-+@ Pouncer A @+-

Time to pounce on things to get them started again.



Art credits:
Alpha Balamant by Jen Reed, backgrounds by Holmberg/Nov
Sandsifter by Jeffry Ransom, backgrounds by Werner/Shreve
Frigid Weebo by Jeffry Ransom, backgrounds by Holmberg

Another 3 more cards for Exodus Flight. That's the set that's going nowhere fast, but it's still going. I wish I have a bit more time to look into MND custom sets, but time is a commodity in short supply for myself right now. People are still doing artwork and stuff for the Insiider cards, so I am going to guess that there will be some cards, although I have no idea how much.

The Official MND site going down for much of the time is a blow for the remaining players and where possible, I have tried to recreate the parts of the site useful to players at Novelty's Custom Cards. The hit rates for that site has gone through the roof since I started that and there are people advertising the site all online, including on Gaia Online and the various Yahoo Groups. It is still missing about a score of d'Resh VotS cards, but in place of that, I've put up the alternate art cards and all the promos. It's turning out to be a good site content wise, but as usual, my web design skills suck so the site looks barely mediocre.

The CCGW forum blew up last month which put a halt to the first Shadowsfall tournament. CapAp/John was leading when everything fell down so I gave him some tokens and he seems to be happy. There has been a lot of games starting up again this month for the tournament this month, but there aren't too many new players and the game seems to be on a decline. I guess as long as the existing players are happy, the game will survive. It has survived for so long now.

Double Jeopardy has another contest this month of course. I was so busy last month that I retroactively named Mitch as the contest judge. He didn't choose himself, but chose Daniel/Dartax instead so that worked out well. There's only been 2 entries for this month's competition... well, it's still early days yet.

Someone called me Mr. MND earlier this month because I seemed to be involved in everything. Oh well. I guess maybe it's about time I took a step back and just let the game die or something... or just wait until the animated series airs, if it does airs. It is definately taking up way too much time though, but it is fun.

The 4th anniversary for gEngine passed by quietly, since I lost all my articles and lists that were stored on the forum for that. I guess I'll start a new tradition where I don't bother too much with the anniversary. No new games were made public over the anniversary, but Mark did make Monster Rancher public a day before so I guess that works.

The only other games that went public after Radical Racers was Fluxx which Tony had been working on for a while - it's his first full fledge game too. Otherwise things are quiet on the CCGW front in public. There's always things going on behind the scenes but I'll leave the respective PLs to announce that.

The engine itself also had an upgrade and a few things were moved around. Ghosts have all lost their gears and ranking has been replaced by something called "level". What good is the level, I have no idea, but it's not fully implemented yet. Perhaps in future when it gets added it'll be of better use. The other major change is that the game wall is now in place. I have no idea if the players are using it though... perhaps they need to get used to that idea as well.

MND wasn't the only tournament that got affected by the loss of the forums... the Rage Tricks and Treats tournament originally scheduled over Halloween was hit as well, so they had to extend it. The other thing that the loss of the forum dealt with was the B5 league, but since all the records are being kept by Alwyn off the forums, it wasn't affected too badly. The league is still ongoing and there's even a league weekend next weekend with real cards as prizes. It is shaping up to be an interesting league after all.


I won't call myself the regular artist for Final Twilight, but I was given a series of 5 more cards to colour in. The image above is for Street Thug - pencils by Antonio Rojo with colours by myself. It's a bit cartoony and I don't think it's indicative of the art found in Twilight, but Nate seems to like it so it'll be in a future expansion of the game.

Talking about the game, there's going to be bucketloads of expansions to Final Twilight starting in December and I've already have the first expansion to add into the engine. I was told to hold off until December though, so that will only go in then, but at least things are starting to move for the game, and I'm happy about that.

One thing that isn't moving too much is Hyborian Gates. I still have yet to type out the Vortex Tactics into the spoiler - that's the last thing left in the spoiler. One of these days, I'll just have to get on to do it. After that, it's basically just importing that onto the gML and adding the scripts and the other pieces required to play the game. Perhaps I'll release it early next year.

