Novelty's Novelties

Do You Blue Furok?

2010-09-14T16:07:00.000+08:00

Malovis thinks the title sounds dirty, but it's not. Head over to Blue Furok Forums to join in on the MND discussion. You might even get to meet up with Malovis himself!

Gone with the wind

2010-01-05T12:01:00.002+08:00

Happy New Year 2010!

I'm going to preserve this blog, since it's one of the few sites that actively ties in to the gatlingEngine and CCGW, but this blog will go into a hiatus and will not get updated frequently (basically like it has been for a while now). If anyone would like to contact me (and see my random musings online), add me as your friend on Facebook, but please let me know who you are (i.e. gEngine username), otherwise I'm just going to delete your friend request.

Also, to the members of the MND customs dev team, I'm open to finishing up the cards on Facebook :)

Happy 8th Anniversary

2009-11-06T17:08:00.001+08:00

It's CCGW's 8th anniversary today. Yes, it was 8 years ago that Doomtrooper was launched as the first game on CCGW. RIP.

-+@ Sailor SOL @+-

2009-04-29T21:19:00.004+08:00

This has been a weird week...

Images from Sandwich Shop, with a card that was made in honour of me. I am honoured to have a sandwich named after me. Anyways, what prompted this set of images was because Kev, the creator of the game, left a comment on my blog saying Hi... and he's just one of 4 people who have done so this week (not counting nipa, who would make it 5)! I miss being able to play Sandwich shop on gEngine, although one of these days, I should really print out the cards and introduce it to my gaming group!

Picks-at-Flies sent me an email earlier in the week talking about Rage and B5 and other miscellaneous stuff. It was good to catch up with him, and to talk about fond times that we shared together and remembered. Sadly, according to him Rage has fallen off the radar now that Fenris & himself aren't working much on it. I wonder if that has anything to do with gEngine going under, but I don't think I want to pick on old wounds, so I'll stay clear of that topic with him.

Some couple from Insiider also contacted me this week asking about the custom MND cards. I didn't realise that half the cards on the custom cards site has no text! I gave the the text for the small expansions but will have to build up the text for the big/main expansions. It was good times working on those cards and although I think I've moved on, it's still nice to know that there are people who wish to play with those cards. They also asked me if I was still making them... well I'm not but I still have ideas locked up there somewhere, so who knows what I may do in future? I wonder if any of the old gang would be interested in working on custom cards... Mal? Bobby? Frei? Ninja?

Doug messaged me earlier and that was a ... well, I was going to say pleasant, but with Doug it's never pleasant, so it's a sorta unpleasant surprise. He was curious about people and basically just wanted to kill time. Oh well, same old. What's new was his spelling and grammar - I could actually understand him a lot better today and according to him, he's back in school. Good for him. Also according to him, he offered a grand to Ed to buy CCGW. I think that was funny. And weird. And so Doug.

It's definately interesting, but weird to have all these people contacting me all in one week. Well, the end of April and the beginning of May is usually a busy time on gEngine, and I guess with it gone this year, well...

Anyways...

一万年と二千年前から愛してる
八千年過ぎた頃からもっと恋しくなった
一億と二千年あとも愛してる
君を知ったその日から僕の地獄に音楽は絶えない

-+@ Mines of Moira @+-

2009-03-27T23:08:00.003+08:00

Who knew what you can find in the mines? Hopefully not Balrog!

Wow, I haven't seen these cards for ages, literally. I haven't been playing for at least 2 years now. Wow, how time flies. I remember I used to play this every day. Oh well, things change with time.

I went in today to play a game on LotR Online and was surprised to see there were about half a dozen players there. A game was ongoing when I entered and I joined the second that was already setup.

I played a Fellowship block game, which for those with Nostalgia, is the best of the block. However, since I started with the Tower block (Helm's Deep is my favourite place in the whole story!), there wasn't much nostalgia for me to play with the Fellowship block. I chose my Hobbit - Wounding Orc deck, and played rather badly IMO. I guess I'm getting rusty with the game. My opponent I think is a former World champion and I was beaten when his Frodo got to site 9. I did manage to kill all his other companions though, but that was not enough for me to win. Oh well.

There's still about a year running for those who has online cards, although no more new sign-ups are allowed. I saw on the forums people pleading for accounts to play. Wow, I can't believe that there'll still be demand for it, but it was one of the top CCG of its time, thanks to the huge movie tie-in, and I think it's still immensely popular, eventhough there have been no new cards for 2 years now. Wow. 2 years...

It's good to know that some sites stay up and running, eventhough their owners no longer have the time and resources to maintain the site. I wonder though, what will happen after 2010. I think by then the demand for "dead" CCGs may become great again. Well, maybe I'll be able to play Wildstorms again!

-+@ Invaders @+-

2009-03-01T14:08:00.004+08:00

I'm surprised that one of the most popular page was the one I posted with the rest of the unreleased cards. I know some of these cards have been seen before, but if not, well, here are the 4 invader cards that I made way back when.

Holmberg actually has a few nice Invader pictures on his site as well (link is on my blog to the right). Here's a nice group shot of 4 Invaders:

Invaders Group shot

That's a nice image. Here's some more of his scratch pad:

Critters 1

Critters 2
Perhaps if there are people making custom cards out there that's not me, some of these would probably make good card images! Please do make sure you ask Holmberg for his permission firsth though!

-+@ Something Pink @+-

2009-02-19T18:38:00.004+08:00

I got the card from the post office today that said I had a package? Ooooh, could it be that my He-Man and Beastman from Matty Collector has finally arrived? No such luck. Grrr...

What did arrive was in a small envelope of hard card. When I saw it I wondered what it could be. When I saw the writing (it's funny how I can recognise the writing even though I've only seen it a couple of times before) and where it's sent from I had a good idea what was inside. Here's a photo (with the names and addressed censored):

If you have a closer look, you can probably make out the German stamps underneath the Finnish postmark. Also under the address, Hans im Glück is visible. That should give a good clue what is inside. Yay, my blank tiles from Europe has finally arrived! Thanks nipa!

I had my first surprise when I opened the box. Something pink? Eeek... did nipa send the parcel meant for someone else to me by mistake? Erm... pink... now why is that colour significant? Of course it's significant... it's the colour mostly associated with Geishas!

What's a Geisha? A joke between the few of us at the now defunct CCGW. Stuff like - I walked into the hotel room and saw that there was a Geisha on my pillow. Heh. Oh well, those were the days which I will remember fondly. Here's a close-up of the chocolate bar:

I think the packaging used to have pictures of Geishas on it, but that was supposed to be sexist or racist or whatever, so that got removed. Apparently Geisha is the most popular of the candies made in Finland with really unappropriate names. I don't remember what they are, but I'm sure somewhere on the internet...

Anyways, the story is this: I wrote HiG to ask them if they would sell me those blank tiles - i.e. send them outside Europe. I even told them I'd pay more. They wrote back and said the tiles were not for sale, but were only available as a replacement. They also said that they would not be shipping them outside of Europe. So much for that.

Not long after that, they put out an announcement that there were going to limit the total number of sheets of 12 tiles to 5 per person. Ouch. That's gonna put a crimp in anyone's style. The story is that they did not want others to get those tiles, make bad quality fan tiles on them and then sell those tiles on ebay, because that would just be 1. copyright infringement and 2. dumb buyers will complain to HiG about the badly made tiles asking for a replacement... which won't be available as HiG didn't make those tiles.

Anyways, to cut my story short, I had to find a. a European, b. willing get the sheets for me, c. willing to ship to me, d. doesn't want it for themselves and e. can accept Paypal. Well, since I am still talking to one on a regular basis (the other being Martin, but we hardly talk anymore since, well, he's busy with work and all), I sent an IM to nipa asking him if he would help me get the 5 sheets. He agreed, agreed to scam HiG by using 2 separate addresses to get me 10 sheets.

I paid him a week ago after he has sent it and I must say I'm really happy with the result. He even threw in a Geisha! here are the 10 sheets as the "before" picture. I shall be happy making custom tiles from these! Kiitos Tomi!

=()= King's Gate =()=

2009-02-04T18:45:00.003+08:00

I played this last week...

This is a tile laying game, where there are ten locations and player has to win points printed on the locations by having the most strength around the location. It's a 4 player game with red, yellow, blue and green tiles for the players, each of which have either a number from 1 to 5, or a cup or a dragon (some of these tiles are shown in the image above).

The game starts with a location being laid (and the locations are marked 1 to 10 to show the order that they are to be used) and each player plays one tile per turn around the location during their turn, usually, but there are exceptions. The tile with the 1 has a star on it to remind players that they can put as many 1 tiles as they have in hand (max of 6 tiles in hand) during a turn. The cup, is a bonus tile that has a strength of zero, but can be played in addition with another tile, if the location permits. Most locations permit the placement of multiple tiles, if the tiles themselves allow it. However, two locations only permit a limited amount of tiles to be played and there are some locations (marked by black circles) allow a player to do nasty things to the tiles around that location. The dragon, for example, removes a tile from play.

When all 10 spaces around the location is filled, players calculate who has the strongest strength around it by summing up the number of their tiles around the location and get points as printed on the tile. The last player gets no points. The player who completed the tile then gets to place the next location touching at least one of the existing tiles. This goes on until all players run out of tiles, or location 10 is completed, whichever comes first.

Gamewise, it's pretty boring, but there are twists with the personalities that can be won. I've never played with the personalities, since I've always played this game with little kids who want to feel grown up by playing a grown-up game so I have no idea how they factor into the game. There aren't a lot of tiles anyways, and in a 3 player game, the game ends after about half an hour at location 8, so games are relatively short.

There is some Strategy with this game. Whoever wins early and scores all the low points will generally lose later when the higher scoring locations are placed. The cup and the multiple 1s adds an interesting twist as it means one cannot count on who might finish the location. And of course, a 3, with the sword icon, cannot be displaced by a dragon or a higher scoring number while a location with a black circle is being played, so it is good to horde 3s until such a time as it proves useful.

What is gorgeous about this game is the artwork, which ensures that no matter which way the tiles are placed, as long as they are upright, the images are "completed" along the edge that are placed. Although the art may seem dull at first sight, the details that it contains is excrutiatingly well done and one gets to enjoy the scenery "in between turns" which, due to the tile laying nature of the game, is different every game.

The other thing that the box contains, besides a tray that doesn't seem to hold the tiles too well, are gold coins with 1 and 5s on them to allow a player to keep track of the score. I find these tokens useful for teaching maths to the younger players, i.e. I have 4 points (4x1) and I score 4 more points. How many point would I have? 8. What would be the most efficient way to deal with the tokens? Take away a 1 and add a 5, literally 4-1+5=8.

Overall, this is a boring game, unless one is playing it for educational purposes. Oh, and the game I played? I lost to the youngest player. Go figure!

=()= Switzerland to Ride =()=

2009-01-27T22:15:00.005+08:00

I had the opportunity to play Ticket to Ride (the original) and two games of TtR Switzerland (among other things) over the past few days, so here's a quick review of TtR(S).

Apologies first for the blurry cards. I must have saved the smaller resolution and image size...

What's TtR Switzerland all about? Well, first and foremost it's a 3-player game, and that was the main reason why it saw play over the past few days - because there were only 3 players available. So that's a plus in its book.

TtR Switzerland also takes to it only one feature from TtR Europe - the tunnels. This made it a lot easier to explain to a first time gamer the rules since there were only tunnels to explain, and there weren't any ferries or stations or the other ancillary rules from TtR Europe. The streamlined multicoloured locomotives drawing (i.e. just like a normal card) also made play a lot more smoother, as players didn't have to stop and ask how many cards they had to take after taking one of those locomotives.

The other plus of course, are the multi-route tickets, two of which are shown above. The players I was with simply loved the fact that it is almost impossible to block those cards as there are 3 possible end destinations. One complaint however, was for the multi-route tickets with originated in Switzerland. The names of the cities, unlike the normal route tickets, were not geographically marked and it took a while to locate them. Otherwise, they were fine.

The other complaint in the game, although not a big complaint, is that the names of some of the places were a bit hard to pronounce. "Brno" - is that Birno, Bruno, Beerino? Well, it's definately not on the list of destinations that a regular person outside of Europe would have generally heard of, let alone pronounce.

Even with the double routes open in a 3-player game, some of the routes were still heavily utilised and blocked. Geneva, for example, saw all 4 routes getting used up on both games, while competition was tough at Bern, Basel and Zurich. The eastern part of the map was sparingly used, especially the south-eastern part. Apparenlty Italy isn't that popular as it is miles from the cities mentioned above.

I won the first game, and drew first on the 2nd after the longest route was taken into account (yes, we were playing with the longest route and most destinations bonuses). We were also playing with the new replacement cards which felt so much nicer not only in terms of the smooth finishing, but also because there are no typos (which came with the original cards in the box).

Overall, this game is great for beginners who have played TtR the original, but have not yet got any experience with the other maps yet. I would strongly recommend getting the replacement tickets and the 1910 cards for more fun. The group I was playing with was so enthusiastic about the map that they are looking forward to the Nordic map, which I explained, will have something more (ferries, 9-card routes). Switzerland is a logical fit in progression between TtR and Nordic with Europe and Marklin after those (although not necessary in that order).

I think Switzerland probably made my gaming group TtR fanatics!

=()= San Juan =()=

2009-01-14T23:45:00.003+08:00

The capital town of Puerto Rico is also a card game for the Puerto Rico board game.

So I had a chance to play this game over the holidays (was that 2 weeks ago? Blimey!) and although I enjoyed the company and the playing, I didn't really enjoy the game.

This is a card game, and it entails drawing cards to hands, taking actions in rounds, building buildings, producing more cards and trading produce. Sounds a lot like a CCG, but it's not. It's a card game. The object of the game is to score the most victory points (printed on almost every card. The game ends when one player has built 12 buildings.

The graphics are great for a card game, but is subpar when compared to the images in a typical CCG, or at least the CCGs I'm used to. The gameplay is relatively fast, thanks to the simplicity of the rules (again, when compared to the CCG). I was also told that the game is a lot simpler than it's parent Puerto Rico. There are tactics and strategy involved in the game, but as I played it only once, I could only vaguely sketch out them tactics and strategies.

The gameplay uses almost nothing new to a CCG player - the cards in your hand function as buildings, resources and produce depending on how they are played. Building can only happen in the building round and Produce can only be produced during the production round. One thing that might be new to a CCG player is that the turns do not consists of fixed rounds. There are as many rounds in a turn as there are players and during each turn, each player gets to pick which rounds are in the turn. It's not really novel, though. One of the rounds in a turn that you may pick is the "Draw" round - this is the only card game where one is not guaranteed to draw every round, which makes cards in hands all the more important.

To make a long story short, I finished with 12 buildings and won the game. And I'm saying that not to boast but to illustrate the point that I didn't enjoy the game not because I lost (I didn't!) but because it's a bit skimpy for my taste. At the end of the game, I commented that it feels very much like a game of Citadels, but is less exciting and has more resource management (not exactly in those words) and everyone who was playing with me agreed that it was so. Ah well! This is not something I will get for my own collection. I'll stick with Citadels, thank you very much.

I think this game is meant for hardcore Puerto Rico lovers who are looking for a quicker and lighter version of the game (hence the simplicity and cards as opposed to board). For the average Gamer though, I'd recommend checking out Citadels.

_.%~ Ancient of Days ~%._

2009-01-14T23:21:00.005+08:00

Happy New Year 2009.

A new year, a new leaf for the blog? Not really. I'll still retain this blog as my personal comments blog, but instead of focusing on the stuff I do at CCG Workshop (RIP!), I'm just gonna post about the games that I play and perhaps put up a few reviews or something. Nothing has been fixed yet, but it will definately include stuff that I'm doing at... ah, but that will be telling!

Just for those who have noticed (which will probably mean none of my one regular reader), the titles have gotten new symbols. Here are some of the symbols which I will be using as part of this "redesigned" (ha ha ha) blog.

_.%~ [title] ~%._ will contain posts about the site (formerly ~ [title] ~ )
-+@ [title] @+- will have my usual ramblings
=(*)= [title] =(*)= will be reviews of expansions, games, whatever

And just to start the year, here's an avalanche of images from Ancient of Days, the fan-made MND set that never will be.

_.%~All Good Things ~%._

2008-12-31T16:22:00.004+08:00

It's the end of another calendar year. Endings are sometimes difficult to process. After today, I have to start writing out 2009 as the part of the date and will no longer be able to write 2008, well unless I get delusional, or dementia or both.

2008 saw the demise of a number of things. The ambitions of John McCain's ambitions to be the 44th US president for one, the fiction that Kosovo is part of Serbia, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae... Yet this blog (used to!) deal with neither of those.

No, this blog was a record of the work and the fun times and the frustration about CCG Workshop more or less, and my involvement in it. I started blog naively and picked a format that was so much an antithesis of what a blog was supposed to be and kept with that format through the years. Well, this post announces an end to that. However, elements of it will be retained for, something else perhaps.

This post though, marks the passing of CCG Workshop after a successful life of 7 years. Who would have thought that something that was spawned after the turn of the millenium would suck hours and hours of my life, first as a player, then as a developer. There was at least 3 eras of the logo, the first one with the black background and greenish text has since gone the way of telegraph machines and vacuum tube transistors. The orange logo was perhaps the most remembered logo, as it was during the time that this logo was used that CCG Workshop was at its peak. The final grey and red logo was an attempt to be more mature, but that was the logo of the site at its demise.

I must say I've had good times and bad times there. There are things that were developed during those years that I will forever take with me. I treasure all the friendships that I've had there that started there, and in some cases still have those. The skills I have developed - coding, graphics, forum management - those I will take away with me to whatever the future will entail. I'd like to give a shoutout to the person who started the ball rolling, Mr. Edward G. Mittelstedt III, for a superb idea and for giving me a chance to be part of the ride for the past 7 years. Wherever he is, I wish him and his family good health, happiness and success.

Time, as the saying goes, wait for no man. Well, the world has moved on, and so must I. Starting 2009, this blog will undergo... well, no ready revolution, or crazy colour change, or anything drastic or dramatic. But that's something for the new year. I thank all my faithful reader (yes, you know there's only one of you!) for your patronage, but now it's time for me to dim the lights and bid you adieu... until 2009!

Watch this blog.

-+@ Kill @+-

2008-01-11T20:13:00.001+08:00

A new year, means something has died...

First up, new games for the year. This one isn't really new, but I just saw these cards. It's the Kingdom Hearts TCG by FFG. It seems interesting that there's a Donald Duck in the set as well. Yeah, Disney must be really pushing that game. I don't have the cards, I haven't played it yet, I'm not even gonna get it. I do like the concept though... or at least the characters.

There's a lot of new things going on with Magi-Nation (no longer Duel). The cartoon series has gone halfway with nary a soul watching it thanks to its really early Saturday morning timeslot. Then there's what was supposedly a MMO going into beta (feh - they lied - in reality it's just a souped up java applet with limited player vs player interactions).

What has also been interesting is that Insiider, the forums that kept the torch burning through the darkest night for the franchise is dead. I wonder why. I know for a fact that the URL and server was recently renewed for a year. So it couldn't be financial. I seriously doubt it's technical because it seems that the URL has been wiped from the face of the net. So I wonder what happened there.

On a maybe related note, CCG Workshop has announced that they are closing down the online card game because the publisher have retracted permission for the site to host the game. Thus closes a chapter for the online gaming site as one of its more popular games goes into the graveyard. There has already been one negative post on the CCGW forums, in addition to a number of condolences as well. A number of players are going to be disappointed that the game is not available there anymore.

So, that's not one, but two of the three sites that has carried on the flame of the Magi-Nation franchise throughout the long winter that has now ended their MND connection. Will the third and final site be similarly targetted as well? Only time will tell.

-+@ Unforseen Consequences @+-

2007-10-31T17:33:00.000+08:00

Heh, only because the server is down.

Only because it's halloween. There's quite a bit cooking, but I'm gonna put on my furry pants and go masticating...

-+@ Loyal Sacrifice @+-

2007-09-05T20:02:00.000+08:00

The things I do for CCG Workshop...

Three "Art of" cards for AE with the symbols. Nothing special here. AE meanwhile seems to be on hiatus as nobody is really placing down ideas for their cards much... yet... hopefully they'll get things running soon. I also need to get the other cards out soon as well - Orothe and Paradwyn and Arderial are all in my stable this time around. Hopefully, I'll be able to get intresting mileage out of the cards... one of these days.

It's just a couple more weeks until the new Magi-nation cartoon starts airing in the US (and probably Canada...). The younger old schoolers have already mostly declared their hatred for the animation and design, while the older old schoolers are adopting a wait and see attitude. References to the cartoon is popping up everywhere but there isn't much to mention other than a few spoilers here and there.

Avatar is also getting a 3rd season soon. I'm awaiting that keenly. I hope it will revitalise the card game, but somehow, I am doubtful that this will be so. I guess Avatar is probably going to be the opposite of Magi-Nation - good cartoon, bad CCG. I'll happily settle for a good cartoon though because that's hard to produce. A bad CCG can always be "fixed" with unofficial fan versions!

And talking about fan versions, the B5 players seem rather keen on revamping the custom cards into their image, to leave a mark or a stamp on it. The discussion has been going on, on the CCGW forums without the input of Bruce. I know the Vorlons seem pretty much "out there" but some of the suggestions are even more "out there"... My position has always been to keep to the spirit of the overall rules, and to use the cards to override the rules if necessary. I guess there'll come a time when I have to test that out, although I'm generally keeping silent on the discussion.

Another SciFi TV show with a cardgame is StarGate and while searching for today's topic, I discovered that there's not only a 2nd expansion planned (or out), but there are also online exclusive cards (presumably on the pay client). One of these days I've got to go back and check those out. I wasn't too impressed by the card design generally, although I do have to admit the icons and the constallation symbols are nice.

And since I'm on new stuff, I just got an email today about the latest Ticket to Ride expansion - the Swiss expansion. Days of Wonders is now accepting pre-orders. It's one that I'd like to get, but I don't think I want to pay for the postage. I'll probably get it the next time I see it in a big board game shop or something. The other big news about TtR has been that DoW is producing a "Nordic" version with a Nordic map to be sold only in Scandinavia and Finland. Players in the US seems rather supportive of the version and upset that they might not be able to get it locally - they are probably as exasperated as how I feel... anyways, I know I can always count on Tomi to mail me a copy or two... and provide the translations as well!

Ed yesterday mentioned that he's busy translating VteS into a PBW format. Wow, I'm going to guess he's gonna be busy for the next 3 or 4 years or so... maybe more. Then again, he might prove me wrong and finish all 20 expansions (OK, I know it's less than that, but it seems that much to me) or so in less than a year, which will probably be my wish! Hopefully, he'll take time out to do other simple games in the interim...

Like Titan, which is the most played game on Ludoholic, both the PBW version, the fast PBW version and the real-time version. I think that game itself is a hit, if only because it's so addictive. Capitol and Urland and Monkeys are fun, but sadly they take time to complete. I'm not going to go into the real-time vs pbw scenario again, but I do feel that people should not be forced to play a version that they do not enjoy, so it's good that both versions of Titan are up on Ludoholic.

Mark has also been rather excited about working on his Ludoholic game. He's making some great progress as well, and although he's not as fast as Ed, I think he's still going more steadily than the other PBW developer (or is it developers?) on Ludoholic. I have no idea, I'm trying my best not to get involved with another format when I barely have enough time to do the things I want to do on the main engine.

And one of the things I did recently on the main engine was to add the missing Fast Break cards into the game. There's a few things that I really wanted to do like sealed deck and to correct the score dice, but I decided it was way too much work for a game that isn't normally played (nobody played it the last 30 days) so I left it as it is to concentrate on other things.

Things like working on Armageddon, which was supposed to be my top secret game but since I've started it and announced it elsewhere, I might as well announce it here as well. It's a game by Blue Leviathan games with some nice artwork, a series of novels planned and other stuff. I know close to nothing, but probably more than the general public I guess. I don't think I have all the images for the cards so that will have to wait. I just glanced at the spoiler though - it's definately going to give me a headache creating the card list! Ouch!

And the parting image for today is from... Orothe. This is an image done not for my custom card sets but for Joe Araiza. He's the penciller (although I modified the pencil some with the inking) and owner of the character. I only did the colours and the background. Don't ask me why there's more beam of lights, I guess I'm just drawn to it. This piece was to test the school of fish in the background - I think the perspective makes it work rather well...

-+@ Red Sky @+-

2007-08-29T20:30:00.000+08:00

Martin got it right, but I'm continuing anyways, probably until the end of the year if my blogging record keeps up...

These three cards are from the Avatar TCG. Logan tried getting some promo cards for me from Origins, but did not manage to succeed. I guess that's my loss. Somehow I don't think it's doing very well. The card design actually looks a bit dull - they could have done so much with the card, but instead it's just lines and colours. Way too simple for a cartoon that has such a complex plot. The cartoon is going into it's third season next month and there are quite a number of crazies waiting for it.

Another new cartoon that's coming out next month is the Magi Nation cartoon. I'm tired of all the speculation and assumptions dressed up as facts being posted almost every forum I go to. I have started a FAQ just to try to combat those false interpretation, but I have no idea if I'm doing any good there. Oh well, I won't even get to watch the cartoon next month, unless...

Not a lot of things going on with the custom cards as well. I got the Paradwyn EF cards up for playtesting yesterday, and fixed a few things, but things are slow since it's the "height" of summer and not many people are around. No new custom cards are being designed, and I haven't had the time to hunt for images, or to colour any as well. Hopefully things will pick up by the end of September. I should really put some time into it as well.

General CCG Workshop news - Monkeys and Titan have both had a bump up in status on ludoholic.com, but I really haven't been keeping track there. I updated B5 again today though, after correcting a whole bucketfull of defects a couple of days ago. It's embarassing that the game hasn't been updated since 2005. It's a good thing that it's getting popular now. Nipa also did a small Doomtrooper update and I think Aiden has got a Rage update in as well since I last blogged. It's not much, but it's something?

