-+@ Sudden Illness @+-

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...

-+@ Recollection @+-

or Remembrance?



Art Credits:
Fog Crij by Jeffry Ransom, with photoshop effects by myself. Background by Holmberg.
White Kowl by Beth Zyglowicz
Kiradan by Cody Shipman

All 3 for EF. Two of those images were templated a long long while ago. Not much work happening on the custom cards, although I did get quite a bit of EL made into RP cards. Rewriting them though is a huge pain.

The DJ contest for Bash Brothers finally ended and not many people seemed happy with the choice of the eventual winner. Ah well. More people should read the rules to make sure that their entry satisfies all the points in the rules. The winner might have been different then. Also posted up the next contest, eventhough it doesn't begin till next week. Still, it gives people time to think about it.

Also posted up the rules for the new tournament. I have no idea how many people will join that one, but it's formatted such that attendence doesn't really count and there's no sign-ups. The usual suspects are poking their heads around it, probably trying to look for loopholes and super decks. Ah well, I guess that's what tournaments do in the long run.

Another competition that will hopefully start up soon will be the Babylon 5 league that Alwyn wants to organise. 8 people have now signed up for the league, and hopefully most of them will avail themselves to play. We still haven't got the rules and stuff for that league so that's another thing I'll be looking forward to. It's also a 3 months league IIRC, so hopefully Alwyn will give the official dates for the beginning and end.

Thomas promised another Doomtrooper league, but it hasn't materialised. I guess he's probably busy with the start of another school year to even think about the tournament. I've seen the troopers moving on to other things though, including one who's now playing Star Wars.

I saw a couple of Kult players the other day and an X-file player today. I wonder if there's a resurgence in those games. I'll find out soon enough at the end of the month. Conversely, MBOR seems to be winding down... someone logged in today and asked for a game with no takers. The other game that on the surface seems to be winding down is Doomtown - the sole shepherd resigned a few days ago.

I've been spending my time getting Hyborian Gates ready for play. There's still slightly over 100 cards to clip and make into cards, but that should probably take a couple of hours. The cards are deliberately not done in the best image quality, since they are not clippable and I know a lot of people would probably take them for other things. I did a test with one of them in the kit and it doesn't look too shabby after the border is placed back in. While I was on the kit, I also spec'ed up the play mat and it looked good, so I took a screenshot and posted it up on the forums. I doubt it'll get as much interest as Monster Rancher seem to have gotten.

Mark is still busy on Monster Rancher, and he thinks it'll be ready before the anniversary. Well, that would be good. He's of course, 2 - 3 weeks ahead of me game development wise and I hope that he won't run into any speedbumps. Tomi is probably working on Heresy now and I was just saying it would be cool if Heresy and Hyborian Gates are released on the same day. Well, that would take some planning though.

I don't think anyone else is working on games at the moment. Well, besides Ed that is. He's working on RPS when he feels like it in between coding for the engine. The next build is probably still a few days, if not a couple of weeks, away. Hopefully it'll be sooner rather than later because the bug with resuming games is a tad annoying.

I also updated the rules for AvP to now link in the scenarios instead of loading everything on a huge page. It looks cleaner. Also discovered that I don't have the Terminator rules, so I had to search Google's cache for a copy. Finally got that in. I think Terminator would be next after Hyborian Gates on the development path. Back to the grind...

-+@ Bounty Hunter @+-

I got some good bargains too...



Art Credits:
Tuyet by Jeffry Ransom, background by Matt Holmberg
Tide Hyren by Jen Reed, background by Matt Holmberg
Howitzer Primat by Jeffry Ransom, backgrounds and colours by Austin Gardner.

Another 3 from Exodus Flight. These look good. I'm just pulling them out of the hat, figuratively speaking, now that I've got a huge stockpile of images to use, thanks to the Dreamstorm templating exercise. I've also updated the icons on the Custom Card site to include one for EF, and added rows for the Insiider Custom Cards.

A quick run down for the custom card icons:

The Elder's Legacy icon. The gear represents that it's the first of the gEngine sets.
The Tainted Glimpses icon. An eye in the traditional core purple represents the set. Art by Justin Hillgrove.
The Twilight War icon. War is symbolised by the sword, which is flaming to overcome the falling twilight. Art by Alison Strom/Whryl.
The Exodus Flight icon. A modification of Insiider icon to show its Insiider roots and an X, from which the name eXodus originally originated. Art by myself.

And for the RP cards:
The Insiider logo, exclusively for the first RP set eXodus. The cards were templated without this logo. Art from Insiider/Jim Wong.
This is the first set logo for the RP cards - a cloud which was taken from the body of the Dew Tryter, a creature in the set, to represent the name of the set, Dreamstorm. Art by Austin Gardner.
The Arderian chime from the set, recoloured to serve as the logo for Chimefall, the third RP set. Art by Jeffry Ransom.

I added one card to TW as well - more on that below - and am working on a card for DJ. I was digging through more images by Whyrl and found this one that would probably make a great DJ card. The downside is that I have to change all my announcements from 7 cards to 8 cards. Not a big deal, I guess... if I remember where all the announcements are. It's a good thing I haven't heavily publicised it yet. At least I don't have to update the MND at CCGW blog because that doesn't have anything about numbers... I think.

The other major thing I started for MND this week or so was the Malovis Challenge. This is where people play 3 games with Mal and tries to win 2 out of 3. I've thrown in incentives for winning all 3 and for using Shadowsfall cards, so hopefully, those will be utilised. Mal is also building crazy decks since his challengers are allowed to name the decks they wish him to play - that was Mal's suggestion, I think it will bite him in the end probably, but ultimately, he'll have fun. Hopefully, this will revitalise the game on the engine.

The other major thing going on is the second part of "The Hunt". Four questions, three of them rather easy, the fourth is a killer. I'm making people work for it, but I dropped a hint earlier that Logan got so who knows what will happen soon. Maybe someone will pick up those 5 tokens... maybe they won't.