I still have to finish up fixing a few other games - YNDT for starters, then Urland needs a huge overhaul. I think Quartet needs some tweaks as well to get it up to scratch and Bowling is still waiting for the AI to be coded in. Lots of work on too many of my games. A quick summary:

AvP - No-frills, images needs to be clipped.
vT - Spoiler to be created, images to be clipped, scenarios to be added.
B5 - Where do I start on this? Bold text, replacement handling, full starting hand automation, initiative determination, lots more to do.
BORD - The reverse card can finally be coded now that the engine has support for it.
BOWL - AI automation and some minor reported defects
CHECK - It's would need time for me to get everything going on this game, up to the point of automation and AI.
ELEM - This is still waiting for the engine fix to enable hotspots for pieces on a card. It's going to take Ed to ensure that the engine is capable of handling that before things can move.
FB - Lots of playtesting needed. It's playable, but things like score automation would probably needs to be done.
FTWIL - An upcoming expansion might be time for me to add in attachments as well.
FIRE - Nothing going on here... I have all the images, but no time to work on anything.
GOFSH - I'll call this finish and done with.
HAMLT - It's public, but there is nothing to check for victory conditions.
HALN - There is no support for the new cards, which would need a massive amount of playtesting to catch.
HGATE - still in the coding stage... it's going to be no-frills
KINGS - Let's call this finish and done with as well!
MND - The players are happy with the setup as it is and minor changes to enhance and speed up gameplay would probably not be too appreciated.
PAD - Ed wants everything to be automated, and now that the engine is finally capable of doing it, it should get done at some point.
QUART - There still some bugs and suggestions on this game that needs to be close out at some point.
RDRCR - It's No-Frills and the engine version is going to be slightly different than the print version.
RVRSI - Minor defects exist on the game, perhaps due to the complications of making sure things work with the AI in 1-player mode and to allow 2 human players as well.
TRIAD - Heh, this is so not going to be done for a while now.
URLND - Scores automation, numbering the oceans, automating a few other common tasks... lots to do here and this would be the second one of the licensed games to get attention... after YNDT.
WS - Some automation would be nice for one of the oldest games on the engine... wish I had the time for it.
WSLS - Heh, well, let's shelf this under the table for now.
WSS1 - An AI would be nice... I think I will be ripping out the preconstucted deck and replace that with a randomly generated deck.
YNDT - some more minor bugfixes required for the game. It's pretty slick now.
YUKK - I'll call this one done as well.

And the title today is from the same CCG as last month since nobody guessed what it was last month. I guess there hasn't been enough entries to guess it as well.

-+@ Tropical Rain @+-

It's refreshing and stuff...



Artist from left to right: Holmberg, Bozyk with Holmberg Background, Holmberg. All three cards are possibly for Twilight War, which may or may not be made. I have no idea. The two on the right were made just earlier today, which is why they are showcased here. The middle piece is Gwen's second donation for custom cards. It looks good though I also got news that we have Holmberg's permission to use his artwork on the custom cards, as long as he's credited and stuff, so that's another piece of good news. I also got Zach drawing a TG card for me - a nice teardrop. He's doing that better than the Hyren he was drawing earlier. Relics aren't too difficult to draw, it's the creatures and the magi that are always a headache. Talking to Eric and he's getting tempted to do MND artwork again. Hopefully he'll contribute a piece or two to the new custom set. We'll have to see.

Not much activity for the MND tournament today, but 2 games were played earlier in the morning and Pirategirl got on the scorecard. That means it might be possible to get 8 games after all. We'll have to see how the tournament goes. I've got to nag WindRider to go play his games as well. Hopefully, I'll see him on.

I also did a semi-major MND update for the engine and added the new TG naroom cards, but forgot to add in the bit where if one plays a creature from discard or deck, it'll get a creature dice at zero. Well, next update probably. The update also saw the first errata for EL - Festive Furok got modified to make it friendlier in play. Hopefully people will play more with it now. That makes Amara, Beauty as the only other card that might need errata. We'll have to see. Also updated the Furok card on the website. Next up though would be to finalise SP by the end of next month.

Also updated Kings... it was a simple update until I tested it out in the soon to be released new build... where it broke. So I spent most of the day upgrading it to work for the new build. I've got to remind myself to do the switch-over manually when the new build is released as well. It wasn't fun doing the same change three times, since there are 3 different language versions of it.

Played Yukk and Bowling with Kari today as well and won at Bowling but lost at Yukk. I decided to upgrade Bowling a bit while he went on to play ToJH with Tomi and Ed. I think it's about time I removed the random number requester popup and I finally have an idea as to what to replace it with. Probably next month, I'll put it in... I know I said I won't work on it since it's a waste of time, but since it's turning out to be an interesting idea, I might as well put it in.

