-+@ Greenpeace Assault Team @+-

Team of course for the first superpowered hero team in comics.



We are Legion. That's what Superman recently said in Justice League of America (#9 IIRC). It's powerful especially for old fuddy-duddies like, well, not me. There'll be lots of Legion exposure leading up to its 50th anniversary next year and the VS cards are only one of the few media outlets where the Legion of Superheroes will, well, make an appearance.

I have no idea if I have mentioned this before, but I actually got 2 packs of these cards - the last 2 packs in a shop that's not here. Didn't get the above cards, but did get some rather good ones - good image-wise that is. I was just looking through them today which is why they are up here on this blog. I wonder if there's anyway to play this game online... hmm...

Even as I'm writing this, I'm scanning the Fastbreak cards and packaging in preparation to getting them added to the game online. I'm rather excited about the fact that I'll be doing a sealed draft in one of my games and I hope I don't blow it by messing up. It's not that difficult to do, since I kept all my old Fastbreak working file, and with the new improvements in the engine, it should be easy to check a few things... well, easier anyways, as compared to the good (bad?) old days where everything has to be done manually.

Talking about sealed deck, my brain is already moving on to the next project - Babylon 5. I just realised that I cannot have random B5 sealed deck because of the way the game is structured. It'll probably have to be something along the lines of LotR draughting where the Ambassador and the starting hand and probably the crusade and ISA decks would have to be preconstructed. Still it seems cool to get the ideas down on... screen and to hopefully progress it sometime this year.

And while I'm on progress, it seems the Ludo games are progressing rather well, eventhough I can no longer see them because I'm not a developer there. Ah well. There are 4 games in development for PBW, and Ed was talking about having one of them ready really soon. Maybe 2 by the end of next month if things keep going at this rate. It seems good for Ludoholic.

Ed also said he might start moving RT games over to Ludoholic 2 at a time to speed things up. That sounds good. The boardgames are just lost in the clutter at the main engine and aren't really being played. The first few games on the Ludo engine clearly stands out, but haven't yet been massively played though. Oh well.

One thing that might be massively played is GTO, who it seems has got a deal with Wizards of the Coast. No, it's not a certain massively popular game - the one that starts with M and has The Gathering in its name - that already has an online version. No this one is for a small lesser known game. It'll be interesting to see where that goes.

Origins start next week or something like that, and that's what Logan and Mark seems to be talking about. I think they are excited about their Treasure Hunt trails that I've set for them this year. Who knows? Maybe they might strike gold. I hope it's not madvogon's gold though.

I did a bit of MND work over the weekend, templatign more cards for Final Night. Heh, for those who still hasn't made a connection yet, Final Night is one of the more famous Legion stories from a while back which dealt with the SunEater, and also features the death of Hal Jordan aka Green Lantern. Anyways, there's something like 50 more cards to go - less actually, I'm down to 48. That's out of 130 so there are a good 82 cards with images for the set that has been templated. I've done all the Universal cards and I think Arderial, Core and Naroom are next.

AoD design is still going on slowly - Daniel is stuck in Naroom and Frosty with Core. I think Cald is more or less there and I should probably move to Arderial soon. Hopefully the other designers will start chipping in with their designs. I think this set might be the best custom set that has been designed - best in terms of art, and best in terms of cards.

-+@ Deep Journey @+-

Deep is for Orothe, Journey is for Age's End



That's 3 of the 40 cards from Age's End. I like that holding up the sword drawing whcih seems rather well done. I wish I could colour that good. Then there's the gay Magneto, and of course my favourite creature and a different version of the card that drew me to the game. I'm a little bit sad about its passing of course, and these cards are of the "milk as much money from the players before we lose the license" category. The game is extremely overpowered now and after playing it for a few days with all the new cards I don't really enjoy it anymore. What a sad way to see such a great game end.

I've also been playing a lot of boardgames online - Ticket to Ride about half the time, although I don't seem to be able to win much these days. The other half of the time though is spent helping Ed test out Ajax on Ludoholic, now that Capitol and Urland has it as well. I think I'm on 2 Capitol games and a Urland game as well as a Monkeys game. Those games are moving slow as they are multiple player games, but I guess that's fine as that's how it's supposed to be.

I was supposed to work on my super secret game this week, in preparation for another bigger game later next month, but circumstances just haven't been coorperative and conductive for me to work on the game. Today I found out I used the wrong version in the last MND update - that's the one with the bug in the validate script which I corrected while I was away. So I had to fix it again - basically it's just a one line difference. And since I was updating MND, I might as well add in the next EF region for playtesting, which is what I did earlier today. So we're now done to 9 out of 13 and hopefully, the last 4 will be added before the end of July.

Things are also heating up (pun intended) as design for AoD begins with Cald by Myself and Frosty and Naroom by Daniel. I think there have been some rather good designs already, but I'm doing the Cowell thing to push the envelopes to make the set better (although not necessary more powerful) as this might be the last custom expansion for MND that will be totally in my control. Final Night, the next expansion, is RP-inspired, which means that quite a bit of the cards have to stay true to character.

While I was doing up the news for Naroom EF, I realised Ed never actually announced on the WGO that LMS has been moved to Ludo. I added that in quickly but it's probably old news by now. What I was suprised by was the fact that I can add WGO onto the Ludo engine as well. That seems cool... if there were more people on the Ludo engine that is. There were a total of 4 games played in May, but hopefully the only direction to go from there is up.