I haven't have had the time to get Fastbreak up as well, and I think that's a good thing. At the end of the day, I think it would have been too much effort for too little gain. So there'll be no more sealed deck in Fastbreak unless I feel really inspired or something. Nevertheless I still have to add in the missing cards - but I have to do the graphics first. I was supposed to do it today, but I decided I'll take a break to write out this blog before the end of the month.

I have been playing quite a bit of Ticket to Ride over the past week or so and have been losing. I think I'm getting worse... or other people are getting better. I also managed to play a game on the Swiss map, which was fun, and there were a type of card in the Swiss game that isn't in the normal game. That was also interesting.

-+@ Offworld Research @+-

2007-07-27T08:16:00.000+08:00

Which is what I seem to be doing, hence the lack of updates. New CCG titles starting this month, last couple of months was from Rage.

Art Credits:
Bazel and Auroc by Alison Strom/Whyrl
Kleysa by Annette Burke

3 more images from AoD, which is currently in design and design is progressing. We lost the forums a while back and I had to create a new one at a new location which has been taking up time. The designers have been asked to provide stuff from memory and all - sorta like a what have been done before - since most of the resources that were on the forums is all now gone. Well, as good as gone anyways. It's still progressing, but slower than what it would have been with the old forums I guess.

Origins has come and gone a long while back and there isn't much to report, since I wasn't there and all. Logan didn't get any news about a new Carc expansion, which I have been hoping for, so I doubt there'll be one this year. Maybe next year. Mark got me the free online code for TTR, as well as news about the Swiss Expansion. I'm excited about the latter and grateful for the former. I've been spending a bit of time playing TtR online ever since and it's funny, but I'm still enjoying the game, eventhough it's so juvenile at the first pass. I've been playing quite a bit of the Mega Game though, and maybe I'll start some Europe games one of these days.

I'm also finishing the games I have on Ludoholic.com. Won an Urland game, lost a Monkeys game, and am on my way to losing the other Monkeys game and a Capitol game. I think I found a bug in the Capitol game, which accounts for why I lost (yeah, right! or not!) but I really don't enjoy those games as much as I do with TtR. It's not so much the pbw format, it's more the games themselves. I wanted to say they are less challenging, but I don't think that's the case. I have no idea why I'm so turned off by the 3 Ludoholic games though. Oh well.

I can't believe I haven't got Fastbreak up yet. I guess I've gotta stop procrastinating and finally get around to it. Maybe this weekend. Then it's off to Barathaum and then Armageddon, hopefully both before the end of the year. I doubt I'll get that B5 update in this year... or maybe I will. Who knows?

The MND.com site has been regularly updated over the past 3 weeks now, and it's created quite a stir/storm among the older communities. People are confusing the "Trading Card" for a revamp of the card game and other people are throwing names at those people. It's almost like a circus. The funny thing is how people can jump to conclusions so easily when such little infomation is given. The sad thing is when they take their own (and often wrong) conclusions as fact and present them as facts. I've been trying to correct those who post, but I'm sure that for every one who posts, there are 10 more who doesn't. Sad doesn't even begin to cover it.

I'll end the post with this image by Annette Burke. Note the Torsk in the background which is so full of detail. The character is very nicely shaded as well!

-+@ Greenpeace Assault Team @+-

2007-06-27T23:14:00.000+08:00

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 @+-

2007-06-22T20:53:00.000+08:00

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 @+-

2007-06-15T17:52:00.000+08:00

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.

-+@ Spotlight @+-

2007-05-29T21:04:00.000+08:00

I wanna turn my attention on a few things, but first:

Art credits:
Twee Twunk - pencils by Joe Araiza, colours by myself, background by Matt Holmberg
Falling Weebo - image by Epoch, background by Rich Werner
Dust Primat - image by Justin Zastrow, background by Rich Werner

Three more cards for AoD, with the first AoD non-promo expansion promo. Twee Twunk was included just to finish off the starting card for a particular magi just in case that this expansion ends up to be the penultimate expansion. (I'm not saying that it will be, I'm saying that it might be, but nothing is certain these days.)

Design hasn't started on these cards though, mainly because I'm still waiting for 2 more images for the expansion before the green light for design to start can be given. I have just finished colouring one of the images for this expansion today and have written another blog about it. The image is posted further down. It was a good image to colour and I did learn quite a few things by colouring it as mentioned in the other blog. I guess I had fun colouring it, but I'm sure the response to it by Joe would be ... well, gushing is the word that comes to mind.

I have actually been templating cards for what was formerly known as Fallen Hour. Formerly doesn't mean it's cancelled. It means that I've renamed it to something a little more . It's now known as Final Night. Tada! Yeah, I know that's a rip-off from something that Batman was associated with and now it seems more onimous. Does that mean that this will be the final MND custom expansion? Who knows? I'm not saying either way because I don't really know.

Anyways, the expansion will be 130 cards, down from the 150 in EF. I've shaved 2 cards from each region and added 4 cards to Universal to give it the final count, although not all 130 cards have been templated. I think as of yesterday, the count was about 70-odd cards done, which is above the 50% threshhold I set for meself to start a custom expansion, so the expansion will be going ahead, if only very slowly (because we are still focusing on playtesting EF and designing TW).

Yesterday I added A Cure for All Seasons for playtesting and decided to do another KMW trick by delaying the announcement until I had the time to do the announcement properly ala Ed. I think Martin actually misunderstood what I was saying in this blog and seemed to have made a rather nasty (especially by his usual French standards) remark there. Oh well, there's a response there that I hope will clear things up.

I managed to squeeze in a game of LotR yesterday and had fun with my Smeagol sneaking to site 8 against the huge besiegers. I think it was a bad match-up there. I didn't win it with my fellowship side though. Gollum didn't even appear until site 4 and was quickly dispatched by the Dwarves who were also busily discarding my deck. Shelob only showed up on 7 and with some bad plays by my opponent with the assignment, I finally overburdened the ring bearer with Gollum and Heavy Burden. I had fun. I hope I didn't drive my opponent away, instead I hope it inspires him to build a pure Gollum culture deck like mine.

I've also been busy updating my MND site. It's weird to be able to pick up the pieces and just go on like that even after such a long break. I had to tweak a few things of course, to bring everything up to date, especially on the custom cards, but I also added a few scans and stuff to keep the non-custom card people happy. I'll need to go advertising it soon again, just to get my counter to go happy again.

And I can't believe I have a super-secret project. OK, not so secret project now. Coming to a gatlingEngine near you soon!

-+@ Legendary @+-

2007-05-23T20:44:00.000+08:00

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...

-+@ Elder Stone @+-

2007-05-21T19:34:00.000+08:00

Coz this is a post about Kybar's Teeth...

Art credits:
Zastrow by Zastrow - I couldn't resist naming a creature after an artist. He's probably gonna tell me to rename it or something.
Tuft Yajo by Werner/Gillette/Goodman
Flint Cragnoc by CyberIsland/Holmberg

You can see the last image at Cyber Island Studio. No, this isn't the studio producing the animated cartoon which will be 26 episodes long and will be done by Cookie Jar and Daiwon in South Korea - see this press release from them. The cartoon will be shown in September presumably on CBC in Canada and Kids WB south of the border. For those outside anglophone continental North America, well, start writing to your local stations if you wanna see the cartoon.

The above art, by the way, is for Ancients of Days as usual as I attempt to finish off the last quarter of the images for the 100 card expansion. And guess what? This month alone, I've gone from 79 to 98. Eek! That's fast. 2 more left and then all the images will be done. Wow. That's rather fast. I still remember when I was finishing the last few expansions that the last 10 cards or so seem to take forever getting the images. This time though, they were just going bang bang bang bang and out the door. Heh, I prefer it this way. The last batch I did were 5 d'Resh cards and one of them is shown above. I think I did the Tuft Yajo a week before and the Cragnoc a few days before that. The last 2 is going to be a pain. I need to locate 2 magi images for Nar and d'Resh. I've already sent messages to a few people, but haven't yet had any response from any of them. Well, I guess there's still time. I wonder if the designers are still rearing to go...

The other less impressive thing I did over the weekend was to get EF KT up and online for playtesting. It's still a bit painful typing in and adapting cards and then checking to see if everything works. I remember the days when I was fervent enough that doing it for an entire expansion of triple the size was no problem. These days though, what with a Sword of Damocles hanging over everything, things seem to be rather... uncertain. Anyways, hopefully the playtesters will come up with their thumbs up and there's nothing more than minor text mistakes. I saw Bobby doing some testing earlier today - I don't think he had a good matchup though.

Of course I also had to do the announcements on the News section, just to make it seem as if things are happening on the site. Well, it is, but not everything gets announced which is a pity. And while I was there though, I decided that I needed to finish up the ad images for EF, so I made a whole bunch of ads and since I enjoyed the process so much, I created a bunch of ads for AoD as well. Some of them are cool, some, not so, and some are funny, as Tomi commented on the Flying Carpet d'Resh ad on the front page.

The other ad I had to add to the front page a few days late was the KMW expansion for VTES. No need to create a new ad for it this time thanks to me grabbing the logo off from the site a few months back. The story is this: it was added on time (or a day later for me), but was not announced because Ed wanted to be the first to announce it. It must be some alpha male thing or something. So I just let him have his day in the sun and only updated the News page after he's done his spiel about it being added and a free pass being given out, yadda yadda. Yes, I mentioned a free pass. Now head over to the Online site to get started.

My ad hoc game group decided to call me for dinner and a gaming session over the weekend, so I went armed with... no games! Wow, it used to be I had to force the games down their throats. Now they are the ones who are not only purchasing the games but is trying to force it down my throat. Whee. Ed's job is done? We played 2 games of TtR, of which I won the first and then got ganged up on in the 2nd which I lost. But that was the second game of the evening. I was first introduced to the game of Saboteur, which is a card game, but a "pathfinding" game. It was OK ... there isn't too much strategy to it and like most other card games, sometimes it plays itself. However, having said that, it'd be a good game for pbw though... Anyways, I think next time I'll bring along A Game of Thrones...

-+@ Vampire Blood @+-

2007-05-11T18:43:00.000+08:00

because I'm gonna talk about VTESO and blood in this blog?

Art by Annette Burke. Just wanted to show more pheygrins that Ms Burke has done. All 3 cards will be in AoD and that expansion will be Pheygrin heavy, but I'm gonna guess it'd be well liked by the general MND public because the art is good and the Pheygrins usually have great mechanics. I really need to finish getting images for this set since design is gonna start next month... maybe I'll just have to delay it until all the images have been sourced.

I finally got the d'Resh EF cards to the playtesters yesterday. That's a long delay I know, when I should be a few more updates into it by now. KT is next then Nar and Naroom, and I hope I can get all of that in before the end of the month. What also needs to be done before the end of the month are the TW cards, but I think it's almost ready to go.

What was not ready to go was Third edition on VtES Online. Instead it's been scrapped and replaced by Kindred Most Wanted... a whole month later. I wonder what's the buzz by the fans that's going on about all this - there are already complaints that the support was lacking, yadda yadda, and now this is the first time that a deadline has not only been missed but has been skipped as well. Hmm...

Also interesting is the fact that Ed's going to do away with the engine and to go with pbw VTES. Now that's interesting. I wonder how many people would pay to use that service when it's much easier to keep track with a free pbem system. I have no idea. I also wonder how convoluted the coding is going to be for a pbw game that has things like interrupts. It takes about a month to finish a 3-player game of Capitol online and that game only has 4 turns in TOTAL. I can't imagine how long a 3-player VtES game would last if done on pbw. It's a good thing I won't know since I don't play the game.

Martin mentioned to me that he didn't realise that StarGate was the latest CCG to be created based on a TV series. Well, it's all brand new and shining and all, but I've already decided that there's something lacking from it. The game seems to be a very crude form of B5 without all the complexities that make B5 nice. At the end of the day, there's not much strategy going on in the game since it's basically a more powerful version of WAR. Of course, this might be due to the limited number of cards - only one expansion. Perhaps they'll improve it in future. Somehow though, I doubt I'd be wowed by it.

I just won a huge lot of Fast Break cards on ebay. It was rather pricey, but not as pricey as what I paid for my first (and before this one, only) lot of Fast Break cards on ebay. I can't wait to get the cards to finish off my collection. I guess I'm the only Fast Break crazie out there.

Tomi has also been trying to complete his Doom collection. Last I heard he needed 8 promos or something like that and he's in discussions to get them. I hope he gets to finish his collection. It's interesting how he can do it in basically under a year.

Ed's also been busy, mainly on Ludoholic. He's updated the page refresh things with Ajax, whatever that is, so that things now should refresh faster, apparently. I have no idea, I don't have any more live games... well, at least not until the next game is made public. Still waiting for Duel of Ages or Grave Robbers, but I think those will be ursurped by something I'm a bit more keen to play. We'll have to see.

-+@ Power of the Ways @+-

2007-05-02T21:26:00.000+08:00

The power is in you as a 80s cartoon used to have as a subtitle...

Cards from LotR again? Only because I've been reading about them today. Apparently Decipher's contract runs out soon and there might not be a next set. So Decipher has decided to go out with a bang... a huge bang, by making cards in the next set, which is expected to be their last set, very very broken. There's already been a large ruckus raised about it on several forums, which makes for interesting reading. Apparently the only way to beat a broken card is another broken card, so that's why the set is riddled with them. That also explains why the main card designer for the set has resigned from Decipher as well. Fruit Loops!

Well, I'm glad I'm only collecting the cards. I finally finished my collection for set 6 - Ents of Fangorn to make it 4 out of urm... 13 complete. Oh well, if anyone wants to send me rare cards, feel free to check the list of LotR cards that I'm looking for at Mahasamatman. I updated the list yesterday and like each and every time I do that, I get innundated with email asking me for trades to places like Poland or Mexico. Oh well.

I did say I'll talk about the cards I got yesterday... it was quite a haul, particularly the cards from Tomi. Here's the list:
Wildstorms
Warlords
Guardians
Judge Dredd
James Bond
Marvel Overpower
Rage
Vampire/Jyhad
Middle Earth
Ani-Mayhem
Dark Age
Dark Eden
Doomtrooper
Dune
Echelon of Fire
Echelon of Fury
Killer Instinct
Netrunner
The Crow
Galactic Empires
X-Files
Red Zone
Top of the Order

All I can say is Yay, cards from both Echelons! I've still gotta sort those cards out later today, but I'm psyched about them. Kiitos Tomppa!

One thing I won't be getting soon it seems is the Kathars expansion. I hear that Spielbox, who owns them isn't allowing Rio Grande games to publish them. So I either have to shell out big bucks to buy the out of print German version or... shell out even bigger bucks to buy it on auction sites. I don't fancy doing that much work for just 4 tiles. I guess I'll pass until there's an easier way to get those tiles.

And there goes the reason I was going to get the next issue of Games Quarterly... no more Kathars... but wait, GQ itself has been sold and shutdown it seems and it's no longer publishing as well. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that Kathar wasn't going to be available next issue. I guess I'll never know.

I also took a gander at the stats on the engine and was surprised to see that MND has gone down a great deal. I guess it's because the Brazillians have decided to desert the game en mass again, now that school has started for them? Probably. Rage also hasn't been doing very well lately as well for 2 months now, but HC is trying to inject some enthusiasm with a new tournament that's pretty much a sealed deck with ante-ing. That sounds interesting, but it depends really on players to trust each other.

I saw this picture last week and was rather impressed by it:

Image by Annette Burke. It's a MND image of course. I think I named this creature a Burkey after her and her brother Daniel. I really do like this image.

-+@Movie Star @+-

2007-05-01T21:02:00.000+08:00

Well, there are lots of those in the game below...

Those are the preview cards for the Stargate Online game, which is based on the offline TCG by Comic Images. Eventhough SciFi is cancelling Stargate after 10 years, the franchise is still going strong with Atlantis and another new series and two made for TV/DVD movies in the works... apparently. Yes, I'm a "gater" just by the info above apparently. I've also been playing the online game which is done by former WA, now SOE. I had to sign up for a WoW account to play, but I doubt I'll ever try WoW because that's almost like Evercrack to me. The physical game is in the stores in the US and Canada for over a month how... I hope I remember to send an email to Logan to pick me up a few promos at Origins this year.

And I wonder what else would be cool for "Novelty's Origin Treasure Hunt 2007"? Avatar, the Last Airbender by Upper Deck? Yeah, that would be interesting. I hope they have an interesting promo for that. Transformers 3D by WotC? I wonder if this is a CCG or something else. I'm not really interested in a tile game or non-standard looking cards (like Hexatomb or whatever that was). Eve TCG - the cards look boring, but the screencaps from the game lend it a nice space element that I'm really getting into. That would be a cool one to pick-up. And Spoils will be on my list of course. I don't really like the bright Kult images - Cthulhu did it better IMO, but that would be a fun TCG to pick up a promo.

And no one has yet guessed the CCG for last month. I'm carrying it forward to this month because well, I'm too lazy to think of a new CCG to pick titles from. I would have though that it would be easy to guess the CCGs from which I'm picking titles for last month's blogs, but apparently it's not so. Oh well. There's another month to guess.

One hint - it's one of the CCGs that I just got cards today. Remember a few weeks ago when Tomi was bored and was sorting out his cards? Well, he sent me a whole lot of cards and they've finally arrived today (amidst like 6 ebay lots). I haven't even seen the cards properly yet or sorted them, but they will get done later and will probably be blogged tomorrow or sometime this week.

What was separate from the rest though were 5 cards in their sleeves. These include the Spawn and Madman foils and the promo version of Hazard from Wildstorms CCG. Drool. The foils were from Unlimited with the white border, which means they aren't that rare, but considering that these are cards from 1996 and aren't even printed now it's like gold ... figuratively of course, although the only difference between foil cards and ordinary cards is that the logo is golden instead of black. And Hazard... it can be had for $5 on ebay usually or something like that, but it was a promo in an early copy of InQuest or Wizard (way back in 1996) so that's a little bit hard to find as well. I guess only a WS crazy like me can enjoy them. Kiitos Tomppa!

As I said, I've yet to sort out the stuff I got from the post office today, but it will include some Mahasamatman updates somewhere. That's going to be fun. The database isn't due for updating until early June though. Still, I guess I better do a once-over to make sure that everything is all nice and dandy there. And no, Stargate hasn't been listed on Mahasamatman yet.

Didn't actually get a board game this time around. I'm surprised. I was going to get Monkeys because it seems like such a good game on uh... that other site (heh heh heh). I still wanna get a few more Carc expansions too, but that can wail till GQ summer is here. That copy will have the 4 Kathar tiles for my Carc collection. I might also pick up Towers while getting that and uhm... well, I'm not getting princess and dragon... so I guess that's all the Carc sets I'm picking up for my collection.

Taling about French things, I wonder how Martin is coping with the non-release of 3rd on VTESO. I wonder if the players are in an uproar. There was a post on the main forums by the resident VTESO canuck asking if Ed was around since he apparently hasn't been replying to PM and EMs. That would be interesting to watch out how it develops. I wonder if the movie-star-looking Hungarian immigrant or the first women highness will win the battle. And no, I'm not talking about the French Presidential elections.

And while I'm on movie-stars, did I mention a few blogs ago that Mark is glad to be back on GRfOS? Well, he is, according to an interview I last had with him. He's gonna need lots of help to familiarise himself with the coding and for a change there's only one person that could help him. Poor Ed. I'm not envious of Mark though. According to him too, I'm the pbw-hater. Heh, OK, whatever. Fingers in too many pies is more like it.

There's also a whole lot of activity going on on the main engine, including the SF league which is still running, crazy AvP rules talk and a bunch of other things that really isn't that interesting even when one's moderating the forums. I guess it's interesting for the people discussing them though. I'll write up a bit more about this perhaps tomorrow with the update about the stuff I got today.

To close, here's the last (as of today) of the images that I want to showcase:

Pencils by Joe Araiza (of course, who else?), colours by myself. I am still trying to play with light and things like that (from the Kybar's sword image) and I think I only partially succeeded. I don't like the fact that the shield isn't reflecting some of the light for starters... and a whole lot of other things. Apparently Joe likes it though, and I guess that's fine since this image is for his custom cards.

-+@ Spear of Deceit @+-

2007-04-20T21:49:00.000+08:00

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 @+-

2007-04-13T21:26:00.000+08:00

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 @+-

2007-04-10T22:09:00.000+08:00

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 @+-

2007-04-07T22:52:00.000+08:00

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 @+-

2007-04-06T22:19:00.000+08:00

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 @+-

2007-04-03T21:55:00.000+08:00

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 @+-

2007-04-01T19:22:00.000+08:00

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.

-+@ Future Coin @+-

2006-12-22T23:48:00.000+08:00

No coins, but definately the currency to the future of coding.

Continuing the series of fan made customs, this is Babylon 5. There have been 2 fan-made customs with a third somewhere in development. Anla'shok (as represented by Lenonn above) features heavily on the Minbari and their Rangers. The Vorlons (as represented by Kosh) basically makes a Vorlon deck almost playable, but the rules weren't made to add him as a Starting Ambassador so someone else has to be the starting ambassador. The Dying Races (as represented by G'Kar) have been 2 years in the making (it takes time to create perfection?) and will hopefully get playtested next year. It features the Centauri and the Narn and in development is one of my favourite card, Arranged Marriage.

So that makes it the 5th? Or is it the 6th? custom set I've shown this month. Doomtrooper, Mythos, Rage, MND, Wildstorms and Babylon 5. Yup 6. 7 if Call to Arms is included. All of those 6 are available to be played on gEngine of course. There's also the Doomtown and Shadowrun custom expansions, but I couldn't find cards for those, which is a pity. Unless someone wants to point me at the site with the Doomtown custom cards...

As expected, Tomi has started work on draughting and I have the proof below. (Side Note: this blog is written in ~~standard~~ my version of British English as opposed to American, thus I have decided to be consistant in my choice of spellings. Draught is the proper word for the American word "Draft", at least according to my dictionary.)

Makes me wanna play Apocalypse or even Paradise Lost draught eventhough I would have no idea what I'd be doing. heh. It also makes me wanna start coding draught into my games. Perhaps B5 draught might be in the works? Hmm...

Ed is busy fixing bugs... not only on Ludoholic where he's been hanging out lately but also for the VTES engine (and by extension, the main engine). He's been more vocal in the forums which is also another good thing. Makes me feel like I'm not alone to face the wolves in there. Hopefully he won't burn himself out this time but will enjoy the ride pushing the engine to the best it can possibly be.

I just checked out the VTES Online forums and it seems that Martin does have all the cards (or at least the scans) to those expansions that he will be adapting next year. Yay for that. Also apparently those are small expansions as well which is why he chose them. Speed is the key. 3 expansions a year was about what I did on adapting B5 as well, and while that was going on, there was a few games played every day. It only started to die when all the cards were added. I wonder why that was so...

Did I mentioned I played a Mega game of Ticket to Ride yesterday? It was my first Mega game and it is good. You can still depend on LA to NY or TransCanada from YVR to Montreal, but since there's a bonus of 15 points for the most tickets made, you really, really want to get that in addition to the longest route. Hence the wish to connect such short haul cities as Washington - Boston. In addition to the unfamiliarity of the game, it was difficult predicting where people were building towards in order to block them, so the game was basically a free for all build as much as you want where you want to. For a change, there wasn't any blocking, which is good.

Talking about boardgames, BGG gave out a free microbadge this year. I used it to get my Ludoholic microbadge so that I now have the 3 badges I was hoping to get. The other 2 are TtR and CCGW of course. Talking about boardgames, a plea to Carcassonne players out there. I need to get one of those as a Christmas (aka end-of-year) gift for someone. Does anyone have any suggestions which one to get?

-+@ The Forgotten King @+-

2006-12-21T23:17:00.000+08:00

which is what these cards show...

What's this? Some religious CCG? Not really. Fractal is from the Israeli superpower group Unit Aleph while Sinbad is part of the Heaven's Fist Team. Both are from an unpopular run in the first volume of Stormwatch when it was written by Union's author and general WS editor. Mr. Majestic probably needs some introduction, eventhough he has crossed over into the Superman universe and has a few miniseries of his own. He was part of the WildCATs while the real team was away on Khera, then he got roped into Savant Guarde and I think he formed a group based around himself later on in the series. And the CCG? Wildstorms of course. The cards on the left and right are part of my Stormwatch expansion from the aforementioned unpopular run with the slew of characters. One of the more familiar characters introduced in that run is Swift, who survives in the Wildstorm universe of today.

The thing about the cards are the templates. They were horrible to produce due to the weird shapes, the weird background effects and the teleportation zzzzznnnnn effect around each character. I think I didn't do too badly, but I'm sure it can be done better, and today was only a first attempt at getting the templates right. I can still see where I used the clone stamp on the cards (urgh! that needs to be fixed) and the ice (cyan) shades on the Unit Aleph template needs to be toned down some. Hmm... some later time.

I haven't received any complaints about the Project Second Chance cards so far, so I take that as a good sign. I made a rather rude blog about why I think people won't use it, but in there there's also an appeal for people to embrace it because otherwise, it'd mark the end of MND custom cards as we know it on the engine. It remains to be seen if I'm successful. Somehow I doubt I will be, but I'm hoping my pessimism is misplaced.

Meanwhile, the votes are coming in for the images that are part of the polls I put up on the CCGW forums. There's no prize or anything, but I just wanna see what people think are good images and whether it'd be worth my salt to start paying those artists for artwork for future (aka AoD) custom expansions (because, if you have been keeping up with my blogs, I'm ~~gonna be~~ am short of MND artwork...). So far Eric Santana's Second Shadow and Jennifer Reed's Auriolis are both in the lead for Elder's Legacy and Shadowsfall Promo respectively by a respectable percentage. Tainted Glimpses meanwhile, which was supposed to have better images than either of those two is stuck without a clear winner in the polls. I have no idea how to interpret that. Anyways, the polls are at Elder's Legacy, Shadowsfall Promo and Tainted Glimpses.

I think I opened the Pandora's box by saying that drafts can be done on the engine if the PL implements it. I think it can be done, but it's going to be hairy to code for and it'll have to check for so many different things that it's not even gonna be funny. Hence the reason why they aren't done in the first place. Having said that PL-extraordinaire Tomi is probably considering doing some support if his forum post is any indication. I can't wait to see what he does.