The new version of the engine has another defect it seems... detaching cards is buggy. I'm glad I haven't implemented things like that yet. Sometimes being low-tech is a blessing in disguise - it means games work even when the engine is wonky. The downside of it is that the game is lowtech, but for MND, that doesn't seem to be too big an issue at the moment.

Things are still quiet on the engine. JC is busy trying to get all the Rage stuff worked out, I think Martin is working on VTES and a few other things and Tomi probably has his fingers in quite a number of pies, whichever strikes his fancy. It's slow, but steady though.

Meanwhile Ed is working on the next bugfix release of the engines. He mentioned that he won't be dedicating as much time to the engine as previously, not that it's noticable anyways - he still spends a lot of time devoted to all things CCGW. That is a good thing.

I just had Nick Szankovics buzz me about doing Tanshihana on the engine. That poor guy has been trying to get the game online for a long time now. I reminded him again of our agreement that I'll code the game for him once he has 100 cards from 2 regions done and ready. He's got 18 more cards to go to reach there, so let's see what happens then.

I logged on to Cardhaus last week hoping to get some Black Rider cards, but was disappointed to find that they aren't offering them still. Which is a pain. I have been waiting to get my Black Rider cards for ages now. I did pick up a box each of each of the block openers - FotR, TTT and RotK. While there, I got a box of Allegiance, War of Factions. They have also dropped their prices for VotS and ND boxes, and I was going to get one of each, but decided it was too much, so I only got a box of VotS.

I haven't done too much to the AWoF box yet, although I must say the cards reminds me of Tempest of the Gods. I would put the quality at below Wheel of Time which seemed to capture teh genre rather well. The template is confusing, and there seems to be too many stats. Also the location of various things are inconsistant on the different card types - makes it a bit hard to locate things at a first glance. Ah well, it's apparently one of the cool new game of the past 12 months and there is some buzz going around about it. Would it last more than 18 months? Probably - the second expansion is already being designed, if not already printed.

The VotS box gifted me with a few interesting cards, including a Cawh, the cald version of the Rock Silth and an Aula, Mindseeker. Nothing big there. The major thing about the box of cards was that I noticed on the booster packing the Kintor image. That image has never been on a card as far as I know, so, a quick scan later and it's now part of TW. That prompted me to have a look at the other boxes. the DE packing has a magi that looks unfamiliar... that might make it into AE at least, although the image quality isn't going to be too good due to the fact that it's small. The VotS box itself has a good collection of creatures with a Nar magi... I wonder if I can use that for something. The Mowat could be promising.

The major thing I did yesterday was to sort out the LotR cards. There were 4 boxes to go through as I realised that I had never sorted my Shadows cards as well. I got some really good cards from Shadows and FotR, normal pulls from TTT, but rather boring pulls from RotK. I think I might have to resort to buying another box of RotK at the end of the day. Sorting out the cards and updating the lists (on Mahasamatman as well) took up the majority of the day. There were lots of poeple offering to trade me cards, but I haven't accepted any offers yet.

I retried the Gandalf RB deck again yesterday on LotRO... and I had to work to keep him alive. I don't think he's playable outside of a pure gandalf deck with elves and men to remove burdens and lots of skirmish events. He floods the pool too, so the only way to ensure survival would be to use the giant ents with G for Grand. I wonder how he stacks up against Uruks, but then again, at battlegrounds, there's that spell to discard conditions anyways. So...

-+@ Inspired @+-

A new month, a new CCG. OK, so I'm less than the title obviously to have to copy the card title from a CCG. And last month's CCG will be discussed below.



Art Credits:
Royal Aritex by Zyglowicz
Quagmire Hyren by Reed
Lava Lasp by Ransom with backgrounds by Nov.

Three potential cards for the Exodus Flight - the first two done over the past week or so. These are part of the Dreamstorm cards I've been templating for RP - I haven't even begun to report them anywhere except on Insiider though. I guess I should start another "bragging" thread on the custom card forums and to publicize it on the blog... or not. I'm actually enjoying templating Dreamstorm - which is a big change from templating eXodus. I think my comments on eXodus have made certain people a bit more aware of their shortcomings and downfalls (artwise), and some of them are really trying their best to up a few notches their artwork, which makes my work of templating easier, of course. I also "donated" a few TG images to Dreamstorm, particularly those that shares an eeriely similar name. People are going to start getting confused very soon I'm sure.

I haven't been working Twilight War in the meantime while templating Dreamstorm (and stealing some of those cards - name and art for Exodus Flight), but I did get some time in between to start the second Double Jeopardy contest. It's day 2 and there are 2 entries, so I guess that's off to a good start. The bad news is those two will probably be half the total entries I'll receive for this contest. I hope there'll be more though, but it's not easy designing a card.

Meanwhile, of the sets in testing, I'm a bit disappointed that nobody is testing out Keeper's Quest yet, but I guess it's still early days. The Nar cards of Tainted Glimpses, however, got a quick run thanks to Bobbydoc and freigabe and their end of the month tokens. I sent Mitch on to have a look at his comments... it's interesting how I'm delegating that part of the work, but since Mitch is a self-declared neo-Nar narcissist (hah!), I think he's the best person for the job.

It was nice though seeing people play with Elder's Legacy and Shadowsfall Promo cards for a change. I guess the engine's populace has long since accepted them as being the norm. Also had a conversation with Justin Zastrow today about his artwork and the game and stuff. He seems happy that more of his artwork are being featured on the custom cards. That's a plus for me I guess. We also talked about him attending the next MND worlds at GenCon Indy later this year... the first one not organised by 2i. I wish them all the best, although I wish I could be there.

