-+@ Chameleon Fairy @+-

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-+@ Temporal Warp @+-

See images below?



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-+@ Peripheral Whispers @+-

Heh, this CCG has really great titles.



Those are 3 cards from Eve CCG. I searched online and found that they were published in Iceland. The art's not too bad, but I have no idea about the gameplay though. Maybe Martin would leave a comment about what he thinks about the gameplay if he reads this.

And it's about time to polish off the things I said I'd write about...

Let's start with VteSO then. Nothing seems to be happening there, and I'm not surprised. The merger/takeover/whatever between EVE and WW is probably taking up resources at WW. The players are agitating about things like when's the next cardset gonna show up and better tech support, but really at the end of the day, with WW in flux, I doubt anything is gonna happen in the short term especially with the holidays coming up.

Ed's been busy on what is known as Ludoholic. Basically that's the play-by-web site and within a short time, both Capitol and Urland are now playable with Grave Robbers being in development. That's all Ed doing all the coding work, but I think Mark has been helping out there some. Kev seems to be the main playtesting guy there with a few others. The games there are slow, especially for me, as I have to wait for everyone to take their turns while I'm asleep. The plus is that I get in games. The big minus is that it takes weeks if not months to finish a game. I'm currently on a 4-player Urland game and that will be my last game for a while until something interesting comes along.

The main engine seems pretty much ignored. Tomi has been the only other person that seems to be doing stuff on there. I think Kult had an update, Doomtrooper has the usual tweaks and a new expansion, and Mythos had a few tweaks. Action on those games is mainly limited to Doomtrooper, if the number of questions on the forums is any indication.

Alex started a Mythos tournament, which seems to be going rather well, but it seems as if it's tapering off at the moment so I'm not sure where things are. The big tournament success is the one being organised by Jacob for Shadowfist. There seems to be hordes of players playing it and Shadowfist has seen some of the most spectular numbers of games being played. I think that's a good sign. The other tournament that's ongoing is the Rage one that H.C. is organising. The usual suspects are in it, but it seems to be drawing in new players if forum sign-ups and posts are any indication. That seems to be a good thing.

The other game that's drawing in new players (now that it doesn't cost tokens anymore) is MND, which has got a new generation of players. I played a game with one of them the other day with my comfortable LE-weave deck and LE alone took out LE-bograth, Baa and the other magi practically with flip kills on the last 2. Weave Path with Bungalaloos = 3e to gain 4e, or more if an Uwamar or two is sitting around. An early Brushfire means an easy burn +2 every turn which was interesting. I didn't even draw any cards the last two turns, thanks to a frusk in play which kept my hand filled with cards. It was a fun game and the opponent was friendly. It has been a while since I've enjoyed that.

One of the new players did ask when will DJ get text and I realised yesterday that it was supposed to be this month, so yesterday, I added all the DJ text to the cards already present on the engine. People are still trickling in to read the cards and I have no idea whether these cards will be a success or not, but the general reception seems positive, with exceptions from the usual suspects, of course.

Mid-post picture below. That's the Cookie Jar picture for the MND animation that didn't get rave reviews.


The other new expansion that I've added to gEngine this week are the Ashcan cards for Final Twilight. Some of the images in that expansion was uncoloured which is a no-no in my book, so I had to go ahead and add in the colours to the remainder of those images. It wasn't easy, and I wasn't really motivated to do colours at time, but I think the end result is definately better than the black and white images. I know DJ, the marketing director for the game has been known to give rave reviews about the colouring so that's a plus. One of the images has pigment based on Holly's skintone and I think Ed was showing it off to her. It was definately interesting colouring those in.

A while back though, someone PMed me and asked me if I were still looking for Hyborian Gates scans for the promos. I was and he kindly scanned in the last few promo cards that I needed to be added to the engine. So after 4 years or so of collecting images, all the images for Hyborian Gates can now be downloaded from the engine. Nobody plays the game though, but that's fine. At least we now have the 70s and 80s preserved on the engine.

Although it's not available yet, I've been told that Titan: Arena might make a comeback onto the engine thanks to the success of talks between Ed and the game creator. This would be the first removed game to make a comeback if it does go ahead. Obviously, the AH images would not be usuable, but I don't think that's a big hinderance - alternative images can always be found. I, personally, think that's good news and it would be a boost to the engine.

I was in a games arcade the other day, and came across a game that actually dispenses out tradable cards. Cards dispensed this way had a magnetic strip which can be swiped on the machine and played. It was a weird concept, but I guess it targetted the card collecting gamers. It sure did work on me. I got a card and it has stats and a magnetic strip on the back instead of a cardback. The game was a boring stone-paper-scissors sort of thing with lots of animation, really juvenile and was a turnoff after the first game. The card was interesting though. I wonder if I can devise a better game based on the number on the card...