Oh and then there's the issue of comprehension of the English language and WoW which I'm not even going to say too much because it'll just raise my blood pressure or something.

-+@ Worker Zombie @+-

2006-12-19T19:52:00.000+08:00

Barhah!

3 more images from LotR TCG Rise of Saruman. Why did I post these 3 cards instead of say an original game or a fan-made expansion (not that difficult since today's blog is really about one of those and another of the other)? Take a closer look at the cards. Yes, that's right, that's Gondor's favourite Swede on a Rohan template... and not just any Rohan template but the Masterworks template. There's also one without the Masterworks template in Rohan's earthly red tones which was what caught my attention initially - it is weird to see Gorn in something other than his Gondor Star, and this is apparently the first of many cross-cultural cards over the next few expansions (if they get printed). Arwen is rumoured to be the next one to get the special treatment being templated on a Gondor card instead of the blue Elf card as is usual in Treachery and Deceit, the expansion after Rise of Saruman.

The Gandalf in that picture is also a little unique. Why is that so? Well, the card wasn't designed by Decipher. It was made by a player who goes by the name of Menace64 online and was one of the 6 cards that won the contest for the online game. It was tested online and the card was revised slightly and was promised to be included in either RoS or T&D. RoS it is and I'm sure the card designer is estatic about the card. Incidentally, I wonder how much did they copy from MND's and Rage's custom cards...

JC has just come through with the goods and the new Rage custom expansion War Council has been added to the online game. I've no doubt there's a whole lot (aka about a dozen or so) die-hard online Rage players downloading the cards and the images. I guess people just need to bug JC every once in a while to get things done or something. I dunno.

While I'm on that front though, Mr. Aidan Bowles has been given the keys of the kingdom and has been made a Project Lead. What does this means? Who knows? I definately don't. I noticed him with the gear in the chatroom today, and since he has the gear, it means I have to update like a million pages (actually about a dozen) all over the place. Ooooh, and I've got to give him forum access as well if he doesn't already have those. Oh well.

I haven't had the opportunity to talk with Martin regarding how busy he is with all the new VtESO cards that he's supposed to be adding in less than a month. I wonder if he even has all the images for all those cards. He's not appealing for any card image which makes me think he's got them all and he's probably about 80% done (or something like that). I guess the VtES players probably can't wait till next year.

And while on that topic, I was asked to update the VtES wiki, or at least the front page, to bring it in line with the CCGW main wiki. Blegh. As if everything should be cut and molded to look the same as everything else (** someone, aka Christoph, stole the templates from the main wiki and used it on the SWD wiki... I think that's so... passè - he didn't even bother disguising it or dressing it up differently... oh well... OK, having looking at it for a second time I do see that it is slightly different in terms of presentation...). Anyways, I updated the main page, but ensured that it was slightly different than the main site and I think I succeeded in giving it common features as the main wiki, yet a distinctively different look at the same time. The colours needs a bit of tweaking (I'm still getting used to this new monitor) to be legitable, but that's something someone else (aka Ed?) can do I guess.

There's also a new MND update today. Specifically, the Project Second Chance cards have all been added to the online game as promised in my MND blog. It's only 9 cards, but hopefully, it will revitalise the game somewhat especially these are cards that people don't even think about because they are so under the power curve. I still need to write a blog there about the new cards after this of the MND @ CCGW blog.

And thanks to everyone at Time magazine for voting me Time's Person of the Year. Well, not just me of course but everyone else who uses the internet to share content - all the bloggers and the podcast people and the YouTube people etc. Well, it's nice to know that I won something this year, if only as part of the faceless crowd! Barhah!

-+@ Alcolyte @+-

2006-12-18T14:49:00.000+08:00

describes the person who did these cards...

That's Call to Arms by Derek Shields. Those images were drawn in paint. Yes, you heard me right, paint as in the paint in Windows. Wow. That's his home-made CCG that he has put in a lot of effort... and like a few years worth of Sundays and public holidays. The effort really shows in the cards. I think they are exceptional, especially for something done in paint. Just look at the icons for starters and notice how detail those are. And the images really make me go Wow, especially when I know that they were done in MS Paint.

And that's part of the custom cards... well, this really isn't custom... it's more original cards. Hopefully in one of the next few blog, I'd be showcasing Barathaum cards, unless I find something else that's exciting.

The news on the VteSO site is that next year is shaping up to be a nice year for the VteS players. January will see a new expansion... Black Hand or something like that hit the VteS engine and 3 months later, Martin has pledge to get the full 3rd Edition out online. Wow. 3rd Edition. If it's as crazy as I think it is, Martin is going to be busy early next year. But wait, that's not all, 3 months later in July, another VteS expansion will be added online. This one is I think one of the recent ones, Kindred Most Wanted. I think that's also the one that has Werewolves and stuff ala Rage. Sounds like a good year for them. I also edited the CCGW wiki for VteS to bring it up to date.

That's now been announced on the main site as well. I had to create a new ad for VteSO as I was getting bored of the 2 other VteS ads. The new ad is specifically for VteSO though since it makes use of the VteSO logo and part of the VteSO website. It looks a bit weird there, but I'll let it slide a bit.

The thing about Mark's games is that there's always an ad. Since Ed has decided to start "blogging" his progress on GRfOS, I thought it deserves a mention on the main page. What I didn't realise is how great Mark's ad is. Well, the CCG Workshop main page is where it can be seen, so don't take my word for it. And yes, Ed's blog is on the Ludoholic forums. There's only one entry and it's pretty basic at the moment, but I'm sure it'd improve over time... if he remembers to post to it.

I have a sneaky suspicion that something is going on in Finland. What's up Scooby Doo? A doomed Revival did you say? No? Oh well. I'm sure someone will get wind of it sooner or later. Probably not me... you won't hear about it here first.

-+@ Phoenix @+-

2006-12-16T01:20:00.000+08:00

A rise from the grave?

This is the link I got the images from. Few people would know I made a LSH update for WS a few years back (OK, more than a decade ago). Now to actually see these cards... well what can a fanboy say? It's a pity that I gave up on the title (and indeed all comics) ever since "threeboot", but to finally see the LSH on a CCG is awesome. Nevermind that these are VS cards instead of WS cards. Well, I guess this will be on my shopping list for next year (and my Christmas wish list for this year!) if only to collect the cards. I do know how to play VS, but I don't really wanna keep up with the game though (way too expensive!)

Later today, or tomorrow if you're not in the Western Hemisphere, is the 2nd attempt for the Final Twilight players to create CCG Workshop Saturdays. 3 players showed up last week and one game was played. Hopefully more people will turn up today to play. I added some words to the News section of the frontpage in an attempt to raise some awareness. I hope people do turn up to play, particularly with some cards that are only Online exclusives.

I'm still in the midst of wrapping and decorations and stuff. Urgh, festive seasons can be such a huge time waster particularly when there are things I really wanna do. Like adapt Barathaum. Or clip AvP. Or colour three more Final Twilight cards. Or update the MND website. Hmm... my other website probably needs an update as well. Maybe next year.

I did find the time to template 4 cards for MND yesterday. Even with those though, I'm still below the 50 cards needed to officially announce the start of AoD. I'm not even thinking about AE at this point in time. It will probably get thrown out the window, I think. I have no idea. Only time will tell I guess as to what will happen to AE.

Ed seems to be stuck with GRfOS as stated on the forum. That a pity though because he was doing so well speed wise with the first two games. I guess all the craziness that goes with the festive season doesn't help him as well with respect to adapting games. Oh well, there's probably no hurry anyways... and on the bright side, next year will shape up to be a good year with all the ground work that has been laid this year.

The Shadowfist tournament has apparently ended. I wonder who won since no announcements has been made. Hmm... I know the Rage tournament is still running and Will/Supes seems to be in the lead. The end of this month is gonna shape up to be interesting for sure.

-+@ Dark Angel @+-

2006-12-14T22:04:00.000+08:00

which describes the 3 images shown below of course.

Art by Whyrl/Strom. That's 75% of the cards for A Cure for all Seasons Promo expansion. Yup, it's a small expansion of 4 cards. The text is up for comments at the custom card forum - links on the left unless you are downloading this with the feeds. This is the Promo expansion for Exodus Flight and like Exodus Flight, it highlights the RP element even more than the usual card. Poor Daniel made a comment which got partially shot down on the forum, but what he said was partially good. I guess he just needs to learn about the story-telling aspect of these cards in addition to the gaming part of it. After all, the story, the artwork as well as the card-game is integral to the mythos of the game.

Talking about Mythos if you wanna support the science blog with Cthulhu as a mascot (pictured left below), you can go and vote for uh... Pharyngula or however that is spelt for the best Science blog.

His closest competitor is the Bad Astronomer though (banner shown upper right). Their blogs have been funny reads over the last few days as the war of words heat up and it's gotten a bit partisan. And that's my cyberspace community service for this blog.

I don't think I'll touch Barathaum this year after all. Sucks and all I know, but since I'm not being the grinch this year, my time is spent sniping ebay auctions, hand-crafting gifts and teaching newly-weds how to bast a turkey for thier new husbands (or something). Yeah, so Barathaum is gonna take a back-seat after all. Bummer. I really wanted to get it up this year as well, but oh well, there's always next year (unless Ed doesn't die of a paper cut while playing with his brand new board games... then the engine goes down a few months after that, I'd guess).

I wonder if Ed has had time to work on Grave Robbers these few days. I get the impression that the silence means he's busy at work on it and we might get a surprise beta before the end of the year. Then again, he could be busy with all the festivities and stuff, so I have no idea. It's not as if he has a blog or he posts updates regularly... or does he?

The server acted up over the weekend and it got so bad that it had to be rebooted by Monday. I got a number of PM asking me to fix it for them, but I didn't want to disturb anything in case there was something there Ed wants to see. It was a memory error after all and it got rebooted. Wow, the number of games over the weekend must have been a mighty amount to have caused a memory error.

JC dropped by the forum over the weekend to make some announcements. I have no idea if anything is done, but at least he's back. Hopefully, he'd be updating the Rage stuff soon. Talking about Frenchmen, I had a nice chat with Martin over the weekend too regarding ... nothing in particular. Sad but true. It was just good to catch-up. The other French PL was last seen updating Shadowfist. I don't think he's in the tournament though.

I think the Shadowfist tournament is going rather well, but I think it's dying down some. I know the Rage tournament is dying down quite a bit because people are getting busy for the holidays. Sad, but true, but winter seems to be the season for fur lovers.

The forum game that Aidan has been trying to organise isn't going ahead after all. That's a pity. I was looking forward to sate my bloodlust by lynching fellow players. Oh well, it's not to be so. Maybe next year. Who know what next year might bring?

-+@ Starlit Fairy @+-

2006-12-08T16:11:00.000+08:00

which brought me news about Stargate, of course...

Nope, not MND customs as promised, but this isn't a normal blog as well. That will resume after this post.

This is a copy and paste from the Gateworld page:

The game will ship to stores in February 2007, with 60-card starter decks ($10.99 each) and 11-card booster packs ($3.49 each). The series includes more than 200 collectable cards for a mission-based game, featuring favorite characters and technology from the Stargate universe.

Ingenuity

Science

Combat

Culture

Booster packs include cards specific to additional characters, obstacles, adversaries, and gear. Each store display of booster cards will include one ultra-rare foil card -- with six different ultra-rare cards in the series.

Paizo.com

In this mission-based collectible card game set in SCI FI Channel's hit series Stargate SG-1, players seek to successfully complete seven missions (or accumulate the greatest number of mission points) to achieve victory. Thwart your opponents with "obstacles," "antagonists," "disease," and the most ruthless of the Goa'uld System Lords, while simultaneously sending your undaunted Stargate team of explorers into the vast unknown. This series is introduced in four 60-card theme decks (Jack O'Neill "Ingenuity Starter"; Samantha Carter "Science Starter"; Teal'C "Combat Starter"; and Daniel Jackson "Culture Starter") offered in 8-count displays, and 11-card supplemental boosters packed in 36-count displays.

SG-1

Atlantis

tournament play

You can tell I'm excited about this.

-+@ Vampire Illusionist @+-

2006-12-07T23:51:00.000+08:00

or more accurately Werewolf Illustrationist...

Art Credit as stated on cards, but I'll explain why I chose these 3 cards out of 50 or so cards. Gremlins in the filing cabinet was funny and that piece is one of Fenris' (HC O'Neil's) best work in the set. Why is it filed under P though? I have no idea. The veil is by MND-fan artist Beth Zyglowicz - you see her images since they form the bulk of the RPG converted to CCG MND cards in EF, and in the future FH. I recognised the image when browsing through the card because her pencils are so unique.

Ira Martin goes under the name of Todd Traf on the engine and I have talked about him before. This image is my favourite yet. Notice the texture on each individual brick on the background. That must have taken ages to draw. Obviously this is done in the real world and not on a computer. If it was done on a computer though, the window would probably have a reflective sheen on it and stuff. I'm too lazy to provide a link, but there's a link in the Rage CCGW forums to view all the cards.

So that's the 3rd custom CCG that I'm showcasing in my blog this month. The next entry would probably be the images from the A Cure for all Seasons Promo expansion for MND to make it a 4th. Or maybe Barathaum. But that's not a fan-made custom expansion, that's an original indie game. Hmm...

Nothing much to say on Barathaum. No work done on it yet other than cleaning up the wiki and making sure everything is there. The server is setup for the game, but I haven't asked for the database to link to it, because I don't have a file to link to. Maybe I'll start to work on it this weekend since I think I have the time for it then.

I have been busy with MND today though, working with 3 different expansions. We are still commenting on the Exodus Flight cards and I'm still incorporating the comments into the cards. I wish that was more tedious, but there aren't that many people commenting anyways. Well, I guess they will only "comment" (aka complain) when it get online and it gets used against them. Oh well. I finished draughting out the Universal cards for EF today too. That wasn't easy. Universal cards are becomming more and more difficult to design these days thanks to the huge cardlist and the potential interaction of cards. I hope they aren't too powerful. It's still private though, the region will only be made public next month with the yet-to-be-draughted Weave cards.

Two other things I finished today are the Project Second Chance Base Set cards of which there are only 8, and the 4 cards from the A Cure for all Seasons Promo expansion. I expected more cards for P2C Base, but only 8 were selected. That might even be reduced by 1 to 7 cards. It's scheduled to be added to the engine this month though. In lieu of the 3rd region for EF this month, I have made public the cards from Cure instead. It's a bit late, but I guess it's better late than never. Daniel has had a once-over look at the cards and have provided some comments, and I have tweaked the cards some more after that, but there are points which I'm still not very happy with on the cards. I might continue to tweak them over time. Cure goes online in March for playtesting.

Now all I have to finish are the Weave cards for EF, and then I can start hunting for images for AoD. With only 30-odd cards and not that many images left to be found, I wonder if the expansion is even going ahead. I need 50 before allowing card text design to start. Maybe I would have to resort to actually paying for commissioned images. Urgh, I'm going to burn a hole in my pocket I think.

Note to self: remember to do a write up on P2C. I need to blog about it on the MND @ CCGW blog to get people to think twice about the cards. I mean, if I created a custom card called "A Brub" that has the text "alternate Brub" and a recoloured image of a Brub with a very similar power, people will have no qualms playing with it. Yet when I do the same thing with P2C people aren't too comfortable with that idea. Oh well. I guess I just have to spell it out for people.

I actually wrote as "Novelty Nostalgia, CCG Workshop Project Lead" to CCP and FFG today, requesting permission to adapt Eve and Call of Cthulhu CCGs on the engine. I wonder if I'll get any replies from either of them. I would be surprise if I hear from them today. Still, miracles have happened, and I hope both of them will say it's OK to adapt their games.

OK, I just confirmed that Titan: the Arena isn't coming back to the main gEngine. Whether it'll appear elsewhere in a real-time format I have no idea as of yet, but I guess I'll announce it here after I announce it on the main site and stuff. Or maybe not. It's confusing even to me what's happening there.

Before I forget and my apologies in advance for being uncouth: but if you have been reading my blog this year and you wish to give me something for Christmas (or whatever end of year holiday you celebrate... although Sinterklaas and Deepavali is over...), drop me a line between now and the end of the year on the blog in the comments section - that's all I'm asking for. Thanks.

-+@ Rally Squad @+-

2006-12-06T20:05:00.000+08:00

Is that what the Scoobies are?

Nope, not the Scooby Doo ECG cards, but these are from the fan made expansion for Mythos. I like these cards, they are well made and they are funny too. Hopefully they'll get on gEngine with a release event like a tournament? Nyaah... according to Alex, all he wants to do is to get on and play and not much else.

Not much going on the engine at the moment - the Rage and Shadowfist tournaments are still running but both are going up to the end of the month. I'm not involved in either though so I have no idea how things are going, but there's quite a bit of traffic on the Rage forums and I'm sure the Fist mailing list is probably busy as well. Only goes to show that someone organising a tournament or two can spice things up.

I went to the Ludoholic forums today and was surprised to find that Capitol has gone Now Playing. Wow. I think Ed is really really really excited about it. He's taken 6 years of experience (and abuse?) working on the engine and translated that into a really great job on Ludoholic. There's a steady stream of gamers there and I think it's about time I said adieu to the site for a while (at least until he starts adapting something interesting like YNDT or something). I added an announcement to the main page of CCGW stating that Capitol has gone Now Playing, but I wonder if that will excite anyone there.

What has been exciting is that Barathaum is getting all its info up and running on the wiki even before the game starts adaptation. Wow. Between the creator and myself, we have gotten the page up and the rules up, and since that is open source, hopefully people will drop in to correct spelling mistakes and grammar and what not. It's the first game that I'm using the wiki as my source material as well... well, in as far as the rules and general infomation is concerned. That reminds me, I need to ensure that the board is mentioned in the rules somewhere as well. The example of play that I read is not there too... hmm...

I finally moved over the Paradwyn and Underneath cards to the public viewing forum for player comments - forgot to do that earlier in the month. Worked a bit on the Universal cards, but wasn't too keen on them for the time being so rather than script subpar cards, I decided to leave them for another day. I helped Mr. Burke out on his cards as well. The solutions aren't perfect and playtesting is definately needed for the new versions of the two TW cards. That's getting there... slowly.

I created a rather nasty Evil Men archery deck today with a pure Hobbit flipside. It is doing rather well against the poor casual player as I'm taking out their fellowship with my archers while my hobbits cancel the skirmishes, discards the minions and just run and run and run. I didn't think it was such a good deck, but I haven't faced top level decks - Smeagollum and Castamir for example - yet. At least I'm enjoying the games. Can't say the same for my opponents though... poor them.

I played my first Mega game of Ticket to Ride today... online that is. I can't start the 1910 games because I don't have the software for it, but some other player did and it took me ages getting on. It was new, exciting and difficult as people were blocking each other trying to get to where they though they needed to go. I didn't win the game, but it was fun building from Washington to Atlanta, for example, to claim the 4 points.

-+@ Grand Library @+-

2006-12-05T21:12:00.000+08:00

Or at least I seem to be showcasing a different CCG everyday...

Nope, not Chaotic cards as I thought I'd do today. Instead these are Doomtrooper cards from the latest just finished (roughly 2 months ago) expansion Armageddon. V Tribe and this expansion are the only 2 not to be present on gEngine and probably won't be there for a while, at least not until Tomi fixes his technical problems at home. Ah well, it'll be a good break for him.

And what's the deal about those Chaotic cards? Well, I only found a jpg of one of them online, the rest are hidden in a flash thingie and I was lazy to do a screencapture, yadda yadda, so it isn't there because I don't have the images. That's the short story. However, while looking for the cards, I came across the official site which promises that physical cards can be translated into the online realm as well because each card will have a unique code. That's a new gimmick I guess... and it's stated to start in January next year.

While searching for Chaotic cards though, I came across a fan made CCG for Britney Spears. Urgh. I can just imagine the cards "Oops, I did it again", "K-fed" and perhaps the latest version, "Fed-Ex". I had a look at the images and thought for a split second that I should used them instead of chaotic, but I don't think I wanna inflict that on the readers of this blog. Anyways, the site is at chaotic but be warned, you might go blind or something.

Ed came to me in a huff and a puff and told me that my last blog was erraneous. Well, not in such big words, but more or less there. I never did realised that he added a notepad feature into ludoholic over time and I apologize to any readers who may have been mislead by my last blog. There is a notepad feature that I never realised and never used, although I should have... it would have been easier for me than to remember all the sequence of things that I wanted to do. Oh well.

Apparently there's a new Rage expansion that's coming up and people are wondering if JC will be up to getting it onto gEngine on time. I have no idea what JC has been doing recently, but he was rather crestfallen when Ed sorta stopped the development of VS. I wonder if he's giving the Rage players any troubles? I have no idea, but he doesn't seem as fervent now though, for some weird reason. Mayhaps he's tired of the whole thing? Who knows?

I just had a look at the new art. There's 4 by Ira Martin who goes by the name of Todd Traff (or something like that) on the engine. I've been watching his artwork and I wonder if he'd do a piece or two for some of the other CCGs out there. Yes I'm still looking for art for the next MND expansion! I like what HC O'Neill did for the latest Rage expansion. I think I might copy that when I get the time.

I pointed the creator of Barathaum to the wiki and tried to get him to do stuff there, like copy the rules onto the wiki for one. I'm a bit tired of the PDF that's posted online though and there seems to be so many different version of the rules that I lost track of what was what. Well, he said he'll get on to it today his time, which will probably be tomorrow my time. I hope he makes an attempt at it... and he does a good job.

-+@ Chameleon Fairy @+-

2006-12-03T23:26:00.000+08:00

New Month, same old CCG though for the title... and that card is just so gay...

Lord of the Rings cards and these are from the next set Rise of Saruman. It got approved late last week so 2 cards have been spoilt - Saruman and the Ring. Of course I have to find a third for this blog so I picked up a fan made card with the spoilt text of another card - a throne, which will be one of the "featured" possession in the set. Saruman is the featured minion with not just one or two or three, but 4 different versions of him in the expansion, which makes sense; after all the expansion is named after him. The cards will be spoilt one a week every Friday. Sadly, it won't be printed in time for Christmas which is a pity, but hopefully it'd be printed early next year.

I have no idea if this expansion will even go online. We are still waiting for the last expansion, eventhough that was only a 6 card expansion. Sony's taking over of WA has really messed up WA and if anyone wants to start and make up ground by taking over WA's share of the pie, this would probably be a good time to start. I have been playing a bit more often though and made an Elf deck yesterday with the twins. It's mid level, but it's interesting playing elves... for the first time. I think I've played out the decktype though.

The sad thing about LotR is that there are only 7 fellowship cultures (and 5 shadow ones). Each culture seems to have 2 strategies at the most making 14 possible playable fellowship decks.
That seems a small number though. The numbers are a little bit higher due to "rainbow" fellowships and dual-race decks, but only Hunters, Eowyn-Elves get to see some play although I saw a rather interesting Gondor/Gandalf fp today.

I've had quite a bit of time recently because the 4-player Urland game finally finished with Ed as the winner. I made a mistake early in the game with a misclick and picked the wrong gene. Oh well, blame it on human error. I'm glad Ed won though not because he coded the game but because he really played well. Everyone else made mistakes. One thing I desperately wished was present on the game interface was a notepad where I could jot down which were the chips that I passed on and what my next few moves are going to be. Relying on memory, sometimes for a few days isn't the nicest thing to be doing.

The only other thing of significance today was that a playtest report was posted for the latest MND expansion that have been added to gEngine for playtest. The DJ cards are, as feared, vastly overpowered, but with comments and playtesting, they are being knocked down a few pegs. I think I have the best playtesting team at this point in time on the engine for the cards... and thanks to the effort started last year, a good team of card developers as well.

There's apparently a new expansion of Doomtrooper to be added... probably in the beginning of the year... and Scooby Doo for Mythos as well. Doo and Doom as I call them. As for Barathaum though, this week is shaping up to be another busy week so I doubt any progress will be made. Perhaps over the weekend, if I can squeeze in the time, the excitement, enthusiasm and effort, I might get it done. Or perhaps not - I have no idea how the rest of this week will go much less of the weekend.

I was looking through a new CCG for next year based on the Fox programme Chaotic. I'm not sure I like it. Is it me or are CCGs getting more and more gimmicky these days? I've posted about Dino Duel where you get cards from an arcade machine... now apparently there's cards that give you codes to enter at a website to do things. Granted, that's not new - Digimon probably had something similar, and perhaps Bionicle as well, but still. Why cut out the game stores and stuff? I have no idea. I'll probably grab the images for the next blog update unless I actually do some work on Barathaum, in which case, it'd be that instead.

-+@ Temporal Warp @+-

2006-11-28T21:37:00.000+08:00

See images below?

Just posting 3 images from dino duel with an ultra-rare on the left, the one and only card that I possess in the middle and a battle card on the right. The card back has a magnetic strip which you can swipe on the arcade machine though so the cardback is a bit weird, but not every cardback has a magnetic strip. The logo is also on the cardback. And that's part of my community service for this blog to educate the public about the future in CCGs. Not.

I'm still waiting to finish my last Urland game. It's been 2 days and I haven't even got a chance to make a move. Kev has been slow to act these last few days probably due to effects of too much turkey (yes, there's a protein* or something in turkey which makes one slothful apparently).

And slothful of course is part of the seven deadly sins... not that thing by some English poet or writer, but the new subtitle in the next two MND expansions. I had to check yesterday to determine if Paradwyn is ready for preview next week/month together with Underneath (it is). Universal might join the ranks there if I can finish that by the end of the month as well.

Wait up, then what will Weave go along with? Well, hopefully over the next month or so, I can flesh out my ideas for Cure and let Daniel have a once over at the design just to see what his gut feeling about the design would entail. Hopefully that would appease him, or alternatively it might upset him that he won't be able to sit back and relax. Oh well.