And non-MND news... I actually had a playtest of YNDT last month which produced some rather good suggestions. I really think that a good playtest team would be a good asset for developers. Tomi has his team of one... maybe I should start developing my own team as well, one that would get together regularly, maybe once a month, and go test my games one by one. That's something to think about. Anyways, lots more to do on YNDT now.

Talking about doing stuff, I haven't updated my report for a while now... I'm sure that's due somewhere. Simply saying "Forward everything by another month" would be fine for most people I guess, but I should really get it up to scratch so that I know where I am... perhaps I should factor in a few other things as well and update it as per the new "realistic" schedule? Something to think about there too.

Engine-wise, not a lot has been happening. Martin did a DoomTown update and Tomi had a few updates for some of his games, and an update for Buffy. Otherwise it's slow for the month of July with no new games, but that doesn't mean it's a bad month. Summer is always sluggish... I did my usual other "end of the month" chores as well, and there are a few surprises, but those can be found elsewhere. I've also started a CCG related project of sorts... more here when I have more to show and tell.

I have been thinking about porting the computer game "Betrayal at Krondor" to a CCG. Obviously I won't be able to host that on gEngine because I neither have the permission from Midkemia Press or Raymond E. Fiest to use those names, or from Dynamix Studios or Sierra to use the images. Still it sounds like a cool CCG idea. It'll also try to emulate the game as much as possible, or at least I'll try to make it so...

What I have so far:

Win conditions:
1. Eliminate all your opponents
2. Be the first to reach Sethanon and obtain the lifestone (e.g. LotR's mechanic)
3. Fulfil certain conditions printed on the race specific "Objective" cards (e.g. mythos' adventures, B5 agendas, etc.)
4. Obtain a total score of 25 (from B5, WS, etc.).

Factions:
Kingdom
Pathatian
Moredhel
Elendel
Guild of Thieves
Magic-Users
Clerics
None (Quegians, Free Cities, Glamhedrel, Dwarves, Tsurani)

Card Types:
Character
Equipment - Quest, Jewel, Armor, Hand Weapon, Ranged Weapon, Magical Item, "no tag"
Events
Location
NPC - Non-Playing Character
Objective - faction specific
Quest
Spells
Traps and Merceneries

Stats:
Melee
Ranged/Magic
Agility

There will be no "active player" during a turn... everything will run like Babylon 5 or Mythos where initiative order is determined (or most probably predetermined in this case... I have no idea yet) and the players play cards one at a time going in rounds. The cost of the card will be paid from the "circular pool". Say in a 3 player game, it's player A then B then C. Each has 5 crowns in the pool to play cards with. Player A "wins" initiative and gets to goes first. Player A plays a card that costs 2 crowns. 2 Crowns get deducted from Player A, while 2 Crowns get added to Player B. So now Player A has 3 Crowns, Player B has 7 Crowns and Player C has 5 Crowns. If Player B decides to pass, he deducts 1 Crown from his own pool and passes it on to Player C to make it 3 - 6 - 6. This is to preventand unfair choke of sorts with tactical passing. When C plays a card (or passes), the costs get added to Player A's available pool, thus completing the circle. It's a bit complicated to explain, but hopefully gameplay would be more intuitive. Obviously, balancing issues would need to be worked out... not every faction will start with the same amount of Crowns a turn - pretty much like the Home card from Doomtown.

Also like Doomtown and Babylon 5 is that each player gets to start with one card, this one being the "Party Leader" which will determine the faction. I think I'll probably allow a free 3 points worth of characters to be played in addition to the leader during setup (similar to LotR and MECCG before that) so that ther's a ready "party" available to play with. I'm toying with the B5 rule that out of faction characters cost a bit more to play, say a penalty, as in MND. That's something to think about.

At the moment it's still rather close to being a LotR clone, with some of my favourite elements from other card games thrown in - the alternate victory conditions from Middle Earth and Wildstorms, the objective card to victory stolen from Babylon 5 and Mythos. The huge drawback in the design is that the parties have very little chance to interact with each other. Events will help some there - mind attacks by the moredhel spell casters, Navon's nighthawk attacks, etc. The only way around that I can see would be some Mythos style creature attack... with a twist. There'll be traps as well as enemies (both humanoid and creature and spiritual) that players can throw at other players.

Attack would be determined by agility - the fastest player/enemy gets to go first. Ranged attacks (including magic) will only be possible if the character is not assigned to an opponent to combat. Combat is a simple WS sort of thing - compare the numbers, although combat events and on card text should make things more interesting. Of course, location text and equipment, etc. may also help or hinder the combat. Unlike LotR, however, it's fight to the death ... or flee, which would probably turn it into something more akin to MECCG than LotR.

Points are obtained from Quests, which are cards you play when you meet certain conditions. I guess this makes them more like Mythos' Adventure cards instead.

Turn order would probably be similar to the LotR/B5 setup:
1. Beginning of Round and determine order (if required)
2. Play cards
3. Play next location card and move party
4. Play enemies
5. Combat - assign, play cards, determine results (recycle as needed or flee)
6. Draw
7. End of Round and victory checking.
Some of these phases will need better names.

Decks will probably follow LotR, with at least 30 either side and an equal amount or something like that. Well, I have no idea yet, it'll depend very much on how the game design moves on and what gets changed. I'm a bit excited about this though...

-+@ Whim of the Queen @+-

Wonder where's the king...



Art Credit:
Poisonous Zungg: Reed
Sikkada: Ransom/Nov
Rayalon Scholar: Zyglowicz

It's been a biggish day for MND custom cards today, so lemme run down the sets one by one.

Exodus Flight (currently collecting images) finally saw the light of day on the Custom Cards site and Forum. This set is mainly for the gEngine players, so they were invited to comment on the artwork and the names. I'm sure some of the cards will either be dropped or renamed. More will probably be added when I start templating Dreamstorm (and later Chimefall) cards, but at the moment, the current list will suffice. I also have to remember to get the rations correct - there should be more Nar and d'Resh cards in the set than say, Cald or Arderial. At the moment, that doesn't seem to be so. The ad for the set is from Whyrl's Lunar Aversion, and I think it looks nice. Can't wait to put it onto gEngine ad rotation.