So, I've still have to finish up HG, WS, B5 and HumAliens. I like the slow pace of HumAliens so much I think I'm going to stretch it over the next few months. WS and the beginnings of B5 will probably get done tomorrow, I guess. Hopefully I'll h ave to time to work on them.

Played two games of LotR today, the first one with non-solo Smeagol, the second with the dwarves. Dwarves sucks against swarms and Naz... actually Naz can be really strong. I still enjoy playing Besiegers though - Gandalf and Elves are discarding their stuff, but I don't have to worry about the smirking Galadriel anymore because they X'ed her. I've got a hankering to play the bouncing Hobbits though...

Tomi was working on AD earlier and then on TOJH. I have no idea what he's up to. He's also offering X-Files away. Maybe he's just getting busy. Who knows what's next? Mythos to Alex maybe? Kapa has been busy playtesting everyone else's game. I think he should be made like official playtester or something. I saw Logan earlier as well working on CC, but I have no idea if an update is imminent.

Ed is hurrying out finish the next version of the engine, and to get VTES out ASAP. It's good to see a post about VTES on the forums... it'll stave off the questions from the players hopefully. Really though, some of those VTES players can be a bit impatient sometimes, but I guess they just really badly want to play. Martin said something about wanting whatever he's coded to be made available as well, so I am guessing that WW or Ed is the bottleneck. I have no idea there though and I'm not about to hurry them... afterall, perfection takes time!

Tony IM'ed me to say that the linked dice from Final Twilight works great. He's been upgrading WoT so much though, and when I tested it yesterday, the dice was too low-tech, so I suggested he get them upgraded as well. He's really burning it up with the updates. He's on errata now... and maybe later he'll be doing attachments. He's definately moving and shaking.

Haven't heard from Christoph lately, he's probably spending a bit more time offline now that Star Wars is done. Haven't seen Julien's Shadowfist update as well - I hope he gets that out soon, people are playing decks with proxy cards already. Someone should really ping Robert and Aaron to see if they are still alive. I haven't heard from either in ages.

-+@ And I Love Your Company @+-

This is the weekend update as I end my Sunday. I wonder how people get to do all the boring facts of their lives and condense them into a blog... wait, I already do that with a boring subset of my life.

Anyways, I thought I'd do a spot check today to see where I am with CCG Workshop stuff. Two thirds of the month has gone past and I should at least have most of the things on my list done. Well, I didn't plan on taking up the Bronx Project at the beginning of the month and that has eaten into my time... so let's start with that first then.

Bronx project - it's the no frills version of a game I don't want to announce at the moment. It has all the basic draw card/play card/discard card already done and I did some work on it yesterday. I was suppose to put in the dice and markers today but life happened, so it'll be done sometime next week. I'm also waiting for Bug to load up the game onto the engine as alpha and to setup the directories on the server so that I can see that everything works on the engine. Anyways, it should go public beta by the end of the month.

Portable adventures is the other thing I have to "finish" up by the end of the month. All I need to do are the pass and the next buttons for the adventure phase. I don't know why I dread that but I do. The other 3 things - Linda, stuff card with rolls, stuff card with bonus CP is really optional I guess. It's a pity I'm a bit burnt out on the game. I really should get into it a bit more to get my enthusiasm up to code.

The MND update for this month was done early on. The 50 card Elder's Legacy custom is all on the engine and I think the text would be as final as they can get. I'll probably announce that the set is finished on the anniversary of CCGW in November. Art is already pouring in (OK, trickling) for Shadowsfall Promo, the in between filler between the sets. I'll have to start work on those ASAP to finalise text to get them to a phase I'd be comfortable with them. I should dedicate an evening to sit down and sort that out. I also need to sort out the Elder's Legacy Promo and then the Tainted Glimpses cards. Urgh, lots of work there, but the crucial bits for this month is done.

Hamlet and Kings were the other 2 games that were scheduled to get updates this month and I can say they are done. I'm quite happy with the Kings update, and well, the Hamlet one is OK I guess. Not many people play those games though which is a pity, but I guess expected. At the very least, they are getting updated.

Bowling has been pushed back a bit because of the Bronx Project. Hopefully, I can get the motivation to finish the game next month - I really need to get Portable Adventures out of the way there so that I can concentrate on this.