And what will be going up soon of course are the new Fastbreak cards that I just finished opening and sorting today. I started with 2 boxes of boosters, needing 15 cards, or 14 excluding a Promo - an uncommon, 5 foils and the rest being rares and only got 9 of them. I can't believe I need 5 more rares, but at least I got all the chase cards. Those will be going up onto the engine hopefully sometime this weekend.

And since I was messing about with boosters and starters, I thought it would be good to add in Sealed deck support for Fast Break as well. I have no idea how complicate it is, but Tomi seems to be doing it easily for his games (probably because he wrote the code and knows what he's doing) so I hope I can easily copy it. We shall see and I guess it shall be posted here on this blog whether I manage to do it or not.

And since I'm on coding - Aidan seems to be going crazy on that front, hammering Rage out into something super fantastic or that's what it seems. It's basic housekeeping, I think to get things up to date and he's poking into things that well, not too many people poke into. But that's good. Hopefully, the Rage players will reward him for it by playing more of the game.

There seemed to be some snafu on the VTES engine earlier this month. No, it's not Martin's fault, so don't go blaming him. It was server related though and to make a long story short, players were all give a 7 day game pass. Yippee! I've got to remember that and factor it into the numbers at the end of the month as well.

I think the Shadowfist tournament has ended, and hopefully there'll be winners announced soon. I still can't believe that gEngine is one of the official platforms for the Shadowfist league and the league can be played both online and offline. Good for Zev and his people. The other thing I noticed is that Julien, the SF lead is now in Budapest, Hungary instead of haute (whatever that means) France Island. I wonder what he's doing behind the Iron Curtain.

-+@ Fast Strike @+-

is as close to Fast Break as I can find...



Art Credits:
Krioh by Alison Strom/Whyrl
Zusah by Alison Strom/Whyrl, background by Matt Holmberg and Rich Werner
Wiscon by Justin Zastrow

Three more images for AoD, which as of today has progress into design. No, not all the images are complete - I'm still waiting for one more Nar magi to finish the images. However, I don't see why that should be holding up the design when 99% of the cards have images, so I've given the word to the designers to have a field day with the cards. I'm looking forward to the design and quite frankly am a little bit apprehensive of how things will turn out. Will my fellow MND @ CCGW blogger be able to link 2 and 2 together to get 4? Will we be able to make the big KT creatures avoid being binder fodder? Will there be a card that would really destroy the game? I don't know... at least not until the cards have been done. And that's an interesting process to go through.

Meanwhile, the cards from EF is being added to playtesting, with Naroom just recently added. I think that's like the halfway point or something. There hasn't been much playtest reports, but those are still trickling in. Some good playtesting being done, when there is any and hopefully, the cards will make people go "WOW!" at the text, the design and the images.

I have been playing a bit of Lord of the Rings TCG over the past couple of days. Yes, I caved in and spent $50 to get about 700 cards so that I can play with the cards from the last 4 or so expansions. The power levels are amazing - none of the decks I have can even survive this power creep. The new decks are just so deadly, on my first game, I got exerted to oblivion by turn 4, and I was playing healing hobbits! Eek. I don't like the power creep there and the game has turned from borderline fun to really sucky. I guess that's one way to make sure the last few sets sell before your license runs out - by making overpowered cards so that the game will crash and burn after your license runs out. Icky.

I've also been playing quite a bit of online Ticket to Ride recently, and I think I'm not progressing at all, rather the opposite is true. I think I'm beginning to suck at the game if that is even possible. Still I have fun with the games though, eventhough I don't win as often as I used to, but that's the main issue of the game I guess. It's not the winning that counts, but having fun. So says a guy who wins 1 out of every 4 games now...

Another game I've been having fun with online is Monkeys on the Moon which has finally gone beta and public on Ludoholic. I won the first ever game against Ed, not that it was a proper game as I didn't know the rules then. I still don't know the rules, but that's what makes it fun, I'm not playing to win, I'm just playing, and if I win, well, that's a bonus. I'm currently in a 4-player game with the game designer Jim Doherty and his "partner" and Ed. They seem to be rather nice people to interact with in the in-game chat.

Ed meanwhile has been busy. There's MotM rolling off the presses and updates on Capitol with Ajax and DoA. Ludoholic now has this nifty thing where one can choose their colours, but it's currently limited to Capitol and Urland only. I guess one doesn't need that in MotM. I've been told that there's also an additional programmer on Ludo too... but I'll leave it up to Ed to announce that.

Have I mentioned that Tomi added Sealed deck to both Kult and Dark Eden? I think that's so amazing. I will probably steal the codes to add to some of my games, although I have no idea which game will benefit from a sealed deck scenario. Nevertheless it's still cool... and for the mid most images, here are the associated cool ad images.


I also received my new stash of Fast Break cards yesterday, that's 2 booster boxes worth of cards and about 10 starter boxes. I have yet to open the boxes, I'm saving that for a rainy day or something, but I'm excited about it. I think I'm the only person who collects Fast Break cards. Hopefully I can complete my collection.

Today I actually sent out the details of the 2nd annual Novelty's Origins Treasure Hunt and this year, participation will be increased by 100%. Yes, that's 2 people from last year's one. I doubt that would double the treasure since I'm sending each of them to different vendors and quite a bit of those is actually to get info rather than freebies. Still, I look forward to the write-up, as well as the goodies.