Double Jeopardy (curently being designed) saw the 6th preview card being put up at the Custom Cards site. This is after the preview on the engine yesterday and the 2nd DJ Contest being setup, also yesterday. It's generating some buzz among the players on the engine which is a good sign. I've also asked for suggestions, both on gEngine Forums and on the MND at CCGW blog as to where to post the preview for the last and final card in the set. I'm going to look forward to the answers.

Twilight War (currently in development) has been put on the back-burner, but I did manage to figure out a few things to do for the next few images. The text has yet to get approved though and that would probably take mega time to do so.

I just realised today that Keeper's Quest (currently in playtesting) does not have a card of the name - it really should. I guess that would mean going back to the drawing board to find an image to make a Keeper's Quest promo card. That would probably up the set to 5 with the additional spell. No big deal there I guess, but the text would probably need a tournament to get designed.

Tainted Glimpses (currently in playtesting) got a playtesing report yesterday. It's good to see people still trying to use the cards and trying to figure out the combos and stuff. The game also saw Delcea, a Shadowsfall (currently in play) magi, being played as well, which was definately interesting. TW still has a long way to go before the text can be finalised, but at the moment things are looking good.

Elder's Legacy seems to be almost forgotten by this point in time. The 50 card set is in playing and I'm going to say no news is good news.

Other CCGW news? I don't think there's much that I know of.

Mark is still busy with Monster Rancher, and seems to be the only person (besides Martin?) who's working on a new game... I saw a number of Mille Bornes players today, and it seems to be picking up steam on the engine. Someone advertised on game.com to pick up the players there and brought them over... I wonder if game.com is a free site or a pay site.

Even the troopers are quiet, as their last campaign tournament was a huge bust, or so it seems. I wonder what else Thomas has up his sleeve. It is summer though and it seems that troopers also disappear for a while as well.

A few days back some guy from Ophidian posted in the CCGW forums about checking to see where the agreement is at... I wonder if that means we will be fasttracked into getting the game onto the engine. Hmmm...

I also had a look at automating the encounters in Portable Adventures today. Gave me a headache and it didn't work in the end. I haven't been coding for so long that I'm so rusty at it. Hopefully, I can get that done before the end of the month. Well, I think I'm going to push back everything that's not done by another month... which sounds bad I suppose, but I feel that there's no point doing shoddy work when I'm unmotivated and then suffer later... might as well wait until things are fired up to do the coding.

-+@ Massacre @+-

I'm in the mood for some mayhem anyways...




4 Cards... Art Credits:
Wanderers by Alison Strom/Whyrl
Double Jeopardy by Rich Werner
Bash Brothers by Alison Strom/Whryl
Secret Lovers by Alison Strom/Whyrl

I made Double Jeopardy today, along with a whole bunch of TW cards. The other 3 were templated a few weeks back. I actually previewed Secret Lovers to Mitch Wyatt (aka Malovis), who then replied that DJ was going to be his favourite set. Heh, I can guess why - 2 Ard/Oro magi and a Nar/Naroom one. Those are all the cards in the set though - 6 cards, 5 of which have 2 different templates, and a promo to cover it. These small promo sets are nice to do though. They are small.

TW on the other hand has just passed the two-third mark. That's the easy mark. For my full 100(+) card sets, the marks are half, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 85% 90%, 95%, 98%, 100%. Takes about the same time to go from 0 to half and from half to 2/3 and 90% to 95% and 98% to 100%. It's because there are less images for the last few regions (particularly d'Resh and Nar, but especially Paradwyn and Bograth!) and that's tough. I'm happy though to have reached the 2/3 mark. 8 more cards to the 3/4 mark then 5 cards to the 4/5 mark. Those would start the tough bits.

Robert Hicks (aka Silver) actually IM-ed me today to talk about MND. I showed him his Chaos Jile and not only was he pleased with that, but he gave glowing praise of the whole of TW so far. Well, at least someone likes it. I'm sure more people like the cards out there, but they are just too scattered and too busy to even get together and play. Such a pity though.

I guess all this was brought about by the large amount of spamming of KQ that I did over the weekend when I added the cards onto the engine. So that means 2 sets (one of them promo) are on the engine after playtest - Elder's Legacy and Shadowsfall Promo, 2 more (again, one of them = promo) for playtesting - Tainted Glimpses and Keeper's Quest, and 2 more (another promo set here) in development - Twilight War and Double Jeopardy. This looks busy. And this is how things were when 2i were up and running. There's also Exodus Flight, Native Spirit and Ancient of Days, but those are so far flung into the future that I don't even want to think about them.

People have been going crazy with the new Bloodlines cards... lots of games going online with the cards as people try to feel their way around the cards. I've already updated two of my decks... bouncing hobbits / forest nazguls seems to be much hated by almost everyone, particulary when I get all the cards in hand and the hobbits run to 9 while the Naz scares people away from second moves. That deck is rare intensive though, but the staples in there aren't.

The other deck is my non-solo Smeagol coupled with Evil Men archery. Well, I can couple it with Besiegers as well, but since the Besiegers didn't get any new card (the only 2 new Sauron cards were Sauron himself and his staff), I'll pass on the Besiegers. What I am interested in is a good non-solo Smeagol with Gollum on the flip side. That should prove interesting, but I'll have to think about what cards are needed in that deck.

Kari has been busy with Gandalf yesterday. It didn't survive too well. His deck-building skills seems to be trial and error, very much how everyone else does it I suppose. I can't wait to see his Rohan/men deck though. That with Burden Naz might be interesting.

Tomi continued yesterday working away on his games. I was a bit surprised to see X-Files got an update over the night, but he's probably just doing things over the weekend while he can. Small updates, but constant updates anyways, to show that the game is at least being thought about even if nobody plays them. I should do that more often as well.

