-+@ 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.