just gave it one last push in an attempt to get it ready by the end of the month so that by the beginning of May it will be custom legal and public. Meanwhile testing the playtesters are having a field day with the first 4 regions of EF... which has only served to bring up the fact that the DJ card from the expansion of the same name is still too powerful. Oh well, that will have to be worked out after TW goes custom legal.

No news yet from Martin and Ed regarding VTES, but I'm keeping my eye on it. I'm also keeping my eye on GRfOS PBW as well as it continues development. Mark has real-life commitments first though, so I'm gonna guess it's going tough for him. A new game appeared to be in development for PBW on Ludoholic as well, although it has not been announced yet. So I'll keep mum until such a time as it is public.

Anyways, today I finished up one image. This is a MND image, but it isn't for a custom card that I'm doing. It's for Joe Araiza who of course drew it. It took me about 6 hours spread across 3 days to get the completed image, and I'm still not too happy with it, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I have to let go after some point or else I'll never be able to do anything else.



Pencils by Araiza, colours by myself, grass by Rich Werner and the trees in the back by Matt Holmberg.

-+@ Bell Trees @+-

I wonder if those are bells on trees...



All images by 2i from the cards. Background by me. Art here doesn't mean picture, but instead it means a fighting style, i.e. in the usual martial arts sense. Anyways, there are 13 of them for AoD - one for each region - and the above are just 3 of them. I'll stagger them with the other image cards as I proceed with the blog.

I'm going to post shorter blogs so that I don't really get overwhelmed too much due to time constraints and other things, and today I really just wanted to show off a few things I've coloured this year. But before that...

I noticed that the Rage players haven't been playing - only 25 games or so over the past 30 days and that has been alarming since Rage is after all one of the "Big Game" on the engine. I posted this on the forum and received the reply that LK has been on a hiatus. I guess that answers that then. I wonder if it's CCG-fatigue...

Since he ain't posting it on his blogs... Mark has resumed development of PBW Grave Robbers. I think the first bit, the keywords bit that was done by Ed, is working although I can't be sure at this point in time (since I'm just looking at a sample development game). Hopefully Mark will bring it up to his usual standards ASAP. I think he's hampered by the fact that there is absolutely no (NIL, Zero, Zilch!) documentation on how to code it AND that the only person he can turn to for help at the moment is Ed. Hopefully he'll be building up the documentation as he goes along so that the next idio....erm... project lead that goes along to it will get a lot more help.

And while I'm on Ludoholic, Ed has been busy tweaking the Duel of Ages PBW interface. I can finally see things on the sample game. According to his blog on the forum he's finally figured what to do with the next step, although actually getting there will get some time I'm sure since nothing is instant in this world except bad coffee and some ways to die. I hope that debugging Urland and VTES won't be taking too much of his time... oh and I hope the next VTES expansion doesn't need large updates to the engine as well.

Talking about VTES, I was almost expecting it to have been public by now. Well, it might not be. It's a good thing that the date hasn't been set because there are a few issues that still needs to be ironed out. I hope that won't delay the release too much... and that Martin won't be too stressed by it.

Ack, and I was gonna keep it simple as well. Anyways, the title of today's blog refers to this image which I completed earlier this week:


Pencils by Joe Araiza, Background image by Holmberg/Bolme, colours by myself. It was a pain to colour in and I don't think I have got it down properly or did justice to the pencils. I like what I did on the mushrooms, but the head overall seems rather badly done, and the leaves on the limbs seems a little bit lacking. Oh well, I guess there's always a next time. This is an image for AoD.

I have 2 more images to write about, but I don't think I'll have the time today, so perhaps I'll blog about them some other time. How's that for cliffhanger? Probably not as witty as I think it is.

-+@ Stand like a Fool @+-

Happy April's Fool. New CCG for titles. The contents of todays blog may or may not be real.



Three more cards from Ancient of Days
Weird Lightning by Nick Szankovics
Duel by Kaku Watanabe
Zap by Matt Holmberg

I'm still in the midst of collecting images for AoD, and design for the set isn't schedule to start until the second half of the year, although the designers are probably itching to get started. I've recruited at least 2 new designers for the set and I'm sure they are rearing to go, although I've had to pour cold water on them a few times just to get things managable.

Meanwhile EF has started playtesting with the first 4 regions already on gEngine and the next few scheduled for the next few months. This is the first custom set that is being playtested by a select group to hopefully maximise the feedback and to prevent the unsaid negative atmosphere regarding cards that are extremely powerful. I hope it works out better.

This will probably be the final month that TW will be in playtesting, it will be made custom legal and public next month. Hopefully all the balance issues can be fixed in time. Lisan is still a potential big NPE and cards like Barak, Leader and Forest Well are hopefully fixed. I still wanna see cards like Brynn, Duwas and Chana being playtested some.

Meanwhile I've said that people who want to design their own custom cards can have a crack at it provided that they design their own sets. The same standards will be applied to those cards if they want it to be added to gEngine. 3 persons and an entire group (those crazy Brazillians) have taken up the challenge and I wish all of them well... although one person has almost partially given up. Oh well, it definately ain't easy.

Otherwise I haven't been up to much on gEngine... but that doesn't mean other people haven't been busy.

Logan finished Maul of America in February and it's now in open testing on the engine. I helped him cleaned up some of the images for that game and gave him some suggestions as to how to handle a few image issues. Of course, what I did was miniscule compared to all the other work that he's done. And there's also something inspired by the iPod in there as well apparently... His other games also had small updates during the interim. I would take that as a good sign

The Shadowfist league finally finished and the winner was announced. That was a long league but at the end, there weren't that many people playing. Hmm... The Mythos tournament players have also just got their prizes and the forums are abuzz about it... a few weeks back. Meanwhile the current Rage tournament is still ongoing, but things seems pretty slow there as well.

While I'm on Rage, Aiden made his debut at fixing up Rage for the engine. I have no idea how he did because I didn't bother looking at the coding, but it seems to work well so I'll take that as a good sign. It's also a good thing that he's doing it since he's one of the rules guy for the Rage customs.

The other game that was supposedly gonna get a new set was Ultimate Combat, but AFAIK, the cards have been added, but not the images. The PL is a re-instated Craig who seems more interested in other things than his own game. Well, I guess that's his perogative.

The interest in the sealed deck thing that nipa did for Doomtrooper seems to have died down some, but that doesn't mean Tomi hasn't been busy. His latest project though has been to update Titan for Ludoholic Real Time, and he's added the Collosal Arena rules as an option. Titan is the second Real Time game on the Ludoholic RT engine after GRfOS.

And GRfOS PBW seems to be progressing under Mark, after Ed decided to drop it for other things. I do wonder how Mark is getting along but it's a good sign that he's back and working on it. Hopefully it would be the first game that's available as both PBW and RT on Ludo.

Ed has been busy updating Capitol and working out the bugs of Urland in between trying to code for Duel of Ages. I like the images of that last game and he seems to have been making good progress on it, although bug fixing for VTESO and the main engine seems to also be eating into his time.

Talking about VTESO, Martin added another expansion in January and the 3rd Ed is scheduled to be added over the next few weeks. The number of games played there remains strong especially with the new cards being added. I'm sure that would be keeping Martin busy for a while...

Meanwhile in the real world, I have been getting a large number of Ticket to Ride games under my belt recently and it has been interesting. It's surprising how such a simple game can be so strategic and interesting to be played. The other game that I have been playing some is Carcassonne with just the base set to understand the rules. That is fun, but seems to take a bit more work than TtR.