I had a look at Forest Well today after one player singled it out as being overpowered. I think it is as well, particularly now that it starts with Warrada. Urgh. Compared with Overgrowth though, it gives more bang for buck with Warrada in play, but it's a costly investment. It needs to be pared down a bit, but I have no idea how without making it lose its effectiveness.

While I'm on that topic, a few days ago, people were singling out Glowing Sword (OK, one person who doesn't play with relic discard was singling it out) as being too overpowered, until I pointed out that Finishing move can't be used the turn it is played and relic discards should be common in one's deck. Perhaps that should be the solution for Forest well as well? I have no idea.

I guess I can finally say that the new game I'm looking to adapt this year is known as Barathaum. It's published by Sage's Workshop or something like that and is actually being sold (apparently) online. I made (I would say badly) a cardback for it which is shown on the wiki. I wonder if it'll get accepted by the creator of the game, but the cardback is like the first thing I code in any new game. Well, if all is in order, then it should hopefully take about a week for it to be adapted.

* Turkeys are rather high in the protein tryptophan, which can be a relaxant for the body. That's why one feels doubly sleepy after a turkey meal (although some say it's an urban myth) - due to the tryptophan and the rush of blood to the digestive track to soak up all the goodies.. including the tryptophan.

-+@ Deity Status @+-

2006-11-27T22:13:00.000+08:00

Who me?

Art credits:
Night Awebaw and Firdhen by Strom/Whyrl
Leaping Osatch by Zastrow

I templated some more images a few days ago and three are shown above. These are for Ancient of Days... but it's still early. I've already removed a Cald template for a later expansion and might have to do the same to a Naroom one. The problem is that with just 6 cards for the first 5 regions, things are pretty much cramped there. Add in a relic cross-region theme for AoD and that's effectively only 5 cards per region. Why a relic theme? Well, we've already have crushing spells and spirit spells and tainted spells so a spell theme has already been done. I could do a creature theme thing, but that's gonna be tricky art-wise. Relics though are easy and I have the perfect image for this theme. I just have to template them one of these days.

Double Jeopardy is already getting it's share of reviews and it's nice to know that the comments that are directed my way are mature and thought-provoking instead of destructive and demeaning. The Wanderers have been hightlighted as a potential issue this early in playtesting, eventhough I wonder why nobody pointed it out during the comments stage. Oh well, I guess people just wanna have broken cards added to the engine or something. I'll have to change that soon I guess.

I've been itching to start working on something that's a bit under wraps at the moment, although I've been bursting to say it here. I can't. It's got nothing to do with licensing though, but it is a game that I want to adapt to the engine, hopefully before the year is out. I need to contact the creator first though to clarify a few things. It's probably gonna be no-fries (aka "no frills") initially, and I have no idea if it'll get automation at this stage. It's all up in the air as the saying goes.

Otherwise, things are quiet. The Mythos tournament has finally ended with Jer(e)(my) (I like spelling it that way) being declared the winner. The other two tournaments will run until the end of the month. Aidan tried to start a game on the forums, but that seems to die horribly and he's giving people an extra week to sign up. I do hope more people sign up.

I haven't put in much time on Ticket to Ride. My ISP is having problems which is causing massive lag on TtR. That's a pity. It is a good distraction when I have 10 minutes spare and nothing to do. Yes, 10 mintues can usually finish a game. That's the huge plus when compared with PBW site (like ludoholic). It has its downside though. Sometimes I have to wait to get a 4-player game, but that's not very often.

I've been playing more LotR instead. It's just for fun, or card-flopping at best. I have a middle of the road deck that will probably beat up newbies bad, and get beaten up by really good decks bad, but I don't mind getting beaten. It's more for the fun of playing the cards and making funny comments like "There should have been an Adam Sandler in Lord of the Rings to pants Sean Austin" and stuff like that.

I've been downloading images to a new computer and I just realised that bowling has a missing image, so it back to the old computer to upload the image before coming back here to work on everything else. Things are difficult when one is migrating over to a new machine I guess... but there's always some good in the tedious process, like finding out that bowling is missing an image for example, which I doubt will be reported at all.

I finally dug up the card I got from the arcade game, and it's called Dino Duel. Apparently it's Indonesian, or at least the website is in English and the Indonesian version of Malay (think American version of English). I'm sure Martin will look through the site and tell me the gameplay depends too much on luck or something (or not now that I've said it). He'll probably be true. It has a good concept and it dispenses cards, but the gameplay is bad, at least in my book. I suppose someone will be coming out with a better machine at some point in the future. You probably won't hear about it here.

-+@ Peripheral Whispers @+-

2006-11-25T19:48:00.000+08:00

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.

-+@ Ego Boost @+-

2006-11-24T20:36:00.000+08:00

I kid you not, that's actually the title of a CCG card.

Art Credits:
Solar Firagon by Nick Szankovics
Weave Pheygrin by Annette Burke, with background by Rich Werner
Core Firagon by Nick Szankovics

You saw it here first, 3 cards from the next (maybe) MND custom expansion tentatively titled Ancient of Days. Like all expansions, I need to get the images for at least half (i.e. 50 cards) before the set goes ahead. That will be a challenge for this set even more so than the last. I went into the last set (Twilight War) knowing I had more than 30 images. I'm going into this with less than 20. So things aren't really looking up, but there's still time and where's there's a Will there's a Grace?

I templated about 6 cards yesterday for AoD, the 3 above being some that were templated. I'm currently at 23 cards with images wich is barely a quarter of the way through... and this is the easy part of getting and templating images. I have no idea where else I would be getting the images, but oh well, I'm sure it can be done.

Before I go any further, lemme explain why I chose today's card title (Yes, that is a card in the CCG that I've been picking titles from, and I thought it was particularly apt for today). I was on the engine today, just hanging out watching people play some games, when in comes this guy with maniacmadmax as his nick. He went ballistic when he saw me in a good way, of course, and thanked me for keeping the game going singlehandedly. Heh, as if I did such a thing. I told him it was a group effort, yadda, yadda, but it did make my head a few inches bigger. It's not everyday that I get praised like that. I guess there are some people that are just appreciative of all the hard work that has gone into the customs.

And let's do a quick run down of MND custom expansion in reverse order, since I've already started off with AoD.

I still haven't done anything for Cure yet, although I'm glad I waited since I'm getting rather good ideas for the cards. This will be the first time in a while that I'm designing a Naroom magi and I hope it won't be too much of a disaster this time around. Daniel offered to help me with the design (I think he secretly wants to monopolize the Naroom card design) but I have yet to decide if I will take up his offer. Probably sometime after I've scripted out the rest of the Exodus Flight cards...

Exodus Flight is still being previewed for comments and I think the set is shaping out great. 9 out of the 13 regions have been revealed, and 2 more will be out for comments next week/month which would mean the last 2 region would only get out for comments in January. I still haven't written most of the Weave and Universal cards, so that would need to be done before January, and that also explains why those regions won't be ready by December. The plan is to start adapting the cards onto the engine by February for playtesting.

I just completed the text for Double Jeopardy today and uploaded the gML to the engine. That means there's 6 new cards available for play, although the cards are still technically in playtesting. I'm gonna wait for the complaints about them being broken and/or underpowered (well, complaints can only be about one or the other, nobody ever says anything if the cards are just right) over the next few weeks. Fun! Not!

Twilight War is still in playtesting and I think it's almost ready to be made public. I have set the ambitious date of February for it, but realistically, I'll probably hold off till May to make it common with the other 2 sets before it (Tainted Glimpses in May 2006, Exodus Flight in May 2005)

I need to start updating the Tainted Glimpses and Keeper's Quest promos with a printable version soon. Those would have to go up on the website, and probably a pdf version for download for anyone who wants to print them and play with them. That's gonna take quite a bit of time that I won't probably have until about March or so. Oh well.

Talking about the website though, I think I'm behind on the calendars - not that many people are downloading those. I also received all the scanned copies of the Book of Ages from Patrick last week and he expects them on the website ASAP. Nopers, I simply do not have the time to do it any justice at this point in time (and my html skills are rusty anyways - I still code everything in a text editor, so it's a pain). I have no idea when I'll get to them.

Insiider has died out completely... slightly later than usual, but dead is still dead nevertheless. The RPers are talking about taking their RP to someplace else (LJ, I think) to "finish" it and there hasn't been any posts other than trading stuff for a while now. That makes the Custom Card forums the most active MND forum out there now, with CCG Workshop's MND forum coming in a close second. The MND Yahoo group is still alive as well, and can probably compete with the CCGW MND forums as being the 2nd most active MND site.

Cookie Jar Entertainment finally released an image of the upcoming animation, and in my book, it doesn't look promising. The cancelled computer generated animation looked much better, although the animation quality probably won't be as good. But then again I'm not the target age of the cartoon, so I guess I'm not qualified to judge. There's still no announcement yet that the cartoon has been picked up or will air anywhere, but based on the fact that it was just sold this year with half a season, I'm going to guess it'll only start showing the earliest by Autumn 2007 since it's too late to be shown Autumn 2006 or as a mid-season replacement in Spring 2007.

There's more MND stuff, but there's also some other time. I know this is just item 1 of the things I said I'd post yesterday, I'll just have to do some of the rest some other day.

I'd like to end by thanking Martin for that comment on the last post that White Wolf has been bought by the EVE people. I read about that, but since it didn't affect me, I promptly forgot about it. Well, things are now up in the air about VteS and EVE both targetting the same market... will they halt the production of one of those CCGs? Who knows?

-+@ Dead Magic Zone @+-

2006-11-23T18:43:00.000+08:00

Whoa, long time no update!

Decipher's Lord of the Ring cards from the Wraith collection. Yup, that's half of the last expansion from Decipher for LotR. Just 6 cards in the expansion. The above 3 images are from WETA workshop, hence the bug in the lower right. However, the images aren't very "movie-like" which has prompted someone to comment that they seem more photoshop than WETA workshop. Oh well.

These cards are not available on LotRO though, thanks to the Sony takeover. Stupid Sony, I guess. Meanwhile, Decipher has already confirm that the next expansion, Rise of Saruman, is in development. Thankfully this time, the set will revert to the usual 100+ cards (140, IIRC), but it will be chok-a-bric with Sarumans (or 4 instead of the usual 1).

I did get all 6 cards from the Wraith collection since the last update, as well as probably half a dozen booster boxes from various expansions - they were going cheap. My free time was spent opening and sorting those cards out though, which probably explains why no blog update was done. I don't seem to have too much free time these days anyways. Still, I made some nice pulls of rares and foils and I'm ever closer to getting my collection complete.

I also got 2 boosters and a starter box of WARS, but haven't managed to open it yet. It's sitting there, calling out my name to get them opened, sorted and stuff, but I know that's gonna take time. No point doing a rush job and not enjoy the satisfaction of doing it properly. I'll get to it some day.

Got about another half dozen MND booster boxes, not only to fill my collection, but to get cheap commons for self-made customs. I don't want to blog about MND today though, because that will just take ages. Perhaps tomorrow when I get the time, I'll talk about all MND happenings and going-ons.

My 1910 expansion just arrived yesterday. This isn't for a CCG, but the boardgame Ticket to Ride. Nevertheless, it's just a cards-only expansion and it comes in a metal tin. I like the tin, it's nicely done, and it's probably done to attract people to buy the tin. However, as someone pointed out, it won't fit in the box for the original game, so I'll have to forgo the tin and just place my cards into the box at some point. Oh well.

Also got my starter pack of The Spoils sometime back, and I must say the cards seems interestingly designed. I don't like the bicycle-deck cardback though, and since what I got are beta cards, some of the images does not have any colours on them. However the coloured images were properly done, and I would say even better than comparable games like Mystical Empires. I haven't played the game yet, or even read through the rules (don't have enough spare time to do either), but based on the images alone, I'd recommend it to someone (who's CCG savvy) looking to pick up a new game.

Talking about new games, Stargate has been pushed back to next year apparently. I don't think anything is happening there at Comic Images or whoever is publishing the game. It's a pity because I was really looking forward to the game. Oh well, next year is a few weeks away.

There's also this new CCG based on a computer game. It's called EVE, and I have no idea if it's one word, or if its an acronym or something. Rich Riley, the only active rules team member of MND has been promoting it almost everywhere, including on the CCG Workshop forums which is where I heard about it. I wonder if there has been any progress getting permission to adapt it. Probably not...

Hmm... this would be a good time to talk about CCG Workshop, but I'm running out of time, so things to talk about in a later blog:
1. all things MND (including Insiider)
2. CCG Workshop - main (including nipa and Mythos)
3. Tournaments
4. Final Twilight & Hyborian Gates
5. Ludoholic (Capitol and Urland!)
6. VteSO
7. Dinosaurs Arcade & Tabernacle?
8. WA post Sony
9. Days of Wonder
10. Remember the Titans

-+@ Sudden Illness @+-

2006-09-12T15:51:00.000+08:00

I think I'll continue the CCG for the rest of this month...

Final Twilight cards for a change. These are from the Ashcans which I will have to add to the engine once I finish colouring up two more images. I did one the other day, but I guess it wasn't in time to be included in the Ashcan release. Oh well, it'll definately be added into gEngine anyways.

Otherwise though, what I have labelled as "Entropy2" internally has been added onto the engine. Apparently 3 of the cards aren't finalised yet so those will be changed some time in the future. I'm a bit surprised though because the cards are available for sale as pdf versions already. Hmm...

The other thing has been this player from Poland has been after me to add in the Atmosphere cards onto the engine for AvP. He has been so enthusiastic that he's been getting the images and matching them with the text and creating all the new cards for me. Heh, hold the horses! Well, I really want to properly template the existing cards before I add any more cards, so I got him to send me current scans of the cards - proper 300 dpi ones - so that I can blank them properly to template them. He has. The next step would be to blank them, then do the templates properly, match the fonts, cut out the images and reassemble both the old expansions in addition to adding in Atmosphere. I have no idea where I'll find the time to do that, but I shall have to do it soon if I wanna keep his interest I guess. He and his one other friend has been going crazy with the number of games - the game is being played rather regularly now and I guess that qualifies it for some "frills".

Ed has been really good and has got Armageddon setup for me. The problem is, I haven't had the time to actually complete it and place it on the engine. Argh! I really need to get this going at some point though, but I just don't really have the time for it at the moment. The card art also haven't been finalised for all the cards, but I have got the spoiler and the rules and everything so one of these days, I really have to sit down and sort everything out. One of these days... I have no idea after or before I start revamping AvP.

Ed's also been good on a number of fronts - notice that Titans: Arena is back up on the engine? Well, he went to the game creator and got his permission to host the game on the engine so now it's back up. Hooray - that's one removed game that's now back on the engine. I guess the Netrunner fans and the Harry Potter crazies can start their campaign to get their games back on the engine now...

Since the cat's out of the bag, Ed has recently been working on a play by web (PBW) site called ludoholic.com . I've been busy on there playtesting (well, more play than testing) the interface and the programming of Capitol. I used to think that the Capitol adaptation on the engine was wanting. The PBW version is so much cooler, with the rules in a convienient form and the moves easily understandable, stackable counters and a point and click interface. Sure, the last thing isn't available on the engine yet, but hey, it's motivation for Ed to add them at some point in future... I think. Capitol is mostly done now, Urland is next on the list as is stated on that page so things are moving fast.

Everyone it seems is caught up in the craze. I saw Kev requesting to do Monkeys for PBW instead of the engine on the forums, and I know Logan and Mark are both also looking into adapting games for PBW. I guess I'm just the only person who isn't jumping with joy (or frustration?) about the whole deal, but I already have enough on my plate... if you can't already tell from the above.

The end of last month was crazy... eventhough I've streamlined my CCGW responsibilities, there was nevertheless a multitude of other things to do as well, mostly MND and thus nothing to do with CCGW. There's the calendar which had to be done. I can understand how Holmberg used to be up to at least a week late with them. They aren't that tedious to do, but it does take time to do them. And just because there's space for a mid blog picture:

That's available for download as a desktop image too.

And while tweaking around on a couple of pages on the custom card website, I discovered I had to update the status of the custom cards... and once that was done, to update TG and KQ up to the EL and SP standards. Eep! That's a huge load of work, and I've been steadily toiling away at it. SP received it's printer friendly pdf around the beginning of the month and KQ last night, with the remnants of EL. So that's less than a score done, a century more to go...

TW is still in playtesting and has been joined early this month by the first card for DJ and P2C. There's already been a tempest in a teacup (sorta-pun intended) with the first DJ magi and I added the second DJ magi last night. I wonder what will happen there. Perhaps people will fall in secret love with it or perhaps things will get frosty (no, not forestry). Who knows?

The MND players, as a collective, or should I say the vocal part of the collective have been calling for power escalation to be implemented on a number of cards. I have been wondering why that is so. Perhaps it's just inherent - people just want the best for the short term, not realising the worst that can do in the long term.

That DJ magi was added as part of the Summer League tournament which has sorta died out I guess. That's a pity though. I guess people only played for the prizes and when the prize runs out, there was no point in playing. That's a good thing though, people shouldn't be pigeon-holed to play something they didn't want to play I guess, but as it has shown, it means that they are being rather abusive (game wise) towards the newer players. Ouch. I haven't seen a new player last for longer than three months yet. Oh well.

Meanwhile, things continue to go busy with the cards in development. EF is firmly on schedule with 3 regions going out for comments at the beginning of the month and the other regions getting prepped for it. We've sorta changed the way this works and the designs are not so much in isolation now and hopefully, this would result in better quality cards being designed.

I've also started the AoD/AE image collection process and the subsequent templating to go along with it, and that is an even slower process. But then again, I guess the priority there is low. People have been coming to the forums asking to contribute... well, the main prerequisite for that is their capability to stick around for the long term. As I said previously, there aren't too many of the long termers recently. I guess people are just too much into the instant gratification thing... or at least the instant thing.

I was talking with Nate about this the other day, and he pointed out to me that he's experienced it as well on the forums he frequents. People (and by that he means underagers who are vocal on the forums he frequents) want the thing and they want it now, but they have no idea what to do or how to do it, because almost everything in life is done for them. Apparently he has written some sort of guidelines thing that's a must read on one of those forums. I've gotta remember to ask him if I can read it anytime soon.

And it's round about September/October, which means Tomi gets more time to spend on the engine... Doomtrooper got another custom expansion, and I know he's busy with the latest expansion that's in the work, but that's not the only game on the engine that got Tomi's love. Kult and Dark Eden and I think Mythos had minor tweaks as well, and of course, as mentioned above, Titan's back. Remember the Titans gets new meaning now!

It's nice to see a Shadowfist league has started up on the engine headed by a guy I know from LotRO. I guess his creative energies has to go somewhere and since LotrO is down, a SF league seems the next best thing? Julien has been forced to update the cards and stuff which is cool - at least SF is getting some attention, even if Zev is now focusing on Conan/Star Gate/whatever.

Oh and I got a huge load of cards the other day - a box each of Black Rider and Bloodlines and two each of Voice of the Storm and Nightmare Dawn. The latter 2 were mostly for making real world custom cards while the former 2 I got because they were really really cheap. I expect it'll get cheaper! Nevertheless, it does take time to open packs, sort cards and the like. That takes time too, which is one of the reasons why I haven't blogged in a while...

-+@ Magical Wings @+-

2006-08-11T01:07:00.000+08:00

I wish I had those...

Art Credits:
Indgo by Whyrl/Strom
Meadow Celphet by Werner/Gillette
Winter Cure by Whyrl/Strom

I got bored of looking at the VteS cards, hence a new blog, which is long overdue as well. Martin guessed the CCG from which last month's titles are from... I'm sure he'll be able to do it this month as well if he tires.

I finally finished templating all the cards for Exodus Flight. The last one was Indgo, as show above. That brings the total to 100 out of 100 cards templated... design of the cards is also underway, with not-so-long and not-so-ardous debates about the merits of various things. I guess people are getting into it. There's still a long way to go.

The card on the right, is part of the Cure for all Seasons promo set of 4 cards. Yup, this is the first review of it anywhere online... I think. I have an idea for the set, but really that would be done after people have finally decided what to do with EF. By people, I mean me.

I added to the Custom Card site "printer-friendly" sheets of MND custom cards in pdf for people to download and print. Those were fun to do once the template was done. And I've recently come into contact with a really good laserjet colour printed, and have been going bonkers converting the custom cards into actual physical cards. I couldn't locate any cardstock (300 gsm or more) so these are printed onto paper, then pasted onto spare MND commons (so that I don't have to print the cardback). Then I have to carefully cut along the edges and for the final touch, to paint the borders with a black marker to make it look nice. Two of the cards are shown in the video below.

The card on the right of the screen is actually Liriel from ND. At the resolution of the video, it seems that everythings not distinguisable. One can only tell that it's a custom when you hold the customs up to a magnifying glass to see the individual spots printed by the printer - it's not as smooth since there is some compression and reduction involved in the printing process. Nevertheless, it's not as significance for normal use. Next up, binding them up.

So what have I been doing online? Well, it's mostly to do with the design of the MND cards - EF and P2C, and of course, the playtesting of TW, which is currently up on the engine. It was down for a couple of days, but after some really hillarious posts, it's been put back up at the request of the majority of the vocal players.

The August calendar for MND has also been made public at the beginning of August. I have no idea if it warrants a mid blog picture, but I'm going to post it anyways, just to make it MND overkill.

On the non-MND front, I finally got the promos, aka Novelty's swag treasure hunt, from Origins, half a world away. I'm rather pleased with the cards though. Thanks again Logan for everything!

CCG Armory finally came through and sent me an invoice saying that they have sent my stuff. It's by UPS so I'm going to expect at least a month's delivery - yes, it's probably that slow, not that UPS delivers bad service, but they are half a world away and they depend on a lot of other people in between me and them. I can't wait to get the cards though.

Oh and Decipher has previewed the next "set". No, it's not Rise of Saruman, but some Wraith set which consists of 6 cards. Yes, 6 cards. That's it. They must be milking the franchise for all it's worth. One of these days I'll probably put up the images.

I went into LotRO and AAOTCG to find them both blank. I hardly see anyone on the latter, although I did play a game or two of LotRO on and off this month. There aren't that many players now though, and the decks are wearing thin due to the lack of cards.

What's the next game I'm going to be coding for CCGW? That's a good question. There's always too many to choose from and not enough time. That, plus the fact that I have to maintain all my existing games as well. But the engine going free for legacy games have been good. At least they are all being played now.

-+@ Blood of Giants @+-

2006-07-12T21:42:00.000+08:00

Whoa, gory, just for the VTES-themed blog...

That's 3 cards from Legacies of Blood, the 9th VTES set and the 4th one that will go online this 15th. I won't be surprised if Martin has finished adapting all 350 cards by now and is only waiting for time before it goes up. I wonder if Ed will be back by then from his holiday to see the 4th set going live. That's an interesting thought.

I've also prepared an ad for the main engine for the expansion... not that it's great or anything, but I got bored of the gunpoint ad that we've been using for VTES announcements for a while so I thought I'd create a new one specially for Legacies.

I hung out at the VTESO forums earlier reading a few posts here and there. It seems a bit... gloomy there, but that's just me. At least gloomy is better than the ghosttown feeling one gets at the CCGW main forum these days, unless of course, it's the Rage forum, which seems to be happening these days. At least it's still getting posts now and again...

I haven't announced it anywhere else yet, but I've already begun designing the EF cards. Well, not just me but also the regular gang of card designers who did such great work on TW. There are a few new faces as well this time around, and I hope they can fit in with the rest of the team. I created a hidden forum specially just for the task so that now I don't have to bother with PM or emails, but instead, it can be posted at one place and everyone can have a look at it. Well, everyone that has access to the forum that is.

Talking about TW, it seems to be quite a hit. The addition of the 100 cards seems to have brought out the pool of players who are beginning to explore the other custom cards. I saw a game with the Aurora Xyx today and Mitch was rather pleased to see someone playing a casual game with a Puddle Arboll. Small tiny baby steps as Mitch would say, but that's a good thing. Hopefully this will open the avenue for more people to play with the custom cards.

The one bad thing about the engine recently is that the MND room is ... well, not down, but extremely laggy. I have no idea what's causing it, but I suspect it's one of the three new tabs - the game wall, the wanna learn tab and the tournament tab. Probably the latter since that's been the buggiest of the lot.

I've been playing quite a bit more of TtR recently, although I'm beginning to tire of it. Well, too much of a good thing, as the saying goes, might not be good or some such. I plopped into the LotRO room to find Chris Tubman in a game. Apparently he just got a bunch of online cards in a "clearance" sale and was busy making decks. There was a fun hobbit deck too which I definately enjoyed watching him play with it. Otherwise though the game seems dead and there are no new announcements as to when we'll get to see Rise of Saruman online.

Talking about LotR, I recently ordered some cards from CCGArmory.com. Martin found the site and asked me if I have purchased anything from there to which I answered in the negative then. Well, Martin, if you are reading this, I did buy some cards from there now, so I hope it'll arrive. I think I bought a booster box each of Bloodlines and Black Hunters which were on sale with 65% off or something stupid like that. I guess the game is dying if there are no demand for the next to last expansion of cards. I didn't see the latest expansion there though.

I also purchased the A Game of Thrones boardgame while I was there. I have no idea why, but I really, really like the Westeros map used there. It was a definate improvement over the LotR Risk map of Middle Earth. I was also reading the rules for the boardgame and was surprised to find out that it seems almost like a CCG to me... well, with the 2 expansions in the offering, I'm sure it can be customisable and collectible as well. I'm rather looking forward to it.

And while I was looking, I found a website that used to offer a beta version of the boardgame. It's put on hold apparently and is no longer available. I wonder if FFG got to them and closed down the site. We'll never know.

The other online site I found was for a game of Killer Bunnies by Playroom. It is free, but you have to like teach 3 new games a week or something to play, pretty much like the Shepherd system or something like that. Well, the Shepherd system doesn't really work so I have no idea how they are getting that to work on their site. I didn't bother downloading the client for the game though, but I did post in the forum in response to some guy who were requesting for it.

The same guy also complained that "Dungeon Dice" wasn't adapted yet. As far as I know, that Yu-Gi-Oh dice game isn't in the list of games to be adapted, and neither does CCG Workshop has permission for it. Perhaps he got it confused with "Dragon Dice" which is a totally other game. Who knows?