Joshua was asking about AGoT on the engine. Erm... no, I don't think so, but someone else has already made a AGoT client out there. I am still downloading all 115 MB worth of data. That's a killer though. He should at least package the stuff in smaller files or something. It would be good to learn how to play AGoT though... I've always wanted to learn that game. However, Martin cautions me that CoC is a game of who has the most Rares, so AGoT will probably be the same, but I hope not.

Ack! There's still people who's after me to be a Simon Cowell for CCGW articles. Argh! I definately do not want to read through 2 or 3 badly written article on games I have no idea what they are going on about. I have better things to do with my time. Really. Like making lots of grammatical and spelling mistakes when I type out my blog...

-+@ Ok wise guy, lets see you do that again @+-

I haven't had so much fun and laughing choosing a title for my blog for a long time. Just in case Martin is still guessing, this card has a base set and an additional expansion set and the rarities are Common, Uncommon, Rare, SuperRare, UltraRare and Promo.



Art Credit:
Solar Charge: Werner/Gillette
Guarded Entrance: Zastrow
Core Jile: Hicks, with background by Holmberg
These are Twilight War cards and I really should be getting on and making more of them, but I really haven't got the interest. Solar Charge is another Solar card for Relaura, Guarded Entrance uses the full artwork that Justin did for Rock Balamant in EL. You can tell I'm reusing the image. Core Jile was submitted by Robert Hicks as "Baby Jile" with the instruction"do whatever you want with it". Well, it was a bit misshapen, so I made it Core. I think I need to slow down TW and get TG playtested in the interim.

Talking about TG playtesting, I made a realy bad stalker's deck today. I don't know why, but I can never make good stalker only decks. I guess stalkers just isn't my style of play. Played Bert with his anti-creature Core deck and had most of my stalkers stolen. Oh well, live and learn. I don't suppose stalkers will be key until something like Weave Seed is made for them, which is why I'm not making a Weave Seed for stalkers - it's over-reliance on one card. I made a few minor tweaks after the playtesting though.

The big news is that VTES has finally started accepting beta players officially. It's being done thruogh WW's site so that means we don't get to admin squat - which is good! Let them do the work! Some days I feel so swamped with all the goings on on CCGW... like at the moment, I'm trying to help this poor Polish player to get his credit card accepted by the website.

Other news... yeah right! Mondays are always quiet and so I barely get much done in my Tuesday blogs. Tomorrow though, Urland gets an update for the panic chip! And on Friday, YNDT goes for a playtest spin.

-+@ New Mystery Machine @+-

A new month, an new CCG to get card titles for... and that one is rather appropriate.



Art Credits:
Yirid: Werner/Gillette
Dusty Habob: Werner/Gillette/Shreve/Holmberg
Night Sandsinger: Werner/Gillette/Goodman/Holmberg

I did say I'll put up the Nar TG cards today, but since I did the last 2 remaining TG cards for d'Resh, I thought I'd put those up instead. These cards were based mostly from existing cards - Hasseth, Habob and Sandsinger. It's a great trick to reuse images from existing cards.

Yes, last 2 as in I'm all done now. 100% finished with all the artwork for TG. I'm so relieved. Next up would be to put these cards up onto the engine for playtesting. Hopefully they'll come of age.

Talking about coming of age, I really have to get Shadowsfall Promo off playtesting and onto playing proper. Also would need to update the engine rules for "Novelty format". It's going to be interesting though to see new cards entering play.

The beginning of the month also heralds in a few other things - Keeper's Question #4 has just started today, and hopefully, people will flock to it. It's going to be a bit difficult to design for it since it costs X. May's Elder's Legacy MND tournament is also underway, the signup thread was started on the CCGW MND forums. The rules were tightened a bit so hopefully more people will qualify, but the deck restrictions were relaxed a lot, so hopefully more people would join.

The Doomtrooper themed tournament also starts today, and this time people will be rewarded with tokens to encourage them to play. Hopefully, those crazy troopers will play more games. There already has been a number of games played. I guess some people just can't wait but to burn up their tokens on the tournament.

Mark has also been busy these few days. There's the GRfOS tournament today, and although he's not organising it, I'm sure he'll be around for it. He's also finalising Summer Camp and there's a Sideshow playtesting session tomorrow. He seems to be having fun with his finger in so many pies. I think he's also slowly working up Power Cardz too.

Tomi uploaded a new version of Mythos yesterday. I think that was the result of the post-update of Yahtzee/Kismet yesterday with Logan, where a comment or two leads to an entire update. That's how most of us work though and I guess we are comfortable around each other. It's a nice environment. I sometimes wonder if we are a bit clique-y, but then again, the NDA sets us apart from everyone else anyways.

Craig doesn't seem to be able to take comments rather well. He made what sounded to be an outburst in the UC forums which Mark replied with actual coding info. I had to move that to the coding forum so that it doesn't violate the NDA. Yes, I'm careful about things like that. I have an entire blog and I know everything I write here doesn't contravene the terms of the NDA.

I'm actually writing up the monthly statistics report in another window as I'm typing this. Last month was the first month that the number of free tokens were dropped to 5 and well, the numbers show that there hasn't been a drastic reduction in the number of games played. That's a good sign I guess.

-+@ 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.

-+@ Entrench @+-

I guess that's how I feel about certain things...



Black Riders releases offline this coming weekend, and here's the former hobbit everyone hates to love... or love to hate. Not too many fellowship side cards, or shadow cards either, but this one culture is unique in having cards for both sides. It pretty much summarises the Smeagol/Gollum dichotomy.

I tried Noble Leaders over the weekend. Coupled with men they were average. I suspect men would be good with Rohan, but I don't have all the crazy rare Rohan rares, nor do I want to get them since they'll be rotated out in online play in October. Oh well, guess I just have to make do with what I have.