The other game I purchased a month or so back was the 2nd expansion of HIStory. This is the CCG that's published in Singapore and is "religious" in nature. I have no idea where I placed the first expansion, but that was basically a shrinkwrapped deck in a cardbox box. This set though is also shrinkwrapped, but it's sold in a 3.25 floppy box of 10 case. That's a good reuse of material I guess since nobody uses 3.25 floppy diskettes anymore.

One comment for Daniel - check the reply to your comment in my previous post.

-+@ Blood of Giants @+-

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-+@ Move to Partial Cover @+-

Or covering your arse?



Art Credits:
Sand Fratt by Jeffry Ransom
Agrilla Hunter and Bagala Outcast by Jen Reed
All backgrounds by Matt Holmberg.

Another 3 cards for Exodus Flight, although I haven't done much MND custom cards lately. I did manage to announce the winner of the 5th DJ contest and get ready the 6th (and final?) DJ contest today so that was half of my MND achievement for today. The other half was to fix up bugs in the game on the engine, thanks to the defects submitted by one of the most loyal MND player that is out there. It's good to have a solid bunch of dependable MND players on the engine.

The other CCG thing I did today was CCGW related as well. Final Twilight's Trinity series 2 is now available on the engine. I was more interested in showing off the artwork (not done by me) than anything else, especially the cool ads I created yesterday. Those still haven't been added to the engine yet, but I guess it'll be done s**n.

I wanted to get a B5 update going as well, but didn't quite have the time. Hopefully there'll be another B5 update before the year is out. I find that I'm happier coding for games that actually get played than those that just sit there. I guess that's why FastBreak is languishing and Hyborian Gates barely register on my radar. I really have to get that going ASAP though... I want to get it over with before the end of the year. It shouldn't be that difficult to create a no-frills game. I just need the time.

And then in the queue after that? Quartet needs a screenshot and various minor bugfixes. YNDT needs to ensure that it's playable. Then it's Urland and the big revamp. I know I'm no longer competing with Ursuppe, but I think I owe it to Urland to see how awesome a game it can be. Or something like that.

Which makes me wonder if Capitol is getting an update soon... Ed was supposed to be working on it... or was he? I have no idea. He seems to be tweaking every semi-abandoned game... Frank's Zoo got some tweaks, although it's far from complete, then there's Sailor Moon... and of course Rock, Scissors, Paper is still in the works. It sounds interesting though to flirt from game to game. I know I do that on a regular basis!

Otherwise things are quiet... but then again, that is to be expected. Major things only happen about once a week or so. I've got (still) a number of end of the month things to handle as well, despite the destruction of the old CCGW forums. Somethings are just too interesting not to do.

-+@ I've Seen this Before @+-

and it's not a CCG on the engine. One more clue to help people who's guessing.



Whoa, what's this?
Art Credits:
Sidar: Zastrow
Chuke: Zastrow
Auroc: Whyrl/Strom

Exodus Flight needs a few magi and here are three of them. The Shadow Paradwyn Magi Sidar, The Orothe Chef Chuke (Razorfin) and Blitz's character Blitz (but renamed Auroc for the custom cards). N'est ce pas?

What have I been up to? Asking Doug to use a spell checker on his Sailor Moon article, for one. He seems cheesed off by it though, and I wonder why the younger Americans can't seem to take constructive criticism. Oh well.

Spent a busy day yesterday since Endeavor went public. Yeah. I was rebuked that I had no faith in it going public. Erm... OK. Anyways, that means there was a whole host of things to do, from rearranging the forums and updating the plates posts. I hope everything was done properly though, it's not everyday that a game goes public.

I have no idea what everyone else is up to though. Probably getting on with their life. I did playtest Urland the other day after the blog, but one of the playtesters dropped out so the playtest was in vain. Still, I like how the new stuff is working, now all I need to do is to make sure that hotpoints work and I can automate a few more things there, including scoring.

I bought what looks like a CCG today... I have no idea yet because this is one that isn't made in the US. It's in English though... I'll show a scan if I have access to my scanner, which I don't. Almost $20 for a boxed starter of 42 cards and a d20. Hmm...

Also saw someone playing VS in a comic store today. It was blah... boring IMO. Still, I can see why the Magic and Deck Masters crowd would like that. It's even more structured than WS though and probably less broken. I wish them well.

Also played quite a bit of LotR today, I like it when I get to confuse people with my unorthodox deck. The tournament players are mostly unfazed, but the other players have to think more and it shows in their gameplay. Sometimes they make mistakes, which is funny. Ah well.

