-+@ The Silver Crown @+-

Silver, thorns... what's the difference?



Art by... well Nintendo. These are all screen caps from the Game Boy Game. Due to the lack of images though, they were used for AoD... or will be in AoD. Currently I'm only at something like 68 out of 100 images. I hate getting the last 30 or so images because that's usually the hardest, but these days, I've got Senior Araiza to help out, I think...

A new artist has shown up on the custom card forums with some rather good sketches. Alas, he doesn't have a scanner for one and two, he's below 18. He's offered to do art for the custom cards, but I had to turn him down due to his age for legal reasons. Well, the good side is that he now has 2 years to prepare sketching and drawing MND style.

The Rage people have finally decided that the tournament that they were in had run long enough and have called it a day. The results have been published on the forums and I had to copy and paste it to the main page as well. Not sure I did a good job there, but at least it's giving the game some publicity. The sad thing is that I don't think there's a tournament to take over from this one. Oh well.

I asked Tomi today about Colossal Arena. According to him it's done, but it needs playtesting and it's not available public yet. Like I mentioned previously, it's just a variant of Titan, with different rules, the same way that Yahtzee can be played with the standard or the Scandinavian rules. That's exciting though.

Going through the image showcase, here's one I did a while ago. It's Pok from the card, blown up so that I can fit the circlet... or crown of thorns on his head. The only bit that's new is the circlet, everything else is from the card. I thought this image was fitting since some religious groups celebrate some historical guy wearing a crown of thorns yesterday.


Pok by Gillette, pencils of circlet by Joe Araiza, colours of circlet by myself.

-+@ Stand like a Fool @+-

Happy April's Fool. New CCG for titles. The contents of todays blog may or may not be real.



Three more cards from Ancient of Days
Weird Lightning by Nick Szankovics
Duel by Kaku Watanabe
Zap by Matt Holmberg

I'm still in the midst of collecting images for AoD, and design for the set isn't schedule to start until the second half of the year, although the designers are probably itching to get started. I've recruited at least 2 new designers for the set and I'm sure they are rearing to go, although I've had to pour cold water on them a few times just to get things managable.

Meanwhile EF has started playtesting with the first 4 regions already on gEngine and the next few scheduled for the next few months. This is the first custom set that is being playtested by a select group to hopefully maximise the feedback and to prevent the unsaid negative atmosphere regarding cards that are extremely powerful. I hope it works out better.

This will probably be the final month that TW will be in playtesting, it will be made custom legal and public next month. Hopefully all the balance issues can be fixed in time. Lisan is still a potential big NPE and cards like Barak, Leader and Forest Well are hopefully fixed. I still wanna see cards like Brynn, Duwas and Chana being playtested some.

Meanwhile I've said that people who want to design their own custom cards can have a crack at it provided that they design their own sets. The same standards will be applied to those cards if they want it to be added to gEngine. 3 persons and an entire group (those crazy Brazillians) have taken up the challenge and I wish all of them well... although one person has almost partially given up. Oh well, it definately ain't easy.

Otherwise I haven't been up to much on gEngine... but that doesn't mean other people haven't been busy.

Logan finished Maul of America in February and it's now in open testing on the engine. I helped him cleaned up some of the images for that game and gave him some suggestions as to how to handle a few image issues. Of course, what I did was miniscule compared to all the other work that he's done. And there's also something inspired by the iPod in there as well apparently... His other games also had small updates during the interim. I would take that as a good sign

The Shadowfist league finally finished and the winner was announced. That was a long league but at the end, there weren't that many people playing. Hmm... The Mythos tournament players have also just got their prizes and the forums are abuzz about it... a few weeks back. Meanwhile the current Rage tournament is still ongoing, but things seems pretty slow there as well.

While I'm on Rage, Aiden made his debut at fixing up Rage for the engine. I have no idea how he did because I didn't bother looking at the coding, but it seems to work well so I'll take that as a good sign. It's also a good thing that he's doing it since he's one of the rules guy for the Rage customs.

The other game that was supposedly gonna get a new set was Ultimate Combat, but AFAIK, the cards have been added, but not the images. The PL is a re-instated Craig who seems more interested in other things than his own game. Well, I guess that's his perogative.

The interest in the sealed deck thing that nipa did for Doomtrooper seems to have died down some, but that doesn't mean Tomi hasn't been busy. His latest project though has been to update Titan for Ludoholic Real Time, and he's added the Collosal Arena rules as an option. Titan is the second Real Time game on the Ludoholic RT engine after GRfOS.

And GRfOS PBW seems to be progressing under Mark, after Ed decided to drop it for other things. I do wonder how Mark is getting along but it's a good sign that he's back and working on it. Hopefully it would be the first game that's available as both PBW and RT on Ludo.

Ed has been busy updating Capitol and working out the bugs of Urland in between trying to code for Duel of Ages. I like the images of that last game and he seems to have been making good progress on it, although bug fixing for VTESO and the main engine seems to also be eating into his time.

Talking about VTESO, Martin added another expansion in January and the 3rd Ed is scheduled to be added over the next few weeks. The number of games played there remains strong especially with the new cards being added. I'm sure that would be keeping Martin busy for a while...

Meanwhile in the real world, I have been getting a large number of Ticket to Ride games under my belt recently and it has been interesting. It's surprising how such a simple game can be so strategic and interesting to be played. The other game that I have been playing some is Carcassonne with just the base set to understand the rules. That is fun, but seems to take a bit more work than TtR.

-+@ Worker Zombie @+-

Barhah!



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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