-+@ Legendary @+-

Well, because it's coming to an end soo...



Three more cards from Treachery and Deceit. This will be the penultimate expansion from Decipher for the game as announced on their site. The online game will last for an additional 3 years after that date up till the end of June 2010 as announced by WA, but that was probably forseen sometime back that it won't go on forever. All those people who have sunk hundreds into the game will well, get little to no physical returns from the game. It is a sad day.

Still I had my fun playing the game and I learnt quite a bit of CCGs in general and design in particular. Regional enforcement for starters, careful use of denial (and no, that's not a river in Egypt), caution with magic bullets, addition of counters, fun with the opening up of new avenues and strategies and a whole slew of things which I'm sure I'll take with me as I progress on. There's also gameplay experiences as well and I think there will be games I'll never forget, including overwhelming a Sauron with Merry. Those were the days. I think I will probably write an article somewhere about that... lessons learnt designing cards by playing LotR or something like that.

While I'm on the topic of designing cards, I have finally made TW public today. It'll be custom legal next month, but it's now playable on the engine by the general public. Will anyone even notice it? Probably not, and I don't think I'll organise a tournament around it for publicity. I guess this is going to be a low key release. I haven't made any announcements - I'll probably do that later this week (that's borrowing a page from VTESO).

Riding piggy-back on the back of that is that EF Nar has now been adapted for playtesting online. I think that will get noticed somewhat by the playtesters and hopefully they'll enjoy the arctic cards and the freezing cards. I can't wait to read my first review fo the cards. Naroom is next and I'm still hoping that can be done before the end of the month.

Meanwhile on the engine, the Rage tournament has kicked off and the Shadowfist league event #2 is ongoing. Those are the only 2 active tournaments at the moment. There's quite a bit of activity on the Rage and Shadowfist forums, which is a good sign. The numbers for both games are also up for the month - in SF's case, it's overtaken VTES... but who knows what sort of numbers it'll be at the end of the month with the free VTES passes.

I'm still keeping an eye out on DoA and GRfOS @ Ludoholic, but neither seems to be moving much. I guess the respective coders are busy with other issues to have much time to work on these games. Capitol still seems to be the more popular game there as opposed to Urland, but that's not saying a lot since there's only 2 games there. It'd be nice to add a few more there, but oh well, this month was VTES month. Maybe next month.

I finally ran into a good Star Gate deck today - well, it was rare-ful, which is why it's good. I couldn't even get more than 1 mission completed which sucked big time, but then again, that's because I'm only playing with a starter game. I was tempted to buy a pack or two, but since having gotten burnt by LotR, I decided I'll hold off and enjoy the game with what I have. Afterall, it's not going to last forever, and when the engine shuts down, all I'll have left would be memories...