-+@ Witchcraft Made Easy @+-

I did say the titles from this month's CCG is fun. And no, this game isn't on the engine, which is why I guess nobody has got it yet.



Art Credits:
Lisan: Liam, with special effects by Nov
Velvet J'lith: Gray
Chard: Liam, with background by Allen
Those are the latest 3 cards for TW, and with them are all the cards I have artwork for that's made in TW. I made a run on two artists work which I have featured before and I found quite a bit of them. Liam was one of them and as evidence from the cards above, he's rather talented. Not quite Holmberg-esque, but I'll make do with what I can get. Lisan is a contraction of the file name that I made for the art - Liam's Sandy. The interesting thing is that Lisa's name is in there as well (Yeah, she sent me a MND cap and T-shirt, so I'm good with her). Velvet J'Lith is done by Samir Gray, recoloured for Core. I like how it looks there though. And Chard was an interesting choice of artwork for a KT magi, and I thought that it deserved a non-Holmberg background, so I got something that Dave Allen did and used it as the background. Overall three rather interesting cards for TW.

And all those cards can also be viewed now at the Custom Cards page. While I was updating that, I also updated the SP cards to reflect the post-playtesting, final version of those cards. It's interesting that each card has a one paragraph write-up, which was a bit weird to do for SP, since most of the cards are rather similar. Also posted about these on all 3 forums that I'm doing admin for...

And today someone accused me of doing either insufficient or incorrect advertising targetting at the MND players. I have no idea why I was the subject of such a vicious attack, but people think they can get "hundreds" of players to the engine by simply advertising. Well, good luck to them. I won't be adverse if they succeed in that as well, but I've done almost everything that I think I can in terms of low-cost advertising and I must say, I'm getting a slow trickle of players to the engine, but definately not the hundreds and thousands that supposedly could happen if I did it "properly" whatever that may be.

Those were the latest 2 ads that were created for Twilight War, both with art by Allison Strom (Whyrl). I like the one on the left because of how the clouds perpetuated in the rest of the image. I had to extend both images to allow me space for the text which wasn't too difficult, but I didn't know if I could pull it off aesthetically. I think the one on the left isn't too bad though.

The tournament is going fine. Three people have qualified now, the first time that anyone other than Mitch has qualified. It's interesting tough how tough the competition has been at the top. birdie (whatever her real name is) got a boost when I declared her the winner of KQ#4 - she still needs 2 more games to qualify, but it's good seeing that a female is contending at the top spots with the guys.

I actually have a playtest in about 15 mintus. Fun stuff and all. The game is Urland and I haven't yet had the opportunity to try out all the new stuff under game conditions. However, I doubt I'll get anyone around to playtest though, the engine seems a bit dead at this point in time.

I also need to do the plates post update in a bit, as there are quite a number of things that needs to get updated there. I should really do a Go Fish update as well, but I've already posted my monthly report, and I'm also rather busy with all the end of the month stuff anyways. Oh well, there's always next month. It's not as if it'll run away or something.

And other PLs? Mark is still feverishly trying to get Endeavor public before Origins. One more month to go and anything is possible I guess. I hope he gets it working too. Logan couldn't find his copy of Sheboygan, or so I was told, so that's not going up. Martin meanwhile is in the midst of working on VTES again as it will be going for closed public soon. Can't wait for that to happen. However, before that happens though, a new Engine has to be finished and made available. Hopefully the hotpoints stuff will be fixed there.

JC surprised us all with a new game hitting closed testing this week. As usual, the images were too large in my opinion, but there's only about two cards anyways, so I guess that doesn't really matter here. Still some optimisation could be useful for his images in general. Timmie has been busy in tandem with Christoph to get fan cards for SWD into play. It's good that the support for that is going so strong now, particularly since it's heavily played. Still, it seems to be highly buggy and poor Timmie probably have no idea why it's doing that. Robert has been promising his fan made expansion for a while now, but I doubt he's too keen to do it since it is a lot of work, and nobody seems to be playing anyways.

And the Junior PLs? Craig is still trying to get the China expansion for UC out I think, but he seems to be going a bit slow. Well, no big deal there, I guess. He does deserve a break after getting UC public, IMO. Gray has begun coding for GE. I wonder how he's doing generally. He seems to be playing more often than he's coding, but there's nothing wrong with that as well.

People who seemed to have gone missing include Kev, and Monkeys isn't beta yet - I hope it'll be ready for Origins and Tony, who seems to have nothing to do now - well, he did upgrade WoT quite a bit, but he hasn't been advertising it much, so it's dying down again.

-+@ Chinese Zombies @+-

specially for Mark!