Go Fish had a few updates to include new cards and to remove some of the other cards. Gameplay wise, it hasn't changed. Maybe I should organise a tournament for this to see what sort of response it'd get. Or maybe not. Hmm...

Wildstorms automation and Triple Triad scanning can be moved back to next month. After all I did mark them as optional. That would mean the workload for next month would be a bit on the heavy side. I hope I don't have to worry about Portable Adventures then.

Seems like a few things would be moved to next month, I guess I'll have to move one of next month's mega games to the month after... That would probably be Hyborean Gates, and I might put HumAliens as "optional" for next month. We'll see. There's not much going on in the HumAliens world at the moment. The game is mediocre at best, but it does deserve a chance I guess.

I still haven't made any firm announcement on WS Legends Solitaire yet. I guess I'm waiting for at least 2 out fo the 4 games I have in development to go public, so that would means that October would be the earliest... but it'd probably be around November or so. The engine's anniversay seems to be a good target as any to make that announcement.

The situation with B5 seems to be a bit depressing at the moment as nobody seems to be playing. I think I'll stick to my November schedule - yes, you read right, November as in early November - to finalise the Vorlon cards, unless play picks up and there's a huge demand for me to do them early. Somehow I doubt it. B5 players can't seem to be able to organise themselves for a game. Some new guy, azuredarkness, asked us for our IMs and contacts, but I have yet to hear from him asking for a game. Doesn't seem to me that he's interested, or maybe Billy beat him black and blue with one of the crazy decks Billy has been known to make, and he lost interest. Who knows?

I'm still waiting for Bug to make Crypt public, if only to offset the loss of the games last month. I'm going to say it'll take a few months to make up in numbers for the loss of those 9 games and Crypt and the Bronx Project will help. Of course there are a large segment of the population (or maybe I'm deluding myself...) waiting for the launch of VTES, but since that would be on a separate server, I wonder if it's going to be worth counting it in the usual stable of games. I suppose I could, but we'll have to see how that sets up. Hopefully, for the beta stage of the testing anyways, it'd be on the engine proper and then it could migrate onto its own server once things are finished.

TRagedy asked me about his app to be a PL. I explained that Bug is usually swamped. He wants to do his own original game... and so do so many of the people out there I guess. At least he knows programming so that's good. He's also been asking about Frank's Zoo, and that's something I can't answer. I have no idea how far along the game is and Thomas seems to work in spurts at best. I doubt he'd be capable of finishing it, or to get it to a playable stage, in the next 3 months. According to the forums, he started it late March/early April, so with the 6 months deadline, he should have it finished by early November. Somehow I doubt that deadline would be met.

I've got a poll running on the forums asking for which game people think I should adapt next. Two games are currently tied on top spot. I'll leave it for another month or so to see how fares either game... or maybe a third game will claim top spot. It could happen.

I've been playing some LotR O as well, not much though. I think I'm happy with the new incarnation of the Hobbits Tales / Sauron Besiegers deck. It works rather well, especially against Ringwraiths, has been known to take down Gondor fortifications and pure Dwarves FP. Haven't tested it against a nice Rohan deck. Hmm... I wonder if I can make a good Rohan deck with the cards I've got... perhaps when I have more time.

And time is something you have very little of when you play this game on the engine... just make sure you have got the power of the gods.

-+@ Through all these Shattered Emotions, there's a Lesson to Learn @+-

Where do I even begin? Chronologically might be best.

I finally had a look at the Tainted Glimpses cardlist for MND and finalised the 6 Arderial cards going into that list. I'll have to create 3 of those images, which means my work is cut out for me I guess. Still, 3 is not that bad. At least I know Arderial will have all cards in that set. Next up Bograth.

After that, I fixed Kings so that it closed out all the known loopholes. It plays better now IMO and I know that quite a few people have been playing it recently. I had to get Martin to help me out with the translations and it was a good thing he was around.

Quartet is finally back up again, not with the new things I had imagined, but with the old game minus a few cards and the addition of a few new cards. I'm still not sure if I should put in much effort to maintain this game. Still, it's a game and it's up. Hopefully, that together with Go Fish will form a good basis for the engine version of "Old Maid" or whatever politically correct form it gets transformed to be. With those 3, that "family" of card games should be complete.