Talking about dichotomy, I'm of two minds regarding gToons these days. I've probably dropped to the lower high 800s by now, which isn't a pity. However, lots of people are still searching for the codes to the really really sought after cards there - jawbreakers and slams. Unless you have a lot of moolah, don't bother getting them. You can, however, beat slam and jawbreaker decks with a properly built deck - it's not easy to do so, but it's more rewarding to do it that way.

I've been working out quite a bit with MND the past few days. Made more cards for Twilight War and some of them looks rather good. I don't know if that's going ahead or not. I finally got the pencils for the Ploomb from Robert (stalker) and proceeded to colour it in. The results are on the MND on gEngine blog, so I won't repeat it here. I'll have to modify it slightly and recolour it for Paradwyn though. No idea when I'll do that, but definately when I find the motivation to do it, it'll be done.

Three more days till the start of the March MND Elder's Legacy tournament. I've been playing against quite a number of decks in test. I finally saw Amara, Beauty in a deck, although the deck didn't even do anything interesting with her. Still, she might be well protected in a deck with Good Ol' Ashgar and perhaps Gar or Barak. Then again, maybe not.

I've been helping Tony out with more coding... he seems very enthused about the whole thing. I still remember that honeymoon stage of first being a PL - the feeling of being invincible and stuff like that... it's a good feeling. Hopefully, he'll stick around for a while and not only finish up transforming WoT into something that's updated and slick, but will also go on to do a few more other games that's a bit long in the tooth.

Martin finally upgraded VTES to the next all singing, all dancing version, or so it seems on the forums. I haven't had the time to test it out yet. I think it'll be going up as an official WW beta in a few weeks, once WW are satisfied with everything. It sounds exciting I guess. Hopefully, the images server will be stable by then... if it hasn't already been moved to the main server.

Mark has been busy incorporating the new features into Sideshow. I got a peek at it, but since it's not yet public, or anything, I won't spoil anything for anyone. Well, I can be cryptic and say it's a Lord of the Rings sort of the thing, in the more traditional meaning of that phrase.

Kari was telling me he hopes Tomi will get DoA up soon. Well, I doubt it somehow. It's not as if that's an easy game to code. I should have told him to offer to help out though... then again, maybe help out might be something Tomi isn't after. I have no idea. One think Kari did tell me is that he's being motivated to learn how to code further and finish up WSSG some. Yay for him.

Logan was busy over the weekend reupdating most of his games to the server after they resetted it back to what it was about a week ago. That must really suck IMO. I had to re-upload 4 of my games as well, so I know how that feels. It's a good thing I know when I updated what just by going through my blog, so this has been a helpful tool for me.

Ed has been busy working on the engine for WW, and I think most of that will spillover to the main engine as well. There seems to be quite a number of stuff developed specifically for VTES and RSP, which have a variety of use outside of those 2 games. I really need to find my game adaptating muse soon to enable myself to take advantage of those cool stuff. I had Martin explain quite a number of them to me, since most of the stuff has been developed for VTES. Overall, it seems really, really powerful. Portable Adventures will probably be the first game to make use of them... once I get my act together to start working on it.

I'm more motivated on working on the forums, and other admin stuff these days, instead of doing actual coding. Does it suck? I think not. Well, if anyone wants to crack the whip at me, and by anyone here, I don't mean just Ed, let me point you to the score of other games I've adapted for the engine. (Just for Martin: score in that last sentence doesn't mean "points", but it means 20, a score of eggs = 20 eggs, just like dozen = 12. Of course, there are other meaning for the word score, besides those 2.) Anyways, the forums are still getting a few minor tweaks here and there, it isn't easy being a global moderator. As I told the rest of the ghosts, with great power comes great responsibility...

There's admin, then there are tournaments and events. I've reported the MND one, and I really should get ready for the Sandwich Shop one. Kev said he'll re-upload the revised rules and the updated game with the new promo on Tuesday. Hopefull that'll be enough for me to get up to speed on everything. I doubt anyone will approach me to play a game, but who knows, there could be some desperate people looking for tokens. Then again, probably not. Most people barely use up all 15 of their tokens a month... and of course, the silver just carries over and over and over.

Of course, there's always custom card making. I'm knee deep in MND with one set in playtesting, and getting the 2nd set onto the engine as well. Then there are the Keeper's Questions which would define the entire set - I'll probably need to tweak the final results there to get them into something that would be interesting and fun to play with on the engine... that'll be in 2 or 3 months time when the competition finishes it course. Of course, there's also Twilight War which may or may not go ahead, but still some work is being done there to determine the feasibility of the whole project. So far the results are encouraging.

Then there's Silk Road or Project CHuckie CHeese. I finally decided how I want the card templates to look, although without any art, they might suck. We'll have to see how advanced my graphics skills may be (or not as the case may be). If and when they are done, I'll probably post them up here as a preview for everyone else to see. And no, they won't be done in time to post them here.

So there are lots on my plate... as always. And this is only a small part of my life! Honest!

-+@ Twisted Dreams @+-

You know, it's a new month and I'm still posting card titles from last month. I guess I'm just gonna do more of these.



Let's do LotR first then. Kari has really been at me for hints on how to get started. He's already spent more than 100 Euros... which is probably about US$200 by now. See, here's someone who has no qualms about spending money on an online CCG, and it's people like that who seems to propt up World's Apart, despite whatever ugly rumour that is circulating around about WA.

Anyways, kapa is opening up his box of Reflection boosters and telling me whatever rares he's pulling. I remember when that happened to me and I was doing the same thing with Brash. Oh well, it's more fun I do admit, to be able to share your pulls with someone else.

I'm still trying to build a good fighting hobbit deck but haven't been very successful. I need something to remove threats. Simple Living is great for wounds, Sudden Fury is great for defense, Home and Hearth is great for burdens, but I have nothing against threats. Time to go a hunting. Maybe 9-fingered Frodo...