Well, there was something that I wanted to do for Urland that I didn't get to do it the last time I hand my head stuck into the code there. So a quick fix today, and it's done. What did I do? Simply automated the drawing of the Panic chip announcement. Now one can't cheat when the panic chip is drawn because it declares it to everyone (I hope). It needs to be playtested though. And the blog proves to me how important things are. While browsing through to get the cards for the 3 above, I realised that they weren't showing up on the engine, and had to make a quick fix on it. They are good now. Oh, as usual, the printed cards has really bad English translations from the original German.

I spent quite a bit of today culling MND images - got a few more Whyrl (Alison Strom) ones, including one that Mitch liked. I have also decided what's coming up after KQ - a promo set called "Double Jeopardy" and I can assure you that Alex Trabec won't be in the set that's for sure. Also did up the current scoring table for the tournament - 2 people have qualified, which is 1 more than last time, so that's a good thing.

The second of the Twilight War ads have gone up on the engine. I'm rather pleased with the TW ads - Distract garnered quite a bit of Wow-age when it was revealed and I think Doll (above) will be used for the campaign next month as well. Made two more today just for the fun of it. TW ads are fun to make, and since I'm in the midst of TW cards, I'm having fun with everything. I'll preview those next week, maybe.

Martin finished up Doomtown today, which is good. I finally get automated upkeep, among other things. I'm surprised at how much work has gone into the game. Hopefully the players will appreciate it as well. We need an online tournament of sorts for that. It's a pity that there aren't many Doomtown players who are willing to undertake such. Time to advertise about the new Doomtown and the new Pillar of Salt fan-made custom expansion, which has gone online.

And as to today's blog title, it's in reference to Mark's new game, Endeavor. It went onto the engine for private testing yesterday and Mark is semi-taunting me that ti will be on before Origins. I hope it will be so. It would be interesting to see more game online before Origins.

The Junior PLs have been rather quiet though. Timmie has been the only one that has made any waves by assuring that custom fan-made cards will be made for SWD. It's nice to see what started off with WS and SR is now being extended to other games.

Someone expressed interest in taking over Buffy today. I wonder if he's actually interested in the game, or if all he wants are free tokens to play his favourite game. Either way, it's up to Ed to decide what to do. His usual MO has been to wait for a couple of months or so and then revert back to them. If they are persistant enough and if they are still around, then they are offered the position. I wonder if it is designed to reward someone who's persistant.

Tony missed his WoT tour yesterday. Shameful really. I just deleted him from that slot. The 2 remaining shepherds are still "doing the rounds" religiously - I guess they just want to hold on to their unlimited supply of tokens. It's hard work, but I don't pity them. Compared to coding, what they do is a walk in the park.

Oooh, and I just remembered that Ed asked me to update the screenshots for Quartet. Blegh. That means I have to play a game with someone again to get a screenshot. I wonder who I can sucker into it. Oh well, maybe I should just offer some tokens for people who wish to play.

-+@ 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.

-+@ Evil Teddy Bear @+-

I can't believe a CCG could have such a card...



Well, those aren't MND cards. Those are in fact the badly translated English version of the German board game Urland. I updated the game on the engine today with the playtesting suggestions from a month ago. Now for more playtesting to see if those new stuff are acceptable. Next up, adding the siren when the Panic chip is drawn and automating it entirely. Seems fun. Then further down the road when Ed fixes up a few things, the scoring can get automated and associated stuff can be done with that. Good stuff.

MND has been quiet. There seems to be a whole new group of players these days, rather distinct from the group that was around at the beginning of the year. The tournament is still going, but slowly and KQ#4 has been getting hits but little interest otherwise. Well, I think MND is about to do its usual die over summer trick again. Oh well, not much I can do there to stop that.

I just realised that Babylon 5 and Portable Adventures are featured this week. Quite a few people are trying to play those games. Babylon 5 works beautifully and there shouldn't be much complaints from the peanut gallery, with the usual exception of the engine's stability of course. Portable Adventures, works, barely. The problem is that the increased automation decrease the game stability. Hopefully the players will continue to post defects if and when they find those.

Black Box went public the same time that Summer Camp did - something which I missed earlier yesterday, so I had to scramble to put up all the good bits about it - FPN, WGO and plates update. I also showed Logan where he should be adding the game rules as well. He and Mark was moaning about not having a checklist for what to do when a game goes beta so I created one for them in the forums. Hopefully I have everything covered.

Also did a middle of the month plates post update in the forums. It was crazy since there was so many things to change, but I think I pretty much got it all. I've started a "Prediction of the number of games available to the public during Origins." My original guesstimate from a month or so ago had it at 70. I have had to up ti to 72 now, since there's 69 games public and the possibility of at least 3 more - Monkeys, UC and VTES - going public before then.