Tomi did a quick James Bond update recently, but I've also noticed a marked increased in the number of people playing the 2nd newest game on the engine. I hope that is a good sign and that they will stay around to play more of the game.

I'm enjoying the "calm" in the meantime though - sorta waiting for 2 other games to materialise. I'll probably start on one of those sometime next month. I still have to put in some effort on Urland and YNDT to get them up to scratch, and modifications to B5 and AvP. Well, this is more to remind me to do something. Perhaps I'll do some AvP for the remainder of this month... who knows what might happen...?

-+@ Superior Tactics @+-

2006-07-06T22:20:00.000+08:00

won me a game today, more on that later...

That's 2 of the promos that Logan got for me and one that I wish I asked him to get. But I didn't so Oh Well. From left to right - Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica CCG, a mecha from Robotech TCG, and We Must Find Jack from The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG.

Just two quick things to write here.

1. I played a game of MND with Cole. He used a burrow deck and all I had was a pure (and by pure I mean 100% of one region, no universal cards even!) Bograth deck. He started off well with a 'fuf and Trygar and I was drawing like crazy with Baa. He dropped an Ormagon and I was devastated, so I just let Baa bite the dust. Wiep flipped next and although I wanted to do a flip-kill, I can't, thanks to his Tunnel Hyren burrowing his Ormagon. I had to settle for waiting a turn before Darkness struck and Trygar went away, but not before leaving a Freep.

I played out a cautious line of creatures, but when he revealed his magi, it was Trug, which, thanks to Freep had enough energy for a Cataclysm. Bye, Bye Wiep. Grahnna flipped next and played a Black Stuff from the discard pile after I had use Transform to grab that Darkness. The response was Strag with another 'fuf. Darkness + Spirit Drain = dead Strag.

That was rather unexpected though as I had only that one card which could take out the burrow creatures. I told Cole that had he been more aggressive he would have got me. Also, if he didn't boast about his Ormagons and Trug, I would have done things differently. Instead I converted my creatures to cards most of the time to be able to survive getting all my cards in played being wiped out. I never got to Ninibom - more than meets the eye! - nor did I get to play that Mist Hyren that I never got a chance to draw.

I enjoyed that game, and there were 3 observers for most part. I think near the end, especially after 2 successful comebacks after getting all my cards in play cleared away, the observers were rooting for me as the underdog. That's the great thing about MND - it's not just great cards that wins a game, it has to do with deckbuilding and skill in playing. Oh and of course, psyching up the opponent with annoying cards always help!

2. I've been playing a lot more Ticket to Ride today, mostly out of boredom, but I have to say, I'm enjoying the "kiddie" version more than the more complicated European map. There's simplicity in the rules, yet there is a whole lot of complexity with the game and that's what I've been enjoying.

There's two different type of players - grandees and annoyers as I call them. Grandees tend to build the longest lines with the longest tracks raking up a huge score in the process by getting the right cards. Annoyers though, are the opposite. They will choose 2 short routes and complete them fast, then play interference with everyone else to prevent them from reaching their goal. I don't have the patience to be a grandee, and running interference is hard because I really, really like those long intercontinental stretches.

My strategy though has been to be a speed-hog (i.e. a cross between a speed-demon and a ground-hog) - take up the most regularly used up line on the west coast and finish as quick as possible to deny everyone else from completing theirs. That usually wins me the game.

---

And in other news - I had a go at Mark for not blogging as frequent as he said he would about his week of boardgames. Consequently he's been getting more regular - there's even a picture in the last installment. Well, thanks to him I'm now playing on TtR...

I hope Martin has finally added those 350 cards to his test version of VteSO. Just over a week left before he'll have to release it. I gave him a formula in Excel to help him speed out the process instead of doing it manually, but I have not yet had a chance to talk with him to see if it works.

Ed's getting headaches these days, the server although seems rather stable is not at 100% yet. He's trying to straighten out the last kinks and he's also pondering the future of CCG Workshop. I hope there's a future.

Logan still hasn't wrote up his Origins report although he said he would a while back. I guess he's just busy. He's been dribbling out info now and again about what went on and stuff, but I can't wait to read about it in full. I hope this doesn't mean he's gonna shelf MoA until next year's Origins!

Oh and I hung out on the engine today in the usual MND timeslot and chatted with a few other people regarding the game. I seem to have demigod status or something. Sheesh! Also got my CCG Workshop email account fixed so that I can send out official emails and stuff. My first email was as Tech support to some guy in Korea.

-+@ Chain Reaction @+-

2006-07-05T00:02:00.000+08:00

Why? Because I have just started the Chain Reaction...

Art Credits
Jore Cub by Essence
Bwisp by Vega/Holmberg/Nov, backgrounds by Strom/Whyrl
Athik Shell by Nov

Three more cards from EF... I think I only have 2 more that I haven't shown on my blog yet. After that I'll have to move on to Cure, then AoD/AE. I finally found the owner of the image I wanted to use for the last EF card, and am now waiting for permission. Hopefully, I'll be able to use it because it's an awesome image by Whyrl.

I finally added the last 2 regions for TW onto the engine. There were a number of people who went "Finally!" when I made the announcement in the chatroom. The chatroom has also been rather busy as of late with a handful of people there at all times, or so it seems. Must be because it now no longer costs to play... but probably also because people are curiously testing out TW.

Adding those last 2 regions has just set a whole series of events into motion, but that's currently hush hush sorta.

I have also updated the Summer Tourney's prizes to include adding cards to gEngine for the monthly winners and a whole new custom relic for the winner with art by myself. I wonder how many people will bite the bait. The tournament went dead as soon as the game became free to play. I've advertised it on the MND @ CCGW blog and on the FPNews so we shall have to see what's happening there.

Meanwhile Mitch has finally finalised the last DJ card... well, the next to last anyways, as the last one will be finalised in the tournament that will be held during playtesting. The card text have been up for review for a while now, but things are also going slow there. Well, I guess we will have the time for that soon enough, but I think people are even more excited about the DJ magi than the remaining TW cards.

Oh and I made a few more ads specifically for the FPN... mid post image coming up. The one on the left is the Naroom image for TW, the one on the right is the 2nd DJ ad that I made. The other one can be seen at the top of the FPN.

And I think that's enough MND for this blog.

I read Mark's blog about Ticket to Ride and I know Ed have been raving about it as well, so I took the opportunity to see what they were talking about. I managed to get a few games in today. On the first pass though, I went blegh, this is boring. 3 or 4 games later, I began to see the strategy involved in playing the game and my opinion of the game rose a little. This would be a good 1 hour game to play with little kids...

Mark has barely posted except that one blog about the evening of Day 1. I'm awaiting the rest of his blogs. I wonder what else they are playing. It seems to be only boardgames. I wonder if he plays A Game of Life?

Logan has just got back from Origins and has a whole lotta stuff to tell. I'm awaiting for his "report" about what he played and stuff. I think that's going to be interesting at the very least. It seems he played in a lot of demos and tournaments which sounds interesting. Apparently he said he met Kev there at Origins!

I asked Martin about those symbol things on VteSO which apparently are the clans or factions or something like that. There are about 30 of them apparently. I wonder if Ed is going to show all 30 on the website. Heh. Oh and the new expansion that will be going in in less that 2 weeks? That has 350 cards. Ouch!

I think I'm finally getting into my CCGW groove and I wonder what should I be tackling next... AvP and B5 both needs an update of sort, but with the loss of the forums, I have no idea what I promised to do on them now... YNDT and Urland also need a fresh look at a few things, but again, I have to dredge those up from memory... blegh!

-+@ Inspired @+-

2006-07-03T21:31:00.000+08:00

New CCG for this month... last month's was from Anarchonism (I think) and the month before that was from Auto Assault OTCG.

Art Credits:
Athik Little by Nov, background by Strom/Whyrl
Spore Xyx by Nov, background by Strom/Whyrl
Glowing Korrit by Nov, background by Essence

I think I can do better than that, but it's tiring doing top-notch work. Still, I don't think these images are too shabby for a custom card set and I'm rather pleased with what has been drawn so far. All 3 are for Exodus Flight, the expansion that is after Twilight War.

I drew the Glowing Korrit just before this... it was supposed to be a Crystal Korrit, but I decided that I could do glowing better than crystal, hence the name change. That is card number 149 out of 150 for EF, the last card is a Nar magi and I'm working on that to obtain permission to use a really great image. Watch this space.

Twilight War continues to get added to the engine for playtesting, and thanks to the game going free last month, the whole thing became like a carnival on speed. People seem to can't get enough of the custom cards and have been playing with them as they get added. I guess that's a good sign. Two more regions to go to be added to the engine, and the Naroom players are already almost begging me to get them added. Well, when I get the time seems to be my mantra, although I hope to get them up before this week is out.

Double Jeopardy has also moved on apace, as I have confirmed the text and have published it for review. Not many people have said anything about it yet though, which is a pity, it does need more comments before I'm going to add it onto the engine. Perhaps a link from the CCGW forums will do the trick.

So TW (100 cards) for playtesting with all regions added in July, I'm going to guess DJ (8 cards) at about October and hopefully EF (150 cards) by about February for the draft versions of the text. And after that of course is A Cure for All Seasons (4 cards). I've still got to draft those cards out. That should keep me busy until God only knows when. I've also restarted sorting images for AoD/AE, but that will take a backseat for a while until DJ has gone to playtesting...

And of course there's Project Second Chance, a MRP custom card set that will attempt to "power up" cards from the earlier sets which are little used so that they'll see more play. It's just something special on my part to make new custom cards without actually making new Custom cards. Phew.

And in between all that there has been tournaments (one just ended last month), contests (again, one just ended last month, and that I've yet to judge the winner), website updates include the brand new calendar for July 2006 as picture below. Mid-blog picture coming up:

Finished working on WSS2 a while back to much celebration and jubilation. It got tried out a few times as well, but it's not a CCG, just a glorified war game of sorts. Still, it is cool to have a custom set for a non-CCG card game.

Martin and Ed have been busy toiling on VteS and in about a couple of weeks or so, another new expansion will join the online cards for play. That's good news for the players, and hopefully it'll draw in more players. Stability shouldn't be an issue to worry about since it seems rather stable these days and it's also gonna be free to play for 3 months, so hopefully that will draw in players.

I was waiting with bated breath for MoA or Crystal Authority to go public before Origins. It was not suppose to be. AFAIR, both had minor debugging issues which needs to be fixed before they can go public, but like all of us, there's just way too little time to do the debugging. Oh well.

Origins is here though and unlike last year, I think I got a good haul of promo freebie cards eventhough I didn't go. NECA was giving out nightmares and there were also free cards from demos of BSG. Poor Logan had to sit through a demo of that... he probably enjoyed it though. I hope he gets back soon...

-+@ Evanescence @+-

2006-06-11T00:37:00.000+08:00

Yeah, the rock band, but also a card, but from which CCG?

Yup, more Nightmare before Christmas Cards. Two of the cards are from Christmastown, the one in the middle though is from the Mayor Starter Deck which I have just opened. I have the other 3 starters sitting in their wrapping as well, and I guess I'll get to them one of these days. While at the store though, I also got a booster pack of AvP, Tomb Raider, Monster Rancher and two of Recharge for my cardback collection.

Titles for the past two months were from the Auto Assault (Online) TCG, which I'm still playing when there's nothing better to do. The player pool is getting better though as my sole starter deck has been taken down a number of times now, although I must say I did put up a fight with it as best as I could with the one deck I have available. I can't believe how many people are playing with rares in their decks these days - spend enough money on the cards and you can probably build a good deck to beat my starter.

I've been working on WSS2 today, getting the images all done. I really should have done them sooner, but there's just so many other things to do as well. Anyways, all that's left of the cards would be to code them and to add them to the engine. Perhaps next weekend... perhaps on Monday? Who knows when my mood will bring me?

I also have to finish coding up the TW cards for MND onto the engine. People are requesting for them, although I do wonder why. It's not as if the cards are great... or are they? I have no idea. The thing is though, they were designed by a few people out there, so I guess those people want to see the cards they designed in play on the engine. Or something. I haven't been working much on it though.

MND tournaments are still ongoing and there seems to be a large player pool out there. More than 20 games have been played in this "summer league" so far but I guess that's normal as it's close to the beginning of the month and people are flushed with tokens, particularly after all the prizes that were given out in the last tournament. This is the first tournament that would last more than a month though, and it's already showing up the defects in the tournament tracking software inbuilt to the engine.

The other tournament that's going on the engine is the Rage one, where this month people has actually played tournament games, as opposed to last month where no tournament games were played. I do hope Rage makes a comeback of some sort for the second half of the year.

One game without tournaments this month is Doomtrooper. Last month though, the players were flushed with the tokens I gave out for the April tournament, but since there was no tournament in May, there's no free tokens this month for them so I wonder if they'll become token-needy again, and will the total number of games drop for this month. It should be interesting to follow.

Oh, I guess I should mention that there was a SWD fan-expansion added to the engine a while back. I wonder if people are playing with those cards. Christoph seems rather busy though with other things, but he's still keeping track with the SWD players.

I have been talking to Nate recently and he's PDF-ing the "new" cards. I was just pinging him about the free cards that was supposed to come my way. Yeah, I get paid in card for artwork submitted to Final Twilight. I think it's a good deal... so does Nate too, he's still asking me for art and stuff. Yeah, when I get more time.

I was also looking at City of Heroes CCG and Robotech CCG today. The former seems interesting, the latter didn't attract me too much. City of Heroes would be another CCG that's based on a MMO, Auto Assault was one, but the most "big name" MMO to lend itself to a CCG is probably World of Warcraft. I've not looked at WoW yet though, and I don't think I'd be interested. It seems something Martin would be interested in anyways.

I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here, but there's one more thing to mention - I've been fleshing out more games on the CCGW Wiki recently, much to Ed's annoyance. Obsfucating the list perhaps?

-+@ Zero In @+-

2006-05-20T23:50:00.000+08:00

as in focusing...

Art Credits:
Squak by Holmberg, background by Holmberg/Werner
Iger by Shipman, background by Nov
Wiscon by Zastrow

3 more from EF, that's almost the rest of my library. Very soon I've got to get the remaining 6 cards done and then get ready to get people to do the design for the cards. I wonder if anyone is up to that at this point in time. We shall see though. While I'm on the subject of EF cards, Essence just did one recently which can be found at MND at CCGW blog, which is why I'm down to 6 instead of 7. 5 more underneath creatures and 1 Nar magi to go and then the cards can start their design life.

I just realised that after making the May calendar, I did not post it up on the custom card website. Oops. The website is getting slightly neglected though, and I'll neglect it for a while until about the end of the month when I put up the June calendar together with May's. I should also probably add some more content there, but there's only so many hours a day, and there's so many other things to do... like add TW cards to the engine.

I just added the 6 Orothe cards today, bringing the total up to 26 or something like that, barely a quarter of the TW cards. I hope to get everything done by the end of the month. Minor automation stuff is still being added to the game and I'm going slowly to ensure that people get used to the changes.

I still haven't announced Cure for all Seasons yet, that's probably going to wait until TW has gone online fully for playtesting. And then, of course there's DJ to go as well. *sigh* It's a good thing I'm on a hiatus. Yay for the hiatus.

Tournament-wise, things are looking good for MND. This is the first month that 2 tournaments are running concurrently and there seems to be interest for both of the tournaments. The regular monthly tournament has got over 20 games played, if the results are to be believed, and I've started a play 3 games with me tournament with the custom cards. We shall see how many games I end up playing. If the response is good, I might even continue with it over summer.

I also did some WSS2 images today. I finished the 'Cats and SW backs, but there's still a whole lot to go. Hopefully I can get the rest of them done before the end of the month, at least that's the target.

I have been playing a bit of Auto Assault (TCG, not the MMO) with my one and only starter deck. I have no idea if people see the starter deck and get complacent or something, but I've been winning most of my games much to the embarassment of my opponents, who all seem to have a good subset of rare cards. It seems weird though, that they should have all these cards and not know how to use it.

Nightmare Before Christmas released the Christmastown expansion just recently I think. I haven't been through all the cards yet, but it seems promising. One of these days, I've got to find an avenue to play the game. I think it's going to be simple, yet fun, but sadly, I haven't found anyone to play with yet, online or offline. Oh well.

I'm still waiting for the announcements of the Star Gate CCG that will be released this year... maybe. Apparently the Shadowfist guy is in charge. I wonder whatever happened to Shadowfist though. Did it die out? Hmm... I guess I'm just ignorant.

And I have no idea what other PLs have been doing on the engine. Things are pretty much quiet at the moment, although I'm sure it's just the calm before the storm that will be Origins. Ed is still busy working to stabilise the server - hopefully, we'll get the stability soon.

Someone also contacted me for infomation about providing art for Final Twilight. I have no idea how that went other than the fact that I gave Nate's name and email to the artist. Nate seems pretty happy about that though. Perhaps we will get some more cards soon.

Anachronism Online is one thing I want to look at in detail. I signed up ages ago, but have yet to get a game. One of these days...

-+@ Infuriate @+-

2006-05-04T18:14:00.000+08:00

betcha I'm doing that now with the titles... carry over from last month... guess the CCG.

Yes, 3 more cards from WSS2, and I finally finished cropping these cards this week. And what a long week it has been, but more on that further down. I finally realised how to get rid of the camera flash showing up on the cards, but it meant that I had to take the photos in daylight. So the last batch was done that way. Some of them still has the reflection of the camera on the cards (stop looking at Copycat's boobs, yes, that's a reflection of the camera), but otherwise, the colours should be better than the washed out reflected glow of the camera's flash.

So that's the front of 63 cards cropped, named and ready for coding, now I have to do the back of the cards. Hopefully, that will be quicker than the front since that is just a basic scan (it's not chromium, so there's no need for the camera, it scans normally) and then more cropping, naming and what not. After that the cards can be coded into the game and WSS1 will have a new expansion, hopefully by the weekend, but realistically speaking, be prepared for it next week instead.

That was Monday. Tuesday was a whole different kettle of fish.

Daniel was online Monday where I happened to corner him and chat about life, love and other mysteries. Well, not the love bit, but definately the other two. One of the by product about that chat was that I finally got permission to finalise Chess Wars and adapt it to the engine. So yay. First off was the draft rules which got cleaned up and modified slightly to make it more presentable. The rules are on the wiki which makes things a whole lot more easier.

Next up was to get server permission from Ed to modify and upload the game, as well as to get him to put the game back up on the main server. That was simply toggling a few things on for me, and by this time, he should be used to it since this is the 20th time or so he's doing it specifically for me.

The hard part was actually coding the game itself. Daniel has done some preliminary coding, when he was last a PL. That was 2003. OK, 3 years isn't a long time, right? Well, with respect to the engine it is. The huge gulf between that and even my most basic "no frills" game was obvious - any of my games is definately miles ahead in terms of technology in the adaptation. I had to add a background, and pretty up the display images for the game, then automated setup and a few other simpler moves. Then I moved it beyond my "no frills" by adding in Pay and Play. With that it was ready for the big leagues, or at least public testing, and that got released on Tuesday as the 93rd game on CCG Workshop and the 80th game currently available. (It pays to be the person who keeps track of these things.)

One thing I would like to point out though, is that during the process, it was a pleasure to have... well, firstly a really up to date developer's guide thanks (mostly) to Logan. Logan, together with Ed and to a lesser degree Mark has been keeping the developer's guide really, really, really comprehensive and user friendly. But more than that though, I had Logan and Ed online at the same time I was coding that (all 3 hours, which was all it took to convert the 2003 version to a 2006 "presentable" version), and their help, in real time was invaluable. I think that would actually be the best way to train a new person to be a PL, but that would mean Ed would get really, really busy if that was so!

And I needed an ad to announce the new game of course, but I didn't really wanna spend way too much time on the ad. So a quick picture and some word art in photoshop and a rather monochromatic image was created. Yeah, I shouldn't quit my day job to go into advertising.

Of course, a new public game meant oodles of updates on the wiki and I spent most of Wednesday at that task. While there though, I took the opportunity to change out some html tags to the native wiki format which makes thing look even better, and easier to edit. Live and Learn, or as some people like to tell me, QBE - Qualified by Experience.

While working on the wiki though, I realised that a Go Fish update was definately required for a few things and that also got done on Wednesday. The update was timely too as it allowed me to add in a few more cardbacks into the game that aren't just black cards. I reckon that there's way too many black cards in that game, so I'm trying to dilute them out.

So, that's 3 updates in a week and it's only Thursday, I've done a lot haven't I? Well, actually, there's more.

It's the end of last month and the beginning of this month though, so there were oodles of end of the month things to do. Game statistics had to be recorded, analysed and updated. The data is public on the website (well, the raw form is anyways), but the collated data that I've been recording for... well, a while now... is only kept with me. I'm not even saving the analyses anymore, I just give a quick summary to Ed and whoever's interested at the time I'm actually working on them and move on. The thing is though, the analyses doesn't result in anything at the end of the day, so I guess that's why nobody bothers.

Then there were tournaments. I had to close out the April MND tournament, which was won by Freigabe with 6 games played. Not a large number of games, but the total overall number of games played for the tournament has been holding even. Tokens had to be given out, results has to be posted, things like that. The usual boring tournament organising stuff.

Then I had to start the May version of the tournament. Rules had to be posted, the corresponding entry on the engine has to be created, the announcements made, yadda yadda. Same old story. While making the announcements though, I went through the old ones and updated those as well, namely the Rage tournament, and... well, that's it. I have no idea if the Doomtrooper league is even going to go on this month and I haven't (yet) heard from Thomas regarding who to give out tokens to for last month.

And while I was on the MND forums, I gave the Weave creatures a twirl and designed 2 of them for TW. I have no idea if it is me or if nobody really "gets" Weave, but people were complaining that they were too overpowered and underpowered... uh... so I guess that makes them balanced? I still have to do the magi, the relics and the spells, though, and hopefully that should be going ahead soon. The creatures basically fit the defensive weave subtheme, and I threw in the weave bulb/homestead combo into that as well. The other cards will have to cater to creatureless (a direction that Weave's heading into even before the company went belly up), the "Weave" effect itself, manipulating the discard pile, cald hate and uh... well, I don't think I can do junjertrug or any other creature type, which is a pity though. I'll have to see what else I can throw in there.

Before I go though, I just want to say that I bought my first booster pack of Magic the Gathering over the weekend as an impulse buy together with a starter deck of the Naruto CCG and a Japanese CCG that's called (as far as I can make out) Masked Super Dragoon. Borrowing from an Airbus advert... "Will wonders never cease?"

-+@ Playa @+-

2006-04-30T20:57:00.000+08:00

which obviously is supposed to mean "Player"...

Three cards from the missing Gen 13 Classic Trading Card Set for WS CCG. They were the last of the CCG cards printed, even after BoW, and are some of the hardest to find. A new CCGW user, Travis Bickle, noticed that they were missing from the engine and kindly suggested that he scan them for the engine. I acquised and he did them relatively fast, so I had to reward him by coding them in the same day that I got the images. While I was doing that, I added the extra kibitz messages as well. I like the cards. They are cool... and new, even to me, a veteran WS player. There's an ad to go along with it... but I don't think it turned out that great, so I'm not posting it anywhere...

And it seems to be a WS fest as I'm still crazily photographing the remainder of the WSS2 cards. I figured out how not to use the flash, but instead have natural sunlight such that the end result looks better. Well, they do, but not buy too much. I still have to crop them and adjust them, and do the cardback, before the images are done. Then there's more work coding the cards since I have to make up the stats for them as well. I was hoping to get things done this weekend, but life happens as usual, and long story short, they will probably be done before the end of next month.

MND work has been going slowly as well, because I'm on hiatus... I had to post up the tournament and contest because it's the end of the month, in preparation for next month... but ever since people found out about the XP system on the engine, I've noticed that the tournaments and contests aren't too much in demand... too much work for too little reward I guess. Oh well. It's a good thing that next month's MND tournament would be the last one... maybe for this year.

And end of the month means I have to do a whole lot of things. I've already submitted the verbal report to Ed about the statistics for the month... yay! As for the plates post, Go Fish definately need an update for that soon, but I'm waiting for MoA and/or CA to go closed/open testing respectively before I update that. It's gonna be another big update.

Yeah, Mark is busy with CA, which will probably be his first game to go live this year. That's what he's saying and I think he's close too. I hijacked him today though, by posting defects for 3 of his games yesterday, when I was going through all the games, downloading all the latest gMLs. He's working on Aquarius as I'm writing this, having already fixed Nodwick earlier. I must confess I'm a bit guilty for sidetracking him off to his other games...

Logan has spent the last few days working on the MoA boards, after I've stiched them together. He's making the lines thicker and easier to read, and then he has to code them. A large part of it is done though which is good, but I'm sure there's still quite a bit more to do before it can go public. Logan is definately busy though.

Tomi has been doing little things on his games, adding in the latest stuff to Yahtzee, Doomtrooper and Mythos mostly, although I think I saw a Tomb Raider update as well there. I won't be surprised if these updates are taking up a lot more time than it seems... maintaining a game is a huge task.

Martin just uploaded a VTES update yesterday, and I noticed that as I was downloading it. He's obviously keeping his attention on the game to keep everyone happy. The game is also the most played game on CCGW for the month of April, thanks in large part to the free game passes Ed has given out for the server problems. I hope there aren't too many complaints.

Ed has been busy trying to fix the server stability issue. He explained in techie talk what was wrong with it, which went all over my head. It seems to make things a lot better, but it still crashes the engine. Long story short - a new server is needed and I'm not sure if he has the moolah to afford it, especially not for the free games that is currently being supported. Hmm...

And that's it I guess. These days, there are only 6 PLs working on CCGW, or so it seems. Everyone else has other commitments, or is just feeling too left out and/or way behind the curve. Nevertheless though, a lot seems to be happening even with the existing 6. Perhaps that's all that's required - a handful of dedicated people churning out quality work instead of a lot of mediocre people wasting resources and producing nothing... ah, hobbits!