I haven't even looked at my gToons game and rank... I'll probably drop back to 900+ after the weekend. Oh well. Not much to do there, but they definately need to fix a few bugs, and add on a few more cards to enable the heroes and the animals to challenge the jawbreaker decks.

Didn't work on anything CCGW at the moment. The only thing that I could work on and update are B5 bold text and I'm still trying to consider all the issues of doing what I'm going to do there. MND, Bowling and HumAliens needs updates to the images server, so those are out of the question. Maybe the images server will get fixed this weekend.

MND has been going on full swing, as I got to observe both the US players and the European players going at it today. Most of them were refining their tournament decks, although not all of them have signed up. I hope those who have already signed up, including WindRider, who did so today, will play at least 3 - 4 games so that there are more qualifiers. I've also decided to penalise the people who signed up last tourney buy didn't play... they'll be forced to play 4 games first before any of their games will count. Likewise anyone else playing them won't have the game credited as well. Oh well, works both ways.

Slumber has suddenly gotten a lot more entries today... I guess this Keeper's Question really is a tough one. The details of my rant can be seen at the MND at CCGW blog so I won't repeat them here. The other thing that might explain the popularity is the fact that the prize includes a free win for the March tourney. It's sorta cool how things are being tied in I guess. Do I like any of the entries so far... I did one until I thought about it and realised how broken it was. I guess I'm secretly a power gamer at heart as well.

I know I might be rushing it, but I think I'm going to finalise Shadowsfall Promo by the end of April so that people will get to use them in the May tourney. I dunno though, that's only 12 cards and not all of them are all powerful anyways. It all depends on the meta that's currently in play and at this point in time, that's Core with theft and Cawh outside Orothe. Forgotten Dancers are already being staples in decks. I predict dessicate or stormcloud will be staples soon if Mitch keeps up his scary Cawh decks. We shall have to see.

Mitch wrote a tournament report for the last tournament. I've yet to put it up yet, but I think I should do it soon. Maybe I should go and edit a few WGO and FPN while I'm at it to put in additional infomation. I've yet to see Frank's redone Catagon article. Perhaps he got busy building his scary anti-everything tournament deck. Who knows? Anyways, the tournament report is up, and I've taken the opportunity to put in 3 more of the EL cards. It's always nice to spam them around I guess.

While doing that article though, I noticed a typo on the Evil Eye. A quick update and an upload to the custom card site was done... I hope the engine's version doesn't have that mistake though. While there, I took the opportunity to correct the Charybdis Wellisk as well. Also found out where I could justify the text in Photoshop as well, which is a good thing. At least I know Shadowsfall Promo magi will get nice looking justified text from now on.

Doug asked in the forum which is the CCG with the least cards, so Tomi replied Crow with 123 and Martin tried to muscle in by answering Planet Petri with 80. Well, as Kev said later in that post, Planet Petri is a Constructible Card Game... also a CCG, so I guess that counts. I countered though with Final Twilight which has 68 cards and Sandwich Shop which has 66 cards and RPS, which has 3 cards. What followed was an interesting next 2 posts where Martin tried to disprove that Sandwich Shop and RPS were CCGs. I begged to differ, since those 2 games uses cards to build "customised" decks (although that a joke in the latter game), and unlike Planet Petri, play isn't limited to a grid or a board. I also think he was seriously confused though. I mean, it's an easy mistake to confuse RPS with RSP. The former is a card game that Tomi created, the latter is a board game by Pair-of-Dice Games. I've got to remember that Martin probably hasn't been around as much as the rest of "us" and little things such as RPS would probably be before his time. And just because I like the RPS cards so much, here they are below:

Hmm... come to think of it, maybe I should organise a Sandwich Shop tournament for St. Patrick's Day. Might be fun... might also be a washout. But at least I get to try out the new rules that Kev added a while back. That's an idea though.

Nate got to me today asking if I have looked through his rules for card making and stuff. I guess I really have got to go read them somewhere. I'm lazy though to make cards for more games. I don't mind playtesting and building decks and critiquing cards, but to actually make cards take too much time and effort... especially with the amount of stuff that I know now about card making. Well, one of these days.

-+@ Sunburn @+-

Not that I am or anything... I haven't been sunbrunt since I was 10...



More LotR cards, just because I've been playing with them since the weekend. Hence the lack of time for anything else. I built a nice little fun that that takes ages to play, but as usual does all sorts of cool combos that bores my opponent to death! It's definately fun for me and that's my sort of deck, and not the power one that kapa is gravatiting towards. Yes, Kari signed up for LotRO and is actually buying more and more cards. I pity him somehow... he's gonna find his credit card bill to be way too much at the end of the month.

My gToons rank is mid-800s as expected. Played a few games today where I lost to a Ed, Edd and Eddie deck and a superhero deck. The last one only because I chose the wrong colour. I was outplayed though and he did deserve to win. Won the other 2, but I think that about puts me even in rankings, so I doubt I'll move much as a result of today's playing.

Let's do MND news next...

After Mitch (malovis) traded Doug (ultradoug) a Sailor Moon game for the last tournament game, Mitch got the required 7 games to win the competition. It took a lot of haggling I'm sure for them to play that game. Still, I'm glad at least someone won it. The sign-up for the next tourney is up and there are already 4 names on the list and 2 more which I'm a bit reluctant to add, but we'll have to see.

Daniel (dartax) posted the tourney report on the forums. I added a few cards and posted it up on the CCGW article section. It's a good read. I really enjoyed it. Frank (NKX) wrote an article today and asked for comments. I asked him to correct a few typos before I put it up on the articles section. Also updated the FPN and the WGO with the news about the tournaments and the new Keeper's Question tournament...