Go Fish also had an update today - I had to put in Echelons of Fury into Quartet, so I decided to add the corresponding card to Go Fish as well. The Fury cardback isn't ideal, I got the box image from BGG and I superimposed on the Fire cardback, but I don't think the results are too obvious anyways, unless one looks at it with a magnifying glass (or the electronic equivilant), so I let it pass.

The forums had a minor update, and I also updated the BOT. I'm still amazed at the number of questions that get asked with typos and/or as single phrases where the answers could be anything. Well, maybe I should give 42 as the answer the next time.

I also played a few good games of LotR O today and had fun. Well, considering that I've spent a small fortune on it, I better have fun for quite some time. Haven't been motivated to build new decks, but I'm working on a good monoculture deck. No news from decipher if they the RotK Anthologies is being released on schedule. I do need to make an order from cardhaus soon and I'm waiting for that to get into stock before I make the order.

Didn't get to talk to Mike Nickoloff today. I think he's probably scared of me. Oh well. Didn't work on Portable Adventures as well, although I'm thinking I should sometime this week. However I think I'll work on Hamlet first, because that really should get some stuff done.

I sent Bug the Iron Maiden images - whatever that's done for playtesting anyways and the Firestorm text. I wonder if he'll have time to work on the images for some sort of playtest on the engine. That would be nice. I might have to see to it at some point when I'm even more fired up for Portable Adventures than I am now.

I also asked Bug to make Abduction public. That game is so cool to be played with. I have no idea when he's going to do that but I hope it's soon.

And ideas? Did you know that there's something from the house of ideas on the engine?

-+@ Pawing Success @+-

Well, I had the inspiration to work on more images for custom cards today for MND so...



Said card above is Umbu Paw, and the image is actually a composite of 3 separate images photoshopped together. The lighting is a bit off, but people who have seen the card have already been asking me where I got the image from... and were surprised when I tell them the source. I did 2 more cards as well - Brown Stuff and Arasyn, neither of which are as good as Umbu Paw, but I guess nobody's perfect.

I got grilled by funk and yurtra today on some of the cards. Brandon was there to back me up on most of them, and where there are obvious and glaring suckiness, I made an attempt to fix them. Still I wonder why I'm doing it if seems as if nobody is playing them. The MND customs aren't as well received as ... say... the Babylon 5 customs or the DoomTrooper ones.

MND aside, I'm still trying to build a good Besieger Shadow side for my LotR Online deck. It sucks big time at the moment, but that's because I'm missing one key rare... or more specifically, 4 copies of one key rare for the deck. Heh, it's going to be like pulling teeth to get those rares, and I wonder if I could retool the deck to work with no rares. Well, that's what deck testing is about.

And I guess I must be making inroads there. I've been invited to join a clan or something on LotR O - not that I think I qualify anyways. I'm still relatively new at the game though and my online ranking is nothing to write home about. Still it's nice to be accepted in a weird place. I guess camadarie is something that most anti-social CCG gamers crave for and they feel the need to do so online.

Oh, I played a game of Go Fish and another game of Earthquake today as well. I still can't believe how smooth Go Fish goes... I wish I could translate that into Quartet... but oh well. Earthquake has most of its bugs fixed as well so that's good. At least someone is playing it.

I talked with Spirit today... who asked me a lot of questions about games and what not. He's involved in Networking and support and not so much the software side of things, but he has been impressed by the quality of some of the games on the engine. Well, he's a shepherd though so let's hope he brings in some money for Bug. Someone else was also saying that they are still surprised that CCG Workshop is still on-going, despite the fact that not many people pay to play. I personally don't think Bug will shut it down anytime soon, particularly not with all the work he's been putting into it. Well, people haven't been paying, but sooner or later, enough people will pay to make it a success... hopefully.

The good news is that Bug should be back later today. I'm glad the server didn't crash while he was away though, which is a good thing. It should give him more confidence of going away and coming back to things still working.

My links section are still missing a few games - 2 Wildstorm Production games: FastBreak and WSS1, and the Wildstorm game that was licensed to WotC - C*23 which was part of ARC. Then there're a few more WotC licensed games - BattleTech and the other 2-3rds of ARC - Xena and Hercules. I did link up Kings and Reversi to the classic section.

And as for this weekend, I'm going to guess it's either Portable Adventures or Bowling. We'll see which one gets done (if any) by the end of the weekend.

Oh and remember Rapunzel? She was in a Tower Siege.