I did manage to get to Dan last night and we talked quite a bit. The real reason for talking to him though, was to get his permission to finish adapting Chess Wars for the engine, which he gladly gave. So that's my other game for the month of May besides WSS2, or that's the plan, at least. I've got to rev up the game to the latest technology, which will probably include things like automation, nice graphics and sounds. It would be good to get into that again.

-+@ Reckless Charge @+-

2006-04-27T22:10:00.000+08:00

Which is sometimes how things seem to happen...

Yeah, not MND cards for a change, that's because today I converted some boxes, a piece of cardboard and a digital camera into a photo studio. The reason I need to photograph the cards is because they are chromium and can't be scanned - when they are scanned, they just turned out all dark and uninteresting. Tip for card publishers who do not want their cards to be scanned and shown online - make all the cards foil!

Anyway, I've got about 18 more cards to photograph, and about triple that to crop and manipulate. Then there's the cardbacks which, unlike a CCG is different for each card, since these are trading cards akin to baseball cards, so each card has a story and the stats for the characters on the card. What cards are these? They are the Wildstorm: Set 2 cards which I'm adapting for WSS1, complete with fan made stats. Hopefully I would be able to finish everything by this weekend, but who knows if that's realistic or not... it's worth a try.

I haven't been the one that's been busy though... Mark is simultaneously working on three games, much to my surprise, particularly since he dislikes working on multiple games at the same time. Not that I'm complaining or anything though, I think it's good that he's able to multitask somewhat, not to mention the fact that he's getting more games done. Hopefully he's still aiming for that two before Origins, 5 before the end of the year, although at the rate he's working, as I have said previously, I'm sure he can easily finish off 10 before the end of the year.

Tomi hasn't been too much of a sloth as well, as game updates for Mythos (huge!) and Doomtrooper (good stuff!) compliment updates for James Bond and Yahtzee. These days, it's simply a case of open up a game, code it for whatever new stuff we get from each upgrade of the engine and then load it for the players, and that seems to be what he's doing. I won't be surprised if there's more update over the next few days.

Logan was busy working on LMS... until he started working on MoA. According to him the games are similar, which means the adaptation would share a lot of things between them. One of the things that the adaptation can't share are the boards, and because the boards are the typical larger than a flatbed scanner, they were scanned in bits. I volunteered to stitch them together though, so I spent much of the earlier part of this week doing that. I don't think the ultimate result is great, but at the end of the day, even on a big screen, the tiny things that annoy me probably won't show up... and of course, Logan can probably airbrush others of those away as well.

I have no idea what Martin is doing after that VTES update earlier this month, he's been pretty silent though, which means he's probably working on something significant. I asked him a few coding questions, but nothing on what he's been working on. Perhaps he's making headway on Monster Mash? I hope so... that game has given Logan a goldmine for LMS and indirectly for MoA.

Ed's been a busy bee himself, trying to track down the sources of the server crashes (I still think it's hackers!), while at the same time keeping an eye out on Mille Bornes, Frank's Zoo and now Capitol. I doubt he's making much progress on some of those games, as there are always more pressing concerns, but he did send me the scans for the Capitol board to "fix up" properly so that it looks better. I did that yesterday and sent it back to him. No idea if he'll update the game. I guess you can just call me "Sweatshop Nov".

And myself? Besides the WSS2 cards, and being "Sweatshop Nov", I've been testing out the cool new stuff that we've been given on the Engine in MND. And while there, of course, I'm adding the cards slowly for the next custom expansion. This expansion is probably rolling out slower than expected for playtesting, and I haven't even finished designing Weave yet. I'll probably have to do that some time next month I think, and then after that to finalise the cards for Double Jeopardy. I did however manage to finish the Calendar for next month...

And while I'm talking about the end of the month, I need to get ready the end of month stuff as well. I know Ed and Tomppa are the two people that probably care about the end of the month stuff, which is why I'm doing them I suppose. I'm not sure I care about them at all, but I don't want to miss out and regret in future though, which is why I'm doing what I'm doing.

It's a good thing I delinked updating the plates post at the end of the month... now I can do them whenever I want... add that to the fact that they are on the wiki... well, it only makes life easier... not just for me but for anyone who wants to modify any of the infomation that's available. I've also created a page on the wiki that's a potential replacement for the Games Page on the website. Whether Ed uses it or not is his perogative. The wiki has also been taking up my time and energy, but it's fun... while it lasts? I hope not.

-+@ Sucka @+-

2006-04-14T22:47:00.000+08:00

Fooled me once, shame on you, fooled me twice, shame on me.

Art Credits:
l'Cust by Zastrow, background by Holsten
Swalb by Katura
Trem by Zastrow

Three more magi for EF, and I do really like these magi. The first two seems dual-magi-ish though, which I suppose can be a problem for card design, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there I suppose. I continued and did a creature image today - it's a manip and not a new image, but it took absolutely ages to complete. I'm glad at the end result though. Since it's also an RP card, the RP version can be viewed on Insiider. So that means there's 7 more images to go, 6 Underneath creatures and a Nar magi.

I spent most of yesterday developing the list of changelogs for the Public CCGW wiki. It was a challenge creating a table that's visually appealing and organising the data so that it makes sense to someone who's looking for infomation and I think the end result isn't too shabby.

It's a holiday weekend for some people, and I'm guessing those people are busy coding away, either on their games or on the wiki, or even the website. Mark is still trying to get at least 2 games done before Origins and at the rate he's going, he'll probably get to do that. Logan is busily gearing up to get all the bells and whistles going for LMS. Those two of them have been doing crazy stuff and hours to get everything done by Origins.

I had a talk today with Tomi about card design. It seems DoomTrooper is suffering from a "runaway combo problem" where players with Uber decks can setup the game to win in one turn by playing a series of cards that combos to gain the required amount of victory points. Those aren't easy to stop though, particularly if one is new to the game, and every game seems to boils down to who can get their runaway combo to trigger first, which makes things boring. Perhaps that is why the number of games played for Doom, particularly over the tournament, is down.

I played two games of Auto Assault today with my two different decks. Basically, those are just "put whatever that's cool into the deck" decks since the deck building rules are not available anywhere. I won both the games against the same deck, using the same strategy, even though the decks I was playing with have different strength. I guess playstyle is important at the end of the day. Mine was to assault missions to win the game, while keeping my opponent on his toes by damaging his vehicle. The game seriously needs more answers to some of the problems, but at the moment it works and is semi-fun, so I guess it's good to go.

-+@ Brick @+-

2006-04-11T23:43:00.000+08:00

That which makes things heavy.

Art Credits:
Mink by Beth Zyglowicz
Zeith by Beth Zyglowicz
Golizar by Mark Chmielewski

Three more magi for EF, I have been concentrating on the magi recently since I have to do major work on the rest of the other 7 cards. I did Golizar and 2 others yesterday and another 3 the day before that which means I have all but one magi for the expansion done. Considering that this is a 150 card expansion, as opposed to the usual 100 card expansion, there's quite a few more images that needs to be obtained for this. And the summary below:

Exodus Flight: Still collecting images, the status (for images) of each region are as follows:
Arderial: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics. COMPLETE
Bograth: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics. COMPLETE
Cald: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
Core: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
d'Resh: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
KT: 1 spell, 2 magi, 8 creatures, 1 relic. COMPLETE
Nar: 1 spell, 1 magi, 8 creatures, 1 relic. NEED 1 magi
Naroom: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics COMPLETE
Orothe: 1 spell, 2 magi, 8 creatures, 1 relic COMPLETE
Paradwyn: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics COMPLETE
Underneath: 1 spell, 2 magi, 2 creatures, 1 relic NEED 6 creatures/relic
Weave: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 2 relics Need 1 creature/relic
Universal: 2 spell, 1 creature, 3 relics COMPLETE

I have yet to update the webpage with all the magi, I suppose I can do that tomorrow or something, because I spent most of today working on the MND updates. The expansion though, is still on hiatus, but has 8 more images to go to get the images complete.

TG now has finalise text and if there are no more comments will be tournament legal starting May. Ditto with KQ promo. Hopefully, that will get more people interested in the tournaments. The KT cards for TW went up at the same time, as requested by Bobby as his "reward" for having the best deck in last month's competition, but I have still to finalise the Weave cards for TW. I'm not in a hurry to do so though, although, I should do it before the month is out. Also, Cure for All Seasons probably needs to be spoilt this month as well.

Those weren't the only things that got added online, a whole bunch of defects also got fixed, not to mention a couple of new things on the online game. One of the things I'm rather happy with is that there are now more colours for cards in the browser and deck manager so that I can afford to differentiate between the Custom cards and the Playtest Customs. The Japanese Promos and the Unreleased Cards also received new colours so that when deckbuilding, it's easier to see at a glance what is the status of a particular card.

Last month's tournament had 20 games played that counted, and another 7 more that didn't count. Which isn't too bad for a tournament. This month's tournament is Highlander format and it's interesting to see the type of things people are doing. There's already a significant number of games that has been played, which is normal since it is the beginning of the month. Hopefully more will be played.

Now that MND is done for the month, I should probably be looking at some other game for the rest of the month. I think focus should still be on YNDT and I'm wondering if it would be possible to do a mini-map for it. I think more of the cards can also be automated now that the engine is more powerful. It's definately time to look at it again anyways.

Tomi has been busy with his games, Doomtrooper got updates, and word is that he's making more custom cards. 108 cards is what he's looking at. I wonder where he's getting the images for all of them. Mythos and Tomb Raider have also had updates recently - he seems busy working on his games which is a good thing.

Logan has also been busy with LMS, new boards and tweaks and all sorts of good stuff. The rules page is being updated to a wiki version specifically for the engine and that is continuously being worked on as well. That is so cool, but I'm sure it's lots of hard work. I suppose MoA will begin after all this is completed.

Mark updated Aquarius earlier this month, and he's still busy working on CA and Attack to get them out in time for Origins. I hope he's doing OK on them at the moment. He's got all sorts of crazy but clever ways of tracking things and he's busily coding away.

Martin had Final Nights up on schedule and is to be praised. Thanks to a free month's worth of free pass that Ed gave out just before the month was up, the number of games played has skyrocket there. Games there are healthy... I wish the same could be said of the server.

Ed has been busy tracking down that server bug, but I think he finally managed to fix it today with Logan's input on various things here and there. Hopefully things will hold steady after this. The update/upgrade of Mille Bornes that Ed did a while back was a good thing as well... play went up for March on that particular game and it's probably due to his great work on that game.

Play was down for Doomtrooper though, despite (or was it because of) a tournament and although the tournament is still going on this month, there's even less games being played. I wonder why. On an unrelated note, Thomas has decided to call it quits as a PL due to other things happening in his life, and if he reads this, know that I wish him well.

I've been playing a lot of Auto Assault lately, mostly to just kill time. It gets boring after a while and the lack of all cards to build decks is probably what I don't like about it. The other thing that I don't like is that the deckbuilding rules are still non-existant which is a drag (no pun intended). Still, it's a good game to kill time... if I can find players to play with.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for Stargate and BattleStar Galactica CCGs to be released. The latter is supposed to be released next month, but I wonder if it'll be delayed in time for the cons. Perhaps I'll find out during Origins.

Oh, and last month's titles were all from Portable Adventures. It's a new month, so titles are from a new CCG. I'm getting into a stage where I can't remember which CCG I've quoted from, so I think this might be a repeat, but maybe not.

-+@ Telling Secrets @+-

2006-03-31T20:43:00.000+08:00

Won't you like to know what I know?

Art Credits:
Skywalker's Tunic by Beth Zyglowizc
Crystal Chisel: Pencils by Jeffry Ransom, Colours by Nov, background by Alison Strom/Whyrl
Draught of Life by Nov, background by Holmberg

Draught of Life's was today's image. I'm really enjoying these one image a day things. I couldn't believe how much the image reminded me of a Keeper's Quest card, the colour scheme, the grass thing, the red blob, the universal card template. It's giving me a good feeling overall drawing that red liquid in a corked bottle. Fun too. The first time I tried to colour glass and it didn't end up too shabby.

And because it's a slow day, I'll use this paragraph to talk about the other card I drew this week that's shown above. Crystal Chisel was originally drawn by Jeffry, but like all his images, they were coloured with crayons and pencils. So I took his image and recoloured it and that was the end result. There's a blog entry about it too.

The custom cards took a huge step today - Project Second Chance just got into its second phase for some cards. What is Project Second Chance? Project Second Chance is an MRP project that attempts to upgrade underpowered cards by grafting onto them additional text to make them more potent. Will everyone playing online be forced to use them? No, the PSC cards will be clearly marked as such and players can have a choice to either use them or ignore them. Some CCGW tournaments though, will mandate that PSC cards be used instead of the official versions. When will we get to see PSC cards on the engine? Each individual PSC card will be added as soon as it is completed - the process is list (get listed on the forums), vote (majority voted to be in the project), design (new text), add (to gEngine).

Well, today is the last day of the March tournament and it seems that there is a clear winner. I've seen some rather good decks from Bobby and GoC as well. I have no idea who to award the extra tokens though. And next month's tournament already has 2 signed up participants. There's also been a huge amount of games played this month, despite (or because of) it being the first tournament with the unfinalised TG cards. It's been interesting though.

I've been talking about hotpoints (not hotpants!) with Mark and Logan for the past 24 hours on and off. It seems I'm some sort of hotpoints expert at this point in time - I'm not! The one game that I rewrote for it is in such a huge shambles that I don't even dare release it to the public. However, I did point both Mark and Logan to the pitfalls and suggested alternatives that they either didn't think of or didn't know existed before. Hopefully that will help them on CA and LMS respectively.

One more day to Final Nights. Will it be released a day early today? or later than the April 1st date? After all, the announcement did mention "around" which introduces some element of vagueness (Ed is learning how to be vague after all the times unexpected delays have come to bite him in the tush). Nevertheless, it's still interesting to speculate and to see what will happen.

I didn't manage to catch a game of Auto Assault today due to the lack of players, but that CCG is shaping up to be really really interesting. They are still working on things - changing cards, tweaking text, small minor stuff that doesn't detract from the overall experience of playing the game. Can you tell I'm hooked? I'm looking forward to their adaptation of Anarchronism now! Curses (or Praises) to the great and mighty Eddie for suggesting that I try out the game.

Did I mention that we have one fewer PL these days? Time to update my records now. It's also the end of March and Ed did force me to write a whole slew of reports every quarter. OK, I exaggerate again, it's only 1 report. So time's a-wasting blogging...

-+@ Six Pack! @+-

2006-03-30T19:19:00.000+08:00

which sounds like a lot... sometimes finishing it is a chore, just like the other stuff I do...

Art Credits:
Dirt Levitation by Nov
Duplicate by Holmberg/Werner/Shreve/Nov
Weave Wall by Werner/Nov/Holmberg

Well, three cards I created this week, and each one of them had their fair share of difficulties. I like how Dirt Levitation turned out, and it's simple because it was done by me. I don't claim to be an artist as such, but I'm happy with the end result. Duplicate was hard to get the final result as I had planned it in my head. Getting the creature was the easiest of the hard parts. Then there were that moving effect and a whole load of other issues. The end result isn't too shabby taking everything into consideration. The weave wall above, is a version 2 of the art. I originally did something, but I really didn't like what I had drawn, so I had to scrap it and restart again. I like this result better, more than 50% of that was drawn by me so I'm happy with it.

I updated the website with everything and a whole load of other things there as well. Tournament announcements, custom card projects, the whole enchilada. April is shaping up to be a busy MND month as well. Ah, there goes my hiatus! As promised though, the April MND Calendar is shown below. The large version is available from the Custom Card website, and can be used as a desktop image.

I managed to create a new HumAliens ad for the Promos yesterday. I like the new ad, but only because it's a ripoff directly from the official site with text added to it. I've got to make a few more ads these days once I get the time.

There aren't too many other things to take note of today... then engine is experiencing a weird logout bug for a while now. It seems to be elusive so far. Hopefully it'll be fixed soon. 2 more days to April 1st, will Final Nights make it on that date? And will there be a game made public before the end of this month? Well, only time will tell...

So, I was playing Auto Assault again today. It's fun. The game mechanics is new, but it'll get old fast though, unless the cards keep it lively. They still have a lot of material to make cards from there so that shouldn't be a problem. It's a bit dead at the moment though due to low publicity since it's still in beta. But it's playable, it's fun, the graphics are cool, the background music is great and most of all it's not buggy, but there are a number of Bugs to choose from, including a few modified VW Bugs.

April will also be the release date for the Christmastown expansion for Nightmare Before Christmas. I'm looking forward to that. I wonder how that game is doing. It's NECA's first CCG and I do want it to succeed. I'm still looking forward to the Stargate CCG as well. Two things to look forward to this year. I've got to ask people to pick up freebies for me...

-+@ Grounded! @+-

2006-03-29T22:49:00.000+08:00

but only to race!

3 different CCGs there... the last one is Star Chamber's card.

The middle one though is one of the three St. Patrick's Promo given out in LotR Online during the St. Patrick's Day tournament. I didn't join that one, but I won't mind testing out this card... if I can somehow get 4 copies of it. It's a pity that won't be soon. Threatening Merry with Rangers is a fun little deck, but it dies too soon, particularly in the beginning when neither the rangers nor Merry can take out the big minions. The problem with that deck initially is that it's a big spender, adding way too much pool to the game in the beginning, which is a pity.

Someone said I should support WA more by trying out their new game, Auto Assault, which is in beta, so I did. That first card is from this game. I really did enjoy the game though even though I've only been playing for less than 24 hours. The card design can be better I guess, but the online implementation is a feast to look at. The graphics and sounds and background music just create the ambience which makes playing fun, eventhough I barely won half the games I played. I look forward to playing more of it.

Meanwhile though, the hubbub on the HumAliens Yahoo Group finally translated into something tangible for me - Rick sent me all 10 Promos that were missing from the engine. Well no longer. I have added all of them just today so all printed cards are now on the engine. The scan quality isn't great, but I'm going to guess that players would be happy to be able to see the subpar image and use it in games.

The rest of the day has been spent working on another card for EF. I redid the image for Duplicate today, but decided not to post it yet until some other day. Then there were a whole load of other stuff for MND - tournaments, general posts, stuff like that which will bore the pants off everyone else. Eventhough I'm supposedly in "hiatus" mode, I'm still doing as much as I was before the "hiatus". Oh well. I still have to update the website soonish for the April Calendar. Work to do, more work to do.

A couple of days until the end of the month as well, which means I've got to do a whole lot more maintenance stuff. Also, it's getting closer to the day that Final Nights will be released. I wonder if Martin is in a frenzy. Ed and Logan are getting into the LMS act and they are both getting the support for the game up to scratch. Yay for them. And I'm getting ready to see Mark's first game of the year go public... and probably a surprise announcement from Kev...

-+@Homework! @+-

2006-03-27T22:00:00.000+08:00

well, it's work at home...

Art Credits:
Vine Etiki by Reed, background by Nov
Phrup colony by Vega/Goodman, background by Nov
Abominable Mombay by Shreve/Werner, background by Holmberg

Three more cards for EF (yes, it's still on hiatus) and I've been doing them one every other day or so. The count is 130 out of 150 cards, so it's the last 20, and that would probably take the net 6 months or more. It can wait though. All cards are on the Custom Cards site... somewhere. There's one that I drew yesterday, but haven't placed on the blog yet. One of these days.

Besides updating the site for the new EF cards though, there's the new stuff on the site as well... new BoA for starters and uh mostly announcements. I've got to add the remaining BoA soon and the April Calendar, which I did today, but won't be posting it up until nearer to the end of the month.

Talking about the announcements there though, it seems pretty certain that 2i has given/licensed their rights to MND to Cookie Jar Entertainment. The links there proof from different avenues that the property is with CJE, although there hasn't been any announcement yet from them. The only announcement that has been official is the Nova thing about the online game. Ah well.

And as for the online game, the March tournament haven't been too shabby with almost a score of games played. The top is still pretty bunched up though, so unless someone plays a few more games, the prize will probably get split at the beginning of next month. That's cool though.

There's also quite a bit of playtesting being done for the custom cards... all 3 of the expansions that are still in playtesting - TG, KQ and TW. I've given out some tokens... which reminds me, I've got to get the contest going for next month. More forum posts...

An aside though, there's been some activity on the HumAliens Yahoo group, and I've been monitoring what's going on there. Perhaps there is increased collector's frenzy in anticipation of the new animated series?

Mark has been busy on his games, the amount of updates he's been doing is, well, crazy from my point of view, but fabulous from Ed's point of view. Logan has been tinkering with LMS like it's the only thing left in the world, expect lots of good things there. Tomi got a Mythos update, and a Tomb Raider bugfix over the weekend! Wow, that's busy. Martin is has a few more days left on his next VTES expansion. I think it's probably ready and all. Ed had to give everyone a free month on VTES though, because of server issues. Hmm... I didn't realise it was that bad, but I haven't been playing recently as well.

Two other things non-CCGW-wise. The first is that I've been perfecting Merry (he's in Lost as well!) with threats and So Fair so Desperate. Coupled him with Madril and IB and skirmish card discarding Targon (in place of Smeagol) and they seem to be rather good... if the draws are favourable, and I don't get stuck with shadow cards near the beginning.

The other thing is that today I found out I have been made a moderator for the Urban Dead wiki. Wow and ouch. Time to get really really busy.

-+@ Huzzah! @+-

2006-03-21T22:58:00.000+08:00

Whazzah?

Art Credits:
Tomes of theForgotten by Beth Zyglowicz
Climbing Boots by Walter Reagan, colours by Novelty, background by Matt Holmberg
Relic Key by Beth Zyglowicz

Three more cards from Exodus flight, which has been put on hiatus while I get on with life, and these are the next to last batch of cards that I haven't yet showcased on the blog. Oh well. I have to start hunting for images soonish for Exodus Flight if only to have them ready for this blog.

It was rare not to mention MND in the last blog, although that does occassionally happen. It also happened because I wrote that after writing for MND at CCGW blog, so I guess I was all MND'ed out. Still things are moving there, although not as fast as some people would like. As I mentioned there, I still have ideas for things there... it's just going to get a bit slow moving along...

So I spent quite a bit of time templating A Cure for All Seasons Promo... and I have a very good idea what the cards will do and how they will go, but they will take time to develop. I am running with it since the motivation is there... which is sorta funny as the Promo expansion before this, Double Jeopardy, is still not finalised yet. Oh well, it'll get done after the whole list of things... like designing Weave cards for TW and templating more cards and updating the website. Eeks! The website... so much to do...

Then there's my WSS2 plans, which I'm rearing to go, but I can't seem to find the time to get on to it. I think this is going to be the next thing after Hyborian Gates... I know it's like 2 years later than I originally planned it, but better late than never I guess. Still I want to get it over and done with if only to say - there it is, look at my achievement? Aren't you proud of it? Gimme a gold star... or a cookie!

And since I'm talking about cookies, Tomi actually has a nice ad of James Bond up on the frontpage of CCGW (and no, don't ask me how those 2 items are related... I just needed a connecting sentence!) I wonder if it has been added to the engine yet though.

Talking about engine ads, it was a nice surprise to see quite a few of the recent ones I made - ranging from the "levitating leaves" Hyborian Gates ad to the image of Tattered Tomes drawn by - ahem - one of CCGW's own for Final Twilight - among the rotation (or as I like to think of as - parade) of images within the engine. I have no idea if anyone even notices those images, but they are fun.

I had a brief chat with Mark today... and he's got ambitious plans for the rest of the year. I know I've already mentioned the 5 target games this year. There's more though besides that, and I'm sure I have just barely scratched the surface. I'm not going to mention too much until the right time though... but check out his blog - there might be some tidbits there... as a French footballer once said... "When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea."

-+@ Pop Quiz @+-

2006-03-20T20:21:00.000+08:00

only because it seemed as if I was given one yesterday... more below...

All art by Boris Vellajo and Julie Bell.

More Hyborian Gates cards, only because I wanted to show that the game is not all with almost porn pictures. In fact the majority of the pictures are less risqué (a word just for Martin) than the selection posted in the last blog. I won't say that this selection is a representitive sample as well... most of the cards seems to be scenery and beastiary which makes it boring to be shown on a blog.

So, I finally found the gusto and finished adding in the 9 Hyborian Gates cards which I have images for, but do not actually own the physical cards. Some of the cards are less than optimal, but they are the best available images that I have so well, that's life. I thought it would take longer to code them in, but when I actually sat down and started coding, they were done in no time at all. I guess it's just a mindset thing.

There was a problem when I tried uploading it to the server though... a permissions problem of some sort. I need to check out with Ed what's the issue there, whether the "recent annoyances" of the engine has anything to do with it. Ah well, something to do.

I spent almost two hours yesterday chatting with some guy who goes by the online name of Sparke. No, nothing personnal, he was just full of questions about the engine in general and the adaptation of AvP and Terminator on the engine in particular. I had to answer question after question for about two hours... not fun at all. Hopefully, at the end of all this (of which the 2 hours last night was only the beginning), I'll get the clipped cards and templates for both games which will allow me to both games and the unreleased Atmosphere expansion online.

And others on the game coding front, Logan has been enthusiastically coding LMS in and out of season adding in things gleaned from Monster Mash. It seems LMS will be highly automated (and it is already pretty much automated). I guess this is a case where metal sharpens metal as Martin got his inspiration for coding Monster Mash probably originally from LMS in part coupled with his own uniqueness (after all, his name is half of the nipa-Martin Index)

I wonder if the next VTES expansion is ready though. The date makes me wonder if it's an April's Fool joke, so I'm sure there are other people out there trying not to be gullible who have a look at the date and wonder if they've been had. Well, it's all academic at this point in time though, but all indications points to the fact that it will probably be on schedule. Ah well, we'll have to see.

Tomi made minor tweaks to Mythos and James Bond over the weekend. He was also rather excited about obtaining the cardlist (and more) for the unreleased Q expansion for James Bond. I think he's probably set in motion the required stuff necessary for adding the said expansion into James Bond. I wonder what he'll do image wise. Perhaps he'll grab them from some fan made comic strip. Who knows.