The second Keeper's Question competition is also up. I can't seem to access the custom card site due to some weird internet problem so I have no idea what is posted. I've been told that there are already 2 entries and it's only the first day. 19 more days or so to go. Hopefully, it'll get quite a number of entries since I've sweetened the pot this time by including as one of the prizes, an automatic win for the March tourney.

I got 2 MND booster box today - a ND and a VotS box. It's the first time I've got 2 boxes of MND at one go and I've already opened the cards. Can't say I'm too thrilled with the cards... haven't been too thrilled with them for a long time now... since they aren't MY custom cards. Oh well. Wish I could afford (and I don't mean monetary terms) to print those cards. Actually Nate told me he found a printer for the custom cards at 3.5 cents a card, yes, that's a dime and 2 pennies for 2 cards or $1.75 to print the entire EL set. Yikes! Cheap. The catch is that I'll have to print 1000 copies, which means the inital cost for the entire set would come to... $1750. Urgh.. and that excludes shipping... I guess I'll have to pass.

Other CCGW end of month news - updated the plates post, which involves removing Tomi from Heresy. It's one of the games he's probably interested in, but he doesn't want to tie it up if someone else wants to do it while he's working on DOA. Surprisingly there was some interest in the game on the forums today... but according to Tomi the site with the Heresy spoiler is down. Oh well.

I did the player statistics for this month as well. MND had a huge boost because of the tournament and I'm glad for that. Shadowfist players are coming up in full force though and taking the engine by storm. Oh well, mon chien est mort!

And I did post up the end of month report a month early. I wonder if anyone actually reads those... I think Ed still reads them... poor him. Must be torture reading them. There's a new section in there too, mostly for my own use.

Quick rundown on the other PLs - I have already mentioned Tomi and Heresy. Nuff said there. Martin just IM'ed me to tell me that a correction is needed to a previous blog - he hasn't scanned in all the cards from the recent VTES set. Logan actually has been fixing the WGO bugs that have been cropping up. WTG! Logan! Not many people are working on the gMLs since the images server is incommunicado. Oh well... I've got to remind myself that I still have a Final Twilight upload to put up there.

Christoph was asking about how am I loading images on the FPN since the images site is down... well, I've been using my own site for those images... they work fine there. I also offered to all other PLs the opportunity to use my site if they wish. However, most of the PLs, with the exception of perhaps Timmie, have their own websites and such. I also added the Galactic Empire and Dr. Who icons to the forums today. It doesn't look to have too much gears now... although I still think there are too many gears on the forums. I could definately do with more of those cardbacks.

Also talked with Nate about the possibility of running a Spring Soltice Final Twilight tournament on gEngine. He's happy to do it I guess, but he's a busy person with his helo and all. We'll have to see what comes of that.

OK, so much for this. Kari is nagging me for a game, and I'm gonna look for more cardbacks online to put on the forum. Whee. Burnt out!

-+@ Heal @+-

That's probably the simplest title of my blog yet to date. It seems appropriate after yesterday and my gratitude for those of you who've been concerned about my well-being. I'm better, but barely.

Images for today, since I'm not at home...



Yes, that's the last of the EL images for the time being... and today seems to be a MND day...

Threw together a tournament MND deck... oh, I'm getting ahead of myself again. I started a Elder's Legacy tournament yesterday, with the rule that each deck should have at least one Elder's Legacy magi, so people are scrambling to get such a deck ready for the tournament. The prize is a whopping 15 coppers, so hopefully that will draw enough people for it. So, I made a deck with Relaura that is specifically built for her and she isn't too bad. The deck is sucky though, but for fun play, it's not too shabby.

The middle image above isn't an EL image but one of the 4 for the Keeper's Quest promo. I think I'll make the March tournament (if the February one is a success) a Keeper's Question tournament, where the winner gets to suggest the text for the puzzle boxes.

Didn't get to play gToons or LotRO, although, LotRO seems to be making inroads on CCGW. How? Heh, I'm not going to say... at least not yet. Watch this space.

Today was also a day I got to talk with all 3 of the triumvirate and it was rather fun to just talk about nothing in particular (or nothing that can be mentioned in public anyways). The usual coding stuff, me spreading rumours, stuff like that. Personal stuff as well, which I doubt will interest anyone.

I can say that Martin posted in the forums that the VTES beta will be ready next month if not by the end of this month. Whether everything else can be ready by then remains to be seen, but people are already queueing up for the beta test so who knows what's going to happen. It's going to be fun to watch.

I had to rebuke Doug (ultradoug) on the forums today - he is just misunderstood I guess, but his online antics are ... well, borders a bit on the disturbing side. Well, hopefully he'll behave online in future, although somehow I doubt that he'll be behaving for long.

Talking about Doug, Robert is finally going ahead with his Sailor moon fan made expansion. It'll be interesting to see how things go there. He was busy for a while and sorta lost track of CCG Workshop, but now that he's (maybe) back on board, hopefully things will progress faster.

Oh, and not that it would interest anyone, but I cleared my forum PMs today. It was at 86% which is a bit excessive, so I had to purge most of the old stuff. I have nothing later than 6 months back anyways, with more than half of those in the last month or so, most of which is not important. The bulk of those were from Ed who it seems prefers to use PM. Heh, I know this is probably the most boring thing I've blogged about. Oh well.

The big news today is that the What's Going On section on the engine is now editable by all ghosts. I promptly put up info on the Blue Furok competition and the MND tourney, which subsequently broke the whole thing. Yay for me, breaker of all that's good and working. It got fixed finally though by Ed which is a good thing.

And there's a new sub-class of PLs it seems. Just when I thought things couldn't get any more complicated they do. Well, let me list the PLs just for fun:

1 PL who is Bugladen
8 PLs who are also ghosts
5 non-ghost PLs who are in charge of a game
4 PLs who are alternates logins of PLs
3 PLs who are assistants to PLs
2 PLs without any games public yet
1 PL who isn't even in charge of a game.

or a total of 24 PLs or 20 individuals. Wow.