Mark has been rather quiet though... I hope that's a good sign. I also hope that the releases of James Bond and Hyborian Gates has spurred him to complete his two games in development that are, I'm told, "close" to being public. I'm cheering for him though... he's the only developer to have a set goal (5 games) this year. (OK, I also do have a goal - 1 game, and I've fulfilled that goal!!! - but I don't think many would count that as a goal. My other goal though is to update B5, WS, WSS1, Urland and YNDT this year with the major changes Ed has just implemented. Notice my signature game, my favourite CCG and 2 licenses in that list.)

Ah, Origins rush. What would be nice though would be to be surprised in a nice way just before Origins. Monkeys going public for one would be interesting. Ditto for Cold War Naval Battles. And I would like to see a surprise new PL finishing a game in time for Origins too. And Lewis Carroll will probably tell me through poetry recited by the mouth of an Alice in Wonderland character "and pigs have wings!"

-+@ Lipstick @+-

2006-03-18T18:57:00.000+08:00

and porn? Well, check out the images below...

Images by Boris Vellajo and Julie Bell, taken from Hyborian Gates.

That's right, Hyborian Gates is finally out for public testing, but I doubt it will get played much. It is after all "no frills" at the moment, and I don't forsee it getting any more advanced than that. There are still a number of cards missing in the game, but hopefully they will get added on as soon as possible, or when I get the time and the inclination to code in the cards, whichever comes first.

Hyborian Gates isn't the first game to go public this year though. The honours there were taken by James Bond. Grats to Tomi for getting that honours (yeah, take note of this, it'll probably appear in a future quiz by myself). It's out public testing, and is slightly above "no frills" since it has attachment and stuff. I haven't had a look at it yet though... I should at some point. That means though that all Target games are now on the engine.

Someone has also contacted me to offer to update Aliens vs Predator. With 5 games played over the last 30 days though, somehow I don't see how it would go beyond "no frills" as well. Nevertheless, any work on the game is always welcomed and said guy has taken it upon himself to update the images. Well, we'll see how much of that there is before his interest runs out - somehow I get the feeling I'm going to be stuck with something half done although I hope that feeling is false.

I was looking at the WSS2 stuff a few nights ago as well. I really have got to get the motivation to start taking photographs of these cards. Really. A scanner won't work since the cards can't be scanned, well, not the front anyways. I have already started somewhat, but it does need quite a bit of work to get everything finished up. I guess I can use Origins as my deadline to finish up WSS2.

Talking about Origins, quite a few things are happening in anticipation of it. Mark is getting his games ready - Attack and Crystal Authority - for public release before Origins and I know Logan is revamping LMS with all sorts of goodies. Next up on his list would be MoA, and I did offer to help out with the images there - not drawing them (ha!) but segue-ing (is that a word?) them together from multipart scans.

Ed was working on Milles Bornes over the past few weeks, and has been enjoying his work there. The game has gotten hugely popular though, although I wonder if it's because he's working on it. Frank's Zoo numbers are close to negligable, but Ed has plans to complete the game there. We'll have to see what happens. His work on 7th Seas seems to be done though and the game seems to be getting some volume, although not a tremendous amount.

Martin has been busy, first with a Doomtown update that was a few days late, but nevertheless was released. It seemed to have drawn more players to the game. Monster Mash I is now on the server as well, and I have no idea how much work has been done there, but obviously more than at the beginning of the year. And with April a scant 2 weeks away, I'm sure Martin is busy adding the next expansion to VTES ASAP.

Is that it? 6 people working on games for the engine? Sounds sad, it's true. People and people's interests change I suppose. Hence the fallen away of some. I guess that's how the cookie crumbles... or whatnot. That does give me an idea for a future blog...

And to end, lemme give a quick MND rundown - not much work on anything, but the tournament is progressing rather well and the new TG cards in a tournament setting is grabbing some interest. How long, how many, who knows? There's news of a MMO being developed for MND as well, so does that spell the end for the CCG? Only time will tell...

-+@ Better Pay! @+-

2006-03-07T00:26:00.000+08:00

Heh, right, as if I get paid for working on CCGs.

Three more Christmastown cards... and what do you know... there's less than 300 days to Christmas... and even less to the release of the expansion. Pity thought that we don't have permission to adapt this to the engine.

Talking about adaptaing though, I finally managed to do more work on Hyborian Gates and it's just a small step, but nevertheless it's a step for getting it completed soon. I doubt it'll be the first public game of the year, but hopefully it won't the the last of the year.

Spent quite some time today scripting the drafts for the Core TW cards as well. I have no idea if it's drawing any interest. Also added the Arderial TW cards to the engine and a few other things. The tournament games seems to have quieten down now, but that's probably because the weekend is over.

Mark seemed to have gone crazy, with Crystal Authority and Attack going public over the weekend. I guess the weekend must have been really productive for him. Tomi likewise has got James Bond to some semblance of "started" although I have no idea if it's even playable yet. Still, 3 expansions is quite a bit of cards to add.

My main priorities at the moment with regards to game adapting are Hyborian Gates and WSS2 for WSS1. Hopefully, I can get those two out of the way before the middle of the year. MND will continue to demand time though and I guess I'll just have to take that in stride. There's also the B5 and Firestorm stuff that I'm a bit hesitant to touch at this point, not to mention, licensed games like YNDT and Urland that needs huge fixes. Oh well. One thing at a time... or better pay!!!

-+@ Copper Pennies @+-

2006-03-04T01:32:00.000+08:00

Whee, new month. Last two month's titles were from Nightmare Before Christmas TCG... betcha didn't know that. New month, new game...

Art Credits:
All 3 by Beth Zyglowicz.

Where to start? It's been a busy month... so busy that time for blogging was virtually zero. Here's the catch-up.

TW had a huge boost in between with Bobby finishing the remainder of the KT cards and myself getting Paradwyn finished. Work has started drafting out cards for Core, which along with Weave, is the only other region that has yet to be finished.

All 6 Underneath TW cards have been added to the engine for playtest, which has got quite a few people interested. The set icon is horrible there, but I wasn't in the mood to update it so it remains such until I get the time to tweak with it. I also added a whole lot of other cards that's at this point in time Engine only. I hope the players like them.

Meanwhile the TG playtest tournament has started and there are those who are looking forward to devasting others with the more than powerful TG cards. Some of those cards seems ordinary though, but throughout playtesting, the regular playtesters have discovered deadly and unexpected combos with them so I'm setting them loose in a tournament format to see if it will give rise to any complaints. Nothing so far, which is a good thing.

Last month's tournament was very well received with a large number of games played. Tim won the tournament though and got quite a bit of tokens in the process. The successful tournament pushed up the number of games played as well. That's an interesting correlation. Tim requested for Arderial TW to be added next for playtesting, so I guess I'll have to do it sometime as well. Oh and Remember Ring...

The official MND website is dead. Well, I guess that means I'm going to get more traffic to my website. I've just loaded the March calendar, but I really need to do a bit more than that - for starters, I need to put in the BoA #1 that Patrick sent me a while back, but there's only so many hours in a day...

Tomi and myself have been busy with the wiki though, getting the game pages stubbed if not fully populated. It looks good so far and there's more than 100 games listed, most of them with rules. Hopefully, if nothing else, it'll serve as a game archive for all things gaming.

A new month means I had to updated the FPN on the website, and there isn't much to announce. I was told that we didn't have the rights to use some of the Rage images as ads, so I had to remove them. Oh well. There's a new batch of Rage ads that I've yet to add. Yeah, when I get the time.

I did the numbers for last month - huge losses for Doomtrooper, which is surprising considering that they had a tournament, and for VTES as the free passes has run out. Gains for MND, which is a good surprise to me since I never expected that it would recover after the slum over the new year, and a smaller increase for Star Wars. I wonder how much server instability has reduced the numbers of games played though.

Tomi has also been busy on Mythos and Doomtrooper in addition to the wiki and it's interesting to see those two games get really advanced. Mark is still working on Attack, and has started work on Crystal Authority. I guess he's well on his way to adapting 5 games for the engine this year. Martin didn't deliver Doomtown at the end of february as he promised, but he did give me a bit of something for my next game and I know he's busy on Final Nights for VTES as well. Ed's still busy trying to sort out why the engine is crashing. Probably a hacker trying to get tokens and passes, I think. Eric was asking a few questions earlier in the month - I think he's designing a CCG of some sort. He's also been looking at other games and was fixing up Dredd last I heard. JC has also been busy, but he's still keeping an eye on his games, and the same goes for Julien I guess as he's been asking for coding tips. Good times for all.

~ Project Leads on CCG Workshop ~

2006-02-22T20:57:00.000+08:00

So, you can say I've been around for a while, and although I'm not as old school as nipa, to most people I've been around for so long that whenever there is a problem with gatlingNet, my IM get buzzed by people I hardly know. That, however doesn't give me the right to bash anyone though, and this blog does not intend to do that. Rather, I'm going to briefly (Hah! as if this will be anything brief) encapsulate my thoughts about what makes a good Project Lead and who should apply to be one.

Before I start though, let me define a term.
Hobbit: People who pester to become a Project Lead, but after being granted the status of being a Project Lead produces absolutely (or close to) nothing.
(Yeah, that's right, another Tolkien reference, the CCGW world is littered with them)

Over my tenure as a Project Lead, I've seen numerous Hobbits hanging around the engine. (Why Hobbits? Think Trolls, but CCGW wise) Of course, one doesn't know that they are Hobbits until after they are made a Project Lead. Hobbits will do everything in their power to become a Project Lead - send in the Non-Disclosure agreement, write reviews, give regular tours, patrol the forum religiously and answer all questions posted there, stuff like that. Of course there are others who do most of that as well, so that's not a distinctive mark of a Hobbit. And of course, those are the things done by normal Project Leads anyways (or should be done by them!)

So what qualities should a person have who will succeed in coding an entire game for CCGW and not end up as a Hobbit? Assuming that said person is qualified (have a working knowledge of coding languages, knows his - basic - way around graphic programs, can work a computer, etc.) the following qualities are ones that I'd recommend a prospective Project Lead to have:

Firstly, it's drive. A person has to be really really really really really motivated to get a particular game onto the engine, particularly their first game, to succeed at it. I've seen people get on the bandwagon to become Project Leads because "everyone else is doing so", or because they wanted to play games for free on the engine and those people usually end up as Hobbits. The losers though are the fans of the game that said person was going to adapt and CCGW.

A person with drive, will "make time" to code the game, however busy their life may be. I know BugLaden is always amazed that ShadowJump manages to squeeze in an hour of coding everyday just before work whenever he's actively working on developing a game. An hour a day works out to quite a lot over a year. It doesn't even have to be an hour a day... even half an hour a day can produce marvelous results.

Drive also means that, for example, should I have to choose between watching TV or coding a game that is uncompleted, 50% of the time, I'll choose coding to ensure that at least some coding gets done. Of course, life shouldn't be dictated by adapting (or updating) a game, so I try to spend half of my leaisure time doing other things... like going out to a posh restaurant for dinner with friends, or watching a movie, or just making lists and more lists.

Drive on its own is not enough though. There have been a number of very driven Project Leads who have ended up as Hobbits. One's interests change through time and if the interest change before they complete (or even start) adapting the game, then those Project Leads end up as Hobbits.

The second quality is perseverance. Martin used to have a signature that said something along the lines of "If Plan A doesn't succeed, try Plan A". In other words, work on it until it works. I mention every once in a while in my regular blogs (this isn't regular, notice the tildes in the title and the lack of cards in this post?) that I almost gave up when adapting my first game. That was Babylon 5 and I tried for about 4 hours to get the cardback to work and nothing happened. I did nothing for a month. Had it not been people pestering me to complete the game, and others offering their help, I doubt I would have finished my signature game.

A subset of perserverance is a dedication. I'm not talking about exclusive dedication, although some Project Leads are actually exclusively dedicated to one game, but rather to the sort of dedication that will see the Project Lead stick with the game, through good times and bad, through difficult coding spots as well as the easy ones, through periods of low game play and periods of heavy game play. A dedicated PL will often be found doing the optional extras for the game - adapting and creating custom cards, creating and maintaining webpages and sites devoted to the game, updating the respective's game pages on CCGW, etc.

I'm also not talking about slaving away all the time to the game. As I mentioned above, a project lead should have a life, and life's normal activities - sleep, food, showers, time with family - should take precedence over coding. It's a sad thing when people give up sleep to adapt a game, often times, not only does the health of the lead suffers, but the quality of the coding and the game suffers too.

Thirdly, a good Project Lead is proactive. He (or she) takes the initiative to do things without being told what to do. Personally, I think this is my biggest area of weakness as I'm spread across so many different games, but nevertheless, I still try my best to ensure that my games are updated and kept up to date as far as is humanly possible. Proactiveness also ties in with the above two qualities - motivation and perseverance.

This quality is especially important in the evolution of the engine. As gEngine is still in beta, every major change affects a game, sometimes drastically and fatally. Other updates exposes methods of doing things the engine has never been capable of doing before. As such each and every game needs to be updated after a major change. A Project Lead should not have to be told when to update his games with the latest technology made available.

Granted, it takes a lot to keep up to speed sometimes. That's why there are the online documentation to help out, and examples in other games. Failing those though, there are always other leads to ask and get advice from, which leads to the next quality.

Last on the list, but not least important is that a Project Lead has to have good social skills. A project lead has to be able to work with BugLaden and the other Project Leads to learn the tools of the trade and various other things related to the engine, to gNet and to CCGW. A project lead also has to cater to the fans and to be able to incorporate their opinions into their adaptation of the game. A project lead with bad social skills would at best, result in a poor quality game.

Even right now, I'm thinking, are those qualities enough? What keeps nipa so dedicated to his games, while kapa heads off to get caught in the quagmire that is WoW? Why does Martin move from strength to strength, while toon seems lost and adrift? How can ShadowJump make a resolution to "adapt 5 games this year" while kdevine still hasn't finished "Monkeys on the Moon" almost 3 years after he started working on it? Please note that I'm not calling anyone I've just mentioned a Hobbit, but I'm trying to figure out what do some people have that the others don't. I can only think of one more...

Although not essential (in my book at least), but nevertheless is crucial, is the element of curiosity. A project lead has to be able to think outside the box (sometimes) and experiment with what is currently available to produce what is wanted in the adaptation of the game. Ricochet's hand sorting scripts, for example, or Martin's game indicators are the sort of innovation that makes great games on the engine. A little bit of curiosity goes a long way sometimes.

In summary, to be a PL, one has to:

* Be computer literate (compulsory)
* Have knowledge about computer scripting (compulsory)
* Have knowledge about the basics of image editing (compulsory)
* Have the following qualities

Motivation/Drive
Perseverance/Dedication
Proactiveness
Good Social skills

(Curiosity is not listed because I don't really think it's compulsory, although it's a big plus to have) There maybe more, but those are the ones I can think of at this stage.

Adapting/coding a game isn't easy, but with these qualities applied, anyone can churn out games easily and quickly, and I'm talking from experience. Comments, are, of course, welcomed.

-+@ It's Time to Party @+-

2006-02-13T23:21:00.000+08:00

Yay! Paaaaaaarty!

Three different cards, Yukk's Feed the Dog, Hamlet's Ending cardback and YNDT's Skyscraper. It's a change though, but it's also apt for what I have been doing today. I spent quite a bit of time today, adding the YNDT and Hamlet infomation to the CCGW wiki. Why those 2? Well, because together with Yukk, they are the 3 Interactivities Ink games that I've adapted for CCGW.

The story actually began yesterday though, when Tomi asked for a slightly different format to the game box for Mythos. I played around with Doom's box and at the end of the day, Tomi was happy with the modifications I made. So that got applied to Doom and to Mythos as well. I see he has done Dark Ages after thatwith Dark Eden being blank. Of course, a change to the format means I had to go back to each and every page to add the necessary stuff. Not a lot of pages at the moment, but that will grow soon enough... at least I hope.

MND was the other page that I created yesterday and it was just a quick cut and copy from wikipedia for that though. Not too much infomation yet, but since these are easier to edit than webpages, hopefully, they'll get polished up to a good enough standard.

Talking about MND, I actually had a look at the tournament results today. It seems that some people are reporting their results on the forums, but not on the engine and vice versa, which means that there are now two different records of the tournament. It almost seems as if it's two tournaments running concurrently. Ack, I hope I don't have to clean up as well. Transition periods are tough though.

I actually did some game coding yesterday - can't mention the game here yet. Was going to do some Hyborian Gates, but realised that I didn't have the files here. Grrr... oh well.

Ed is still trying to figure out what's causing massive lag on the server. I thought it was an error in the collections script, but it turned out not to be so. Maybe it's just something random or maybe it's a hacker. Who knows? It's interesting though, because the lag can oft times disappear and then reappear for no reason. Perhaps the physical server is just being cranky?

And everyone else? I really have no idea though. It's the beginning of the year and there's a million things to be done. It's also a new year to make resolutions to complete a game you said you'll code 2 years ago. Perhaps that's why Aaron's been hanging out around the engine these days? Who knows... I have' also seen Craig online though, although he hasn't hung out on the engine for a while now. I guess he's gone on to other things.

-+@ Bass Player @+-

2006-02-11T20:02:00.000+08:00

Heh, that'll make it easy for those who's guessing...

Art Credits:
Darius and Naga by Beth Zyglowicz
Anget by Cody Shipman

Another 3 cards from Exodus Flight, which has been put on ice for the forseeable future. It's a pity though, some of the artwork is really nice for this set. Nothing much going MND wise, except the tournament. I did post up the themes for the tournaments until Summer. There's been some interest, but rather minimal though. One good thing is that Dave who runs the tournaments in Springfield likes my idea to have a Highlander tournament so I think Springfield will probably have it first before it goes online.

I did finish up the long overdue calendar for February - it's up on the Custom Card site. I've also got the March one ready to be setup, but haven't done that yet. Talking about the site though, Mark has kindly offered to host it so it's making a slow migration across to a new site. I'll announce it here once things are ready.

I just realised that I haven't done a nipa-Martin blog for almost a year now. To briefly summarise, "nipa" denotes a person who solves game design problems with game objects while "Martin" denotes a person who solves game design problems with scripts.

Today's update deals with Tony and Christoph. Last time I evaluated Tony though, he received n6M1 mainly due to his ability to manipulate game objects. Since then though, he's adapted Fluxx and Fluxx has shown that he has the ability to manipulate scripts as well. I think he's gonna get upgraded to n6M4. Christoph on the other hand, is barely starting out modifying SWD and he seems to prefer scripts to objects, I'll start him off on n1M3. The other person that needs an upgrade is Mark, as shown by his recent abilities to automate moves in games. I'll just add 2 more points to his nM scores. And the full list is as follows:

Ghosts
BugLaden nxMx - Rock, Scissors Paper
nipa n10M9 - Doomtrooper - Mythos
Ricochet n8M8 - ShadowRun - Last Man Standing
Martin n8M10 - Doomtown - Vampire: the Eternal Struggle
Novelty n8M7 - Babylon 5
ShadowJump n5M8
kdevine n4M8
toon n3M7 - Judge Dredd
kapa n2M1

PLs
tonyluzzi n6M4
Bruce the Goose n1M6 - Rage
Jammer Jun n2M4 - Shadowfist
Izibaar n0M3
Rainbow n1M2 - Sailor Moon
stormcloak n0M2
10tacle n1M2 - Star Wars (D)
vampus n0M0
[Note: Josh hasn't adapted any games yet, hence the zeroes.]

Former PLs with games adapted
jackalope n1M7
mechaman n2M5
hiro_antagonist n1M5
sillywiz n2M4
jaycurl n2M3
Valorian n2M2
JudgeWhyMe n1M3
j235 n2M1
Point Infinity n1M2
superryoga n1M0
TimalakofBorg n1M4

The eagle-eyed would have noticed the Signature games, and the secondary signature, where available is also included in that list for the current PLs. Ed gets RSP as his signature though... he's doing so many wonderful things in that game that it'll probably be the standard way of doing small board games for years to come. And it's no surprise that Rage, JC's second game, gets his primary. It's the game he updates as soon as something new is available before his other games. There's 2 other PLs with just one game, so those make it as their signature. Christoph has the aforementioned SWD, while Robert's Sailor Moon, although not the best game out there, is his only game and isn't too shoddy for a first attempt. Eric only has Judge Dredd left and I think he's doing something to it these days... I wonder what.

Mark mentioned to me that I left out his signature (and secondary). That's for a reason though. I haven't given too much thought to it (and Kev's) yet for one, but more because it's hard to judge what exactly is his primary. He seems to work on all his games all at once. That plus the fact that he does not have a major CCG is probably the reason why it's hard to figure things out. His signature game used to be Harry Potter... but since it's gone, he's sorta been without a signature for a while. Perhaps he'll find a new signature game.

-+@ The Tree House @+-

2006-02-07T22:14:00.000+08:00

sorta like a haunted mansion, no?

Well... not MND cards for a change, but the spoilt cards from the first expansion of the Nightmare Before Christmas TCG that will be released next month or so. Yeah, I'm a few months late for Christmas, but the cards are so cool and I really do like the template.

Ed has been busy with trying to get the engine to work the way he wants it to work... the update patches are coming in droves lately, which is a good sign in my book. Bugs are getting fixed up pretty quickly and it doesn't even have to wait for a major update. I think the players appreciate it too.

Coding wise though... not much is happening there, or so it seems. Tomi seems to be busy in the Doomtrooper tournament and Mark seems quiet on Attack. I haven't heard from Kev about Monkeys and Martin is probably busy getting ready for the next Vampire expansion, Final Nights.

I've been busy fixing up the errors in Final Twilight that Lee Valentine, the president of Veritas Games (and a longtime supporter and critic of the game), has found in the online adaptation. All's good now hopefully.

That's the other thing I did last night for Final Twilight - it's an image for Trinity 2. I'm not too pleased with the shading, but Nate likes it and it will be added to Trinity 2 though. The background was interesting - grain, then texturise then craculature on a dark yellow shade. A final lighting effect to make the top bit darker completes it. Not too shabby there.

The MND tournament is still going on, of course, and the Terrible Twos seems to be going rather well, but then again, it's the beginning of the month and people are flushed with tokens. Dartax has been blogging at MND @ CCGW about his games, which is always a good read. Christoph (Freigabe) asked today in the forums though if they could have competitions for the EF cards. I turned him down though. Well, when they can come up with the images, they can make their own custom cards, I suppose. Mitch offered to take over a month running MND tournaments which was a nice offer, I might take him up on it too.

The reason I am writing today though is that I want to put down my thoughts about "Signature Games" on CCGW. What is a "Signature Game"? Well, I can't clearly define it, but it has elements of the following:

Game coded (or re-coded) by one person and showcases that person's coding ability
Game that is the first updated when new stuff becomes available
Game that owner would advice people to look at when they need examples

Most of the time though, the signature is that person's first game for the engine. However, that's simplifying things a bit though... sometimes, some of the coders will have a "Second Signature Game" which is only slightly below their signature game. Often times though the Second Signature would be in a different category.

Let's consider a few examples:

Tomi's signature game is naturally Doomtrooper. Not only has Doom the most automation for any CCG, it's one of the most developed game on the engine. Although it was originally coded by Ed, I know Tomi (almost) completely recoded the game to include all the bell and whistles that it has now. Drag and discard, card attachments, deck legality checking are some of the things that started off life in Doom.

With almost a score of games under his belt though, he definately has a Second Signature. That game though is Mythos. Although driven by Alex, his subservient minion (or is that demon?), to ever greater heights, a large number of the automations in Mythos are the mastermind of Tomi himself. Playing the investigator automatically from the deck for example... to the floating tool bar, all of these are elements from Mythos.

What about Logan? Well, naturally, Logan's signature is Shadowrun, his first game that he adapted and one that he's most adept in. The hand sorting scripts were developed for Shadowrun, and Shadowrun also has the make change scripts which automatically calculates how many Yen needs to remain after spending some, and will create the necessary tokens.

Picking Logan's secondary is a bit more tricky though - it could either be his board game, Last Man Standing, or his tile game, Crypt: The Pharaoh's Curse. LMS had that amazing movement automation, which Crypt was the first tile game. Based on just that though, I'll call LMS as Logan's secondary, although only time (and Logan) will tell if that's the case or not.

It's easy picking Martin's Signature - Doomtown. The fact that he immediately announced an update to it after finishing VTES shows how much the game means to him. And there are huge elements of Doomtown that are found in many of Martin's games - autopositioning, turn order determination and multiple hands functionality to just name a few. Martin's secondary though is the game that has been taking up much of his coding time for the past year - VTES itself. Due to the nature of the license, it's much more advanced than Doomtown. The reason I didn't pick VTES as Martin's signature is simply that much of what's in it is either from other games, or specifically requested for it.

Tony's signature game though is his only game done from scratch - Fluxx. It's probably the first game to have experience points, and attempts to do a whole lot more than what on the surface. WoT, although it has grown leaps and bounds since he took it over, isn't as greatly developed though as Fluxx seems to be.

And as for my signature? I still think it's B5, which was revolutionary for its time. It was the first game to use dice and markers as buttons, and the first game to attempt to fully automate setup on the engine. Its original scope was modest, but as it and the engine has grown, it's attempting to do a bit more than everyone else. It's probably a bit low tech these days, but the basics of almost anything a CCG could need is in there.

And my secondary? No, not MND. I haven't actually changed much of Ed's code in that game. MND was so excellently coded by Ed originally that the tweaks I added later - creature dice, automated magi energize, etc. all pales by comparison to his genius. For once I'm stumped though. Nothing else stands heads and shoulders above anything else with the exception of B5 though. Suggestions are welcomed though.

One game that isn't really my secondary though is Reversi, complete with its AI and all. That was a collaborative effort between Tomi and myself and the result is a bit inspiring considering the technology (i.e. mainly built for card games) of the engine isn't really geared towards it (at that time). Likewise, I won't consider Portable Adventures my secondary due to the fact that at least 2 other people have worked on it from its inception. I'd like to nominate AvP as my secondary, except that there is nothing special about it... oh well.

-+@ Lock @+-

2006-02-04T00:21:00.000+08:00

New month? Same CCG...

Art Credits:
Inferno by Annette Burke
Harvest Feast by Matt Holmberg
Dune Blast by Nov, background by Holmberg

OK, Dune Blast was the last templated card that I did a while ago. It looks funny... too 2D, I need to find out how to improve things like that to make them more 3D. Anyways, the card has been added to EF, and of course, the website has been updated to include it yadda yadda. And if people haven't already read it, Flight Delayed pretty much has the status of where EF is going.

It's another month and MND has got a new tournament... less than 10 games were played last month for the tournament, and dartax emerged the winner. I think I gave out more tokens than was actually used... doh! This month though, it's a quick tournament format with only two magi and it's titled Terrible Twos. I hope more people will play in the tournament, but I don't have too much faith in it.

I was just talking to Bobby about finishing up his 4 KT cards for TW. He still hasn't found the time to do it yet. I still have to finish up Paradwyn, and Weave and Core are still up in the air, although they aren't as up in the air as they seem to be. I wonder how many people actually understand that TW, and DJ, is still on eventhough EF isn't. Probably not a lot... and of those that do, not many would care. I won't blame them.

Meanwhile I've been busy working on Final Twilight as it releases its second expansion in almost as many months. This is the first expansion to include artwork by yours truly so hurray! I'd boast a lot more about it, but blegh, it's not much to boast about. I think the expansion has already been sold out or something... hmm... Anyways, Nate has come back with a whole bucket load of defects so I guess I'll have to get around to them sometime...

Meanwhile, Mark seemst to be making progress on Attack according to his blog. That's not an exclusive CCGW blog, so there's a lot of searching to get the CCGW related parts, but it's a good read nevertheless. It's nice to know that my blogs have started others onto the path.

Tomi has started on the part to adding XP to his games. That is a great thing, and hopefully it'll encourage more people to play his games. Martin has also announced that he will be spending time to update his signature game - Doomtown. I can't wait to see what tricks from Vampire will he be using in the Doomtown update.

Two people I haven't heard from for a while are Tony and Josh. Tony is probably busy with work and all, and he still posts once in a blue moon on the forums (OK, I exaggerate, he posts a lot more frequent than that... and a lot more frequent than Robert, that's for sure). And Josh? Probably vamping away doing some other thing. I hope he hasn't given up on coding CWNB, but somehow, I don't see how someone can keep up with learning how to code these days, with the gazillion things to remember, unless they are really really really really really really really enthusiastic about the game in question, like Christoph is about SWD...

Christoph is still tweaking SWD to his liking. I think that's a good thing that he's doing. It's a pity that he's just a one CCG person though. Anyways SWD is still going strong, but has been overtaken by VTES in the number of games played category as of last month (yes, I'm still doing that eventhough I've stopped reporting them). The good news for VTES is that WW has agreed to let the next expansion be added... it'll probably be around the end of March, early April according tot he announcement.

Talking about announcements, I had to update a whole lot of stuff on the FPN for February a few days back just to catch up with everything. For once, there's not one, not two, not even three but 4 tournaments running simultaneously this month. That's a first I think for the engine.

It's a pity that the engine has been a bit unstable lately - the forums are fill with people complaining about not being able to log in. Oh well, can't be helped, I guess. Ed is trying his best to trouble shoot the problems and it seems to be taking up all of his time.

Talking about forums, I simplified the Custom Cards forum a while back also. There's still a small group of people who frequent that forum, which is a good thing, but I wonder how long that will last if there are no more competitions there. Oh well.

And it's full circle back to MND again. Things on my to do list for the next few whatevers, in no particular order:
1. Fix Final Twilight.
2. Finish up Hyborian Gates.
3. Add WSS2 to WSS1, automate, update and add XP.
4. Nag Ed to switch on the lab so that I can finish off NBC.
5. Add TW Underneath to MND, add DJ to MND, bugfixes.

-+@ Look What You've Done @+-

2006-01-22T01:48:00.000+08:00

What have I done indeed...

Art Credits:
All 3 images by Justin Zastrow. Background on Macah (originally Machlady) by myself.

Those were the 3 magi I did for EF a few days, or was that almost a week ago, and they are all based on Just's art. I think those magi aren't too bad really and EF does need a slew of magi to complete the images. I also photoshopped a spell but it didn't turn out too well. Added it anyways just for the fun of it. Just for my record again.

Exodus Flight: Still collecting images, the status of each region are as follows:
Arderial: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics. COMPLETE
Bograth: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics. COMPLETE
Cald: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
Core: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
d'Resh: s spell, 1 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. NEED 1 magi
KT: 1 spell, 2 magi, 8 creatures, 1 relic. COMPLETE
Nar: 1 spell, 7 creatures, 1 relic. NEED 2 magi, 1 creature/relic
Naroom: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics COMPLETE
Orothe: 1 spell, 1 magi, 7 creatures, 1 relic NEED 1 magi, 1 cretures/relic
Paradwyn: 6 creatures, 2 relics NEED 2 magi
Underneath: 1 magi, 2 creatures NEED 1 spell, 1 magi, 7 creatures/relic
Weave: 1 magi, 6 creatures, 2 relics Need 1 spell, 1 magi, 1 creature/relic
Universal: 1 spell, 1 creature, 2 relics Need 2 creatures/relics

Someone asked me if they could help out with Core and/or Weave for TW. While all help is welcome, I think for the time being, I'd like to keep those regions open because of the following reasons:

1. some of the artwork of those regions has string attached to the text of the card - i.e. I can only use the image provided that certain conditions are met. I will have to fulfil those conditions, most of which revolves around the text of the cards.
2. the cards being submitted by most people (Naroom by yourself and Orothe by malovis being prime examples) are very much devoid of an explicit war theme. This will have to be made up for in the other regions, particularly Core and Weave.
3. I want to have some regions that are available for someone else who may be interested in card design who may have unique ideas for the game. Although they won't be able to have free go at most of the cards due to the first region, there's at least half of the region generally available - of course, they'll have to be even more strongly supervised to enforce the War theme.
4. There's also a bunch of left over suggestions from Tainted Glimpses that I have yet to browse through and see if any will fit for Core or Weave.

Instead though, I pointed him to EF. The cards there needs a once over and suggestions for updating or revamping some of them are always welcome. Some of those cards are broken, others are a bit too bland, and still others aren't compatible with the CCG. Quite a bit of work text-wise is needed there as well.

Mark has started on Attack I think. He's gotten to the scripts so that means all the other stuff - board, cards, etc. is already coded. That's way in advance for a licensed game. He blogged about it too... I think. I wish I can work as fast as him or Martin who seem to put in insane hours everyday on their games.

I'm talking with Tomi online about his trooper group which is still playing so many years after the demise of the game... well, the demise of the publishing of the game. It was started by a train of thought about "legacy" games which there are still players playing... and making custom cards for those games. The Helsinki troopers have done a lot for Doomtrooper, and some of their customs are even on the game creator's official website. Others that I've had the pleasure of knowing and working with include Jason Roosevelt (Wildstorms), Bruce Mason (Babylon 5) and HC O'Neill (Rage). Other games to have notable custom sets after the game has been discontinued (publishing) include Star Wars with its player committee, Dune, Spellfire, Mythos, Doomtown and recently I've seen someone has been adding Wheel of Time customs to gEngine.

-+@ The Well @+-

2006-01-13T19:07:00.000+08:00

Wishful thinking? Perhaps not...

Art Credits:
Forest Primeval by Rich Werner
Briny Deep by Rich Werner / Chana Goodman / Matt Holmberg
Evergreen by Matt Holmberg

These were the 3 cards I did the other day for EF, with the text versions for Chimefall. The latter can be seen on Insiider. I did 3 more cards (templating) for EF today, 3 magi, and I'll show those here some other day. I did update the website though, so they can be seen there for now. With those 3 it means that 127 cards out of 150 and 6 regions out of 13 are now complete for the expansion that's only scheduled to be (re)designed late this year.

Meanwhile for TW, the expansion that's going up for playtesting in just under 3 months time, the remainder of the Naroom cards have been posted bringing the complted regions to 8. I'm still waiting for BobbyDoc for the remaining half of KT, and I've got to do Paradwyn and d'Resh. Weave and Core are still up for grabs at this point, but unless I can find someone better, I'm going to do those as well.

Otherwise, I haven't been doing too much CCG stuff due to real life stuff intruding. But hey, real life stuff takes precedence over CCG stuff. I did however edit the Alphabet Game post today to update it for the latest round. That game is still trying to survive after the loss of the forum, but there are people who are enthusiastically posting there and playing with it.

Ed added Function buttons to the engine a while ago (along with a whole host of other things) and Martin has since incorporated them into VTES. I had a look at them yesterday. They were slick. It does give me inspiration to tweak a few of my games to do the same thing as well. We'll see what I can come up with.

HC O'Neill posted the January Rage tournament on the forums today. I echoed that announcement on the front page of CCGW. Instead of the new Rage ad, I used the other new Rage ad that's on the server. This one is a bit more complicated, but it does say "When will you Rage?" or something like that. I wonder if anyone gets drawn into the game with those ads.

Talked with a CCG-fanatic about Anachornism today. Apparently it's supposed to be available online, provided by World's Apart according to a quote in the TriKing games forum. It's January but there's no online version... yet. It's still early though, there's 18 more days left in January.

I also tried looking for spoilers for LotR's next expansion, Rise of Saruman. Nothing released so far, and I wonder if the design team has even started designing the cards yet. There's a contest on LotRO to design cards for it and 10 suggestions from LotRO will be used in the expansion. I guess the 10 that's been selected looks pretty bland so far, mostly Timmy cards as can be expected.

I did see the fact that Stargate SG1 might be getting a TCG released this year by Comic Images. That's interesting news. I wonder which season they will base the cards on and if they will use the Atlantis stuff as well. One can only speculate so much of course. I think Comic Images must have reached some sort of agreement with Genio, the (Brazillian?) publisher of Myths and Legends as well, because both that game and SG1 (Genio formerly has the rights to produce the TCG of SG1) will be under Comic Images, at least in the US. Who could have figured that Wrestling could make enough money to subsidise another 2 games...

-+@ It's Time You Begun @+-

2006-01-11T21:49:00.000+08:00

but begun what ... that is the question...

Art Credits:
Woven Cloak by Scott Montgomery, background by msyelf
Coal Mask and Toxic Mushroom by Beth Zyglowicz

Another 3 cards for EF, this time though, relics. And I just realised that I have only 4 days worth of images left before I run out. Ah well, back to the good old days when I have to worry about images after that. I either have to make more... or use non-MND cards. So I decide to template a few more cards for EF today, and the corresponding cards for eXodus and Chimefall. Whee!

It's been a busy day for MND for me today. First off Mitch sent me the Orothe card suggestions for TW and they were good. So that had to go up on the Custom Card forum as a first draft for people to comment. Not many Orothe players though it seems, but that's another reason done at least, which leaves 4 more - Paradwyn, which is mine, Core, Weave and d'Resh - and two half regions - Naroom and KT which are only partially done. Hopefully those can be done in time for a March playtest start.

The exception though would be the winner of this month's MND tournament who will get to pick a region to be added to the engine in February for a preview playtest. I hope that will get things going... but it might not. We shall have to see what happens there.

The Custom Card website has also got an update today. The conclusion of the Double Jeopardy contests means that all the Double Jeopardy cards can now be added to the website. While I was there, I added the scan of the Ancestral Flute "controversy" with a note. That would help people make up their minds.

Patrick Miteff sent me the full scan of Book of Ages issue 1 today. I didn't even ask him to do it, he just submitted it knowing fully well that I intend to add it to the Custom Card site. I guess that's the good thing about him - he's so eager to push the site as well, but he did have a huge part in creating it as well. Consequently, he's using the images from there on ebay, but that's something I really don't mind too much... I think.

I clipped the Hyborian Gates scans that I scanned in yesterday - they look good. No coding done on those yet, but I hope to get them in sometime this week. I hope to finish Hyborian Gates this month as well if I get to work fast on it.

Haven't worked on anything else otherwise, and there's no more games that I would feel comfortable adding the experience points system to. But that doesn't mean that the announcements on the front page of gEngine will stop. Today I bumped up 2 of them and reinstalled a third. Of of those which got bumped is the B5 league weekend announcement.

B5 League weekend starts tomorrow engine time, so that's something to look forward to. To make up for not having one last month, this month's weekend is double time - it lasts for 4 days instead of two. It's a pity I won't have time to play though. Oh well, maybe next month. I still haven't played a league game.

And Bruce has been adding cards for the next B5 expansion. Minbari came out early this week which, although didn't exactly wow everyone, seems to be very well received. There are some gems there mixed in with everything else though so it's a bit hard separating the chaff from the curds (see "how to mix idioms"). I haven't had time to go through them yet though, but I should given that I'm an OK-ish Minbari player... self-declared and all...

-+@ Tub of Terror @+-

2006-01-10T21:38:00.000+08:00

Go Fish?

Art Credits:
Blade Eebit by Beth Zyglowizc
Conscript Vemment by Holmberg/Vega/Nov
Canopy Flist by Beth Zyglowizc

Yes, two of those cards are dated 2006. They were the ones I did a few days ago and so I thought I should show them here before the week is through. It's amazing how changing the colour and the background and adding multiple copies of the same creature can change a creature so much - compare the Conscript Vemment with the normal Vemment and it'll be obvious what I did to get that card. The other 2 are Beth's images and she's getting even better as she gets older - the eebit was one of the earlier images, the flist is a very recent one. Constrast the difference there.

Having said that, I haven't done anything MND-wise since the last blog so there isn't much to say. OK, I fib. Patrick Miteff messaged me to tell me that my MND demo cardlist was missing a card, so I added it into the site. That's about the only MND thing that I have done recently besides a minor correction to the website and talking to Mitch about his share of the TW cards. Well, that's not a big thing that I did with mal, I just reminded him gently that I was waiting for his card suggestions.

Secret game is now on the engine, but it's all hush hush and all so I can't say anything. I had a whole lot of problem uploading all the images last night to the server since the connection was intent on disconnecting. In the end I just gave up and waited until today to load up the images. Ed asked for the rules, so that got uploaded as well. I haven't done any coding wise there, but it needs a bit of graphic work for counters and markers before I can code them in.

The other game I worked on (finally!) is Go Fish. Added in all the cardbacks that I have and updated the plates. I wanted to add in Hecatombe as well, but I'm not sure if the engine will be able to display a pentagonal card. There's always a tile I suppose, but all that effort just for one card... I don't think it's worth it. Since I don't have an image of Hecatomb anyways, it was just an intellectual debate, and I didn't head over to search for a cardback.

One of the things that got added to Go Fish was the XP system. This was a lot harder to do in Go Fish because it is such a mature game compared to all the others. Mature as in coding wise, not target age wise. I had to compromise a bit on the code, but the players will be happy - they get more XP in certain conditions, all because I took shortcuts with the code.

And of course the spamfest continues. Today's was the announcement about Go Fish getting its tournament system. Not a big deal there. There are two ads already available for the game so there wasn't the need to create one. I chose the safer ad, but with a catchy title. Hopefully it'll entice people to play.

Of all the games I've added XP to these last few days though, only Bowling has seen some play. The rest has been rather lethargic due to the fact that they cost tokens, which is a pity. For anyone who can scrounge up 10 silver tokens, they could get all 10 silver tokens back if they play 10 games of Yukk and are lucky. Hmm... maybe the XP system needs a revamp? But wait, if they used the 10 they've just earned to play another 10 and win all 10, they get 15... and if they use that 15 to play 15 games and win just 10 of those, then they get 20... so the system rewards someone who plays a whole lot more of one game. That's not too bad. No revamp needed for the time being.

(OK, I fib again. I just checked the results and Reversi also had an increase just today. I guess those announcements do work!)

I updated the plates post today - after all, that's what the Go Fish update is used for. I can't believe I haven't updated some of the images on the plates post in 2 months. That's a long time and... well, only 1 game have been released in that time... it doesn't sound like a lot but it definately is a lot. The main thing that happened during that period was VTES going live (again).

With the success of the VTES engine, Ed's got ideas for other separate engines. That sounds intriguing... I wonder what will he come up with. Well, the best way to make money would be to combine it with something that makes money on the web - eeewww... porn engine just came to mind. I hope that's not in the works.

Mark just told me he's gathering materials for Attack! and he's working out in his head how he wants it to be coded. That's a smart way of doing it - it's his first boardgame after all. I'm sure it'll end up to be this singing and dancing (literally, with sounds and automations) adaptation of the game at the end of the day. I am looking forward to that one. That would be his 11th game - it's hard to imagine that he's almost touching a dozen games.

I dont' think I have mentioned that Eric posted in the forums that Judge Dredd seems to be malfunctional. I couldn't repeat that and neither could Tomi. I wonder if it's something else... nevertheless, it is good to see him working on something on the engine again, even if it's only Dredd.

That's not the major thing on the forums though. There was a SWD player who claimed harassment from another player and the other player claimed it was a concoted fake. I have no idea who to believe so I asked them to sort it out in private and locked the thread. Really though, airing their dirty underwear in public like that... I had expected better from SWD players.

And to end on a high note, I just finished scanning in a few things for Hyborian Gates. Now that the XP games are out of the way (the only other game where it's feasible for me to add XP is Quartet, but that is currently in a big mess, so it'll have to wait until the weekend when I can "clean house"), hopefully I can finish up Hyborian Gates (if mystery game doesn't get in the way). I also have a hankering to finish photographing (yes, with a camera - the chrome cards can't be scanned) WSS2 cards to create the WSS1 expansion. Ah good times ahead! Busy ones too, at least for me.

-+@ Barrel @+-

2006-01-07T16:20:00.000+08:00

of Monkeys?

Art Credits:
Retrefer by Alison Storm
Alia by Beth Zyglowicz
Greev by Alison Storm

Three magi for EF on display above. I'm particularly fond of the Greev image by Whyrl. I was busy a few days back so I decided to photoshop a card for EF. Conscript Vemment was the result and that will be shown in the trio above some other day. While there, I templated a few more cards for eXodus and Chimefall and consequently some more cards got added to EF. Since that was the case, the website got updated to showcase the new cards for EF (so you can view the Conscript Vemment there). So that means EF Arderial has all the images now and Paradwyn is one creature less.

I've been playing a whole lot of LotR recently since I seemed to have gotten into the groove of testing out Gollum with my non-solo Smeagol. It is still work in progress, but one newbie got really frustrated by it since I wiped out all his hobbits on site 6. It's bad news when one doesn't have condition discard.

Tomi has also been getting into the groove as well - Doomtrooper got updated on the same day and there was quite some buzz regarding the new tournament and the new tournament system for the tournament. It is good to see the troopers outnumbering the jedi for a change.

Meanwhile, I've been spamming up the main page of CCGW with all sort of news, but hey, those things are newsworthy IMO... well, except for the MND one that was put up today. There has been at least one item since the 3rd of the month and hopefully it'll be that way until about the middle of the month.

First it was Yukk!, then Reversi and now Borders. Borders got the XP treatment as well over the weekend and it gets easier and easier to code it once you've done it a couple of times. Yes, it got an announcement too, but prior to that I had to create an ad for it. I think it could be better, but I'm not going to complain about the ad that's currently placed with it.

Today I started coding on a top secret game? Heh, well, not that top secret, but I'm not going to say anything here until it gets released... which might be a long time in the future. It's different though doing a recent game, one that is still in print (although I have no idea how well it's doing in play). Hopefully it'll get me psyched up to finish off Hyborian Gates after it.

Talking about Hyborian Gates, I've got some kid to send me the scans of the cards I'm still missing in return for real cards. I think he has the better end of the deal, but these are cards I have excess of anyways and I'm not particularly fond of the cards so he can have them. I'm sure I also have probably a pound of Hyborian Gates commons and uncommons somewhere...

-+@ Say it Twice @+-

2006-01-06T17:43:00.000+08:00

or three times or four times...

Art Credits:
Craw Helm by Holmberg
Sizzling Sareb by Werner/Gillette/Shreve/Holmberg/Nov
Pipe Dreaming by Holmberg/Nov

And the final two cards (image wise) for TW has finally been done. Those are the 2 above together with the Sareb that I did sometime ago. These are also the first 2 cards that I've templated this year, so they are the first to carry the (c) 2006 logo. Now that the images are done though, the next step would be to design the cards. Hopefully that can be done before the first half of the year so that all the cards can go up on the engine by April latest.

I also templated a few cards, not for EF, which would be the next full expansion but for Ancient Enemy. That's right, Ancient Enemy with the Invaders. The 14th region. There's some great Werner and Whyrl art out there for the invaders and I'm trying to see if I can get at least 60 cards for the expansion to start the expansion. So far there's only 10 or so cards, mostly magi, but I'm not too worried at this point in time about AE yet. As I said, there's still EF to go...

And just for my record, since the last of this has been bumped off the first page of my blog:

Exodus Flight: Still collecting images, the status of each region are as follows:
Arderial: 1 spell, 2 magi, 5 creatures, 3 relics. NEED 1 creature
Bograth: 1 spell, 1 magi, 4 creatures, 3 relics. NEED 1 magi, 2 creature/relic
Cald: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
Core: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
d'Resh: 7 creatures, 2 relics. NEED 1 spell, 2 magi
KT: 1 magi, 8 creatures, 1 relic. NEED 1 spell, 1 magi
Nar: 6 creatures, 1 relic. NEED 1 spell, 2 magi, 2 creature/relic
Naroom: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics COMPLETE
Orothe: 1 magi, 6 creatures, 1 relic NEED 1 spell, 1 magi, 2 cretures/relic
Paradwyn: 6 creatures, 2 relics NEED 1 spell, 2 magi, 1 creatures/relic
Underneath: 2 creatures NEED 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures/relic
Weave: 1 magi, 6 creatures, 2 relics Need 1 spell, 1 magi, 1 creature/relic
Universal: 1 spell, 1 creature, 2 relics Need 2 creatures/relics

or 37 more images out of 150 to go.

All those new images mean that the website got updated, well only for the TW cards up above, the AE page haven't been created yet (and I'm not even sure if the expansion will even be made). Also update the info there that the Insiider expansion Soul Conflict has been released. Nothing major otherwise. And just because I think it'll be nice to have an image mid blog, here's the January calendar from the site (image by Whyrl).

I actually played another MND game yesterday, this time with Bobby Doc. I conceded though since it was late and the game was slow. He had an interesting paradwyn deck - the type that only Bobby can come up with. I played the transformers deck that does absolutely nothing. Seriously though, it needs a bit more draw in that deck.

I also played a few games of LotR yesterday just for the fun of it. Won as many games as I lost, but I enjoyed recurring Gollum and watching Smeagol take out the Witch King. It's not a tournament deck or anything, but it runs fast and unless stopped by a top notch shadow side, it wins most of the time.

Spent a bit of time today adding the XP system to Reversi, and while I was at it, I fixed a bug and added a message for 2-player play. I doubt people will play it even with the new XP system, but at least it's another thing off my list. I created a new ad for it and plastered that on the front page of CCGW's site along with the announcement that it now has XP. Here's the ad since I'm in the mood for mid blog graphics.

Since I'm doing mid blog images, Aiden (picks) made 3 ads for Rage the other day (well, last year really) because I got tired of that one Rage ad that was repeated again and again. I changed out the Rage ad on the front page as well, but here are the two images since I'm doing mid blog images:

Yes, those are nice. Thomas has decided to start the Doomtrooper Tournament again this year in February and I think that's a good thing. It will definately increase the number of people playing Doomtrooper which is a good thing. Hopefully he will be able to find someone to help him with the records and such.

And since we are on tournaments, the B5 League weekend is next weekend and will last for 4 days instead of the usual two. This is to make up for the fact that over December last year, the craziness of things meant that B5 was largely ignored. The league though, together with all the various other publicity stunts are still drawing players from the nether - some new guy (but not new to the game) showed up just this week and said he'll be along for the ride. And of course, there's also the fan made cards...

And I hear rumours about a Star Wars tournament thing on gEngine...

-+@ Wheel of Torture @+-

2006-01-05T22:58:00.000+08:00

The titles of this CCG makes great titles.

Art Credits:
Sloth Hyren by Jen Reed, Background by Rich Werner
Sandstone Hyren by Austin Gardner
Tornado Hyren by Jen Reed, Background by Matt Holmberg/Rich Werner

What a day, and it hasn't finished yet. Another 3 cards from EF of MND. The good news is that all the MND stuff I did in the past 24 hours was just to play a game with Freigabe/Christoph. He won, barely. I played with a Transformers deck that really didn't do anything spectacular, but it did help me get familiar again with the game after not playing for so long.

I spent quite a bit of today working on Yukk! It is the first of my games to get the Experience points system. Hopefully, people would play it more, but somehow I doubt it since it's only silvers/gold tokens. I also fixed a major error that made the game unplayable since the last update and updated the code a bit to make it a little more modern. Hopefully it would be played more.

Talking about play statistics, I finally did the December numbers. Surprisingly Star Wars still leads the pack, even with VTES on the scene - both are free. Shadowfist is not far behind. The game that was most played AND cost tokens was Doomtrooper, which was a surprise. MND lagged far behind games such as Doomtown and B5. Oh well. How the mighty have fallen.

I updated the plates post today, in preparation to update Go Fish. Sadly I ran out of time. Reversi also would probably get an update soon-ish and both of those games will get Experience points added to them. It's not too difficult to add expeerience points I have discovered with Yukk.

I saw someone (Kinam) offering a one-shot tour for Wyvern. Sorta interesting I think, but Wyvern is hardly played (and is still free). It's a pity that there are no takers though. There seems to be a dearth of players online these days, with the exception of probably the Star Wars players who keep pretty much to themselves.

VTES Online has its new URL these days - http://www.vtesonline.com. It was slow going when I checked there earlier, but there was a 3-player game going on. I wonder about the future of the game online. Yes, the game definately needs more sets, but Ed and Martin needs to get the permission for White Wolf to add those, and then there needs to be time to actually scan the images and code them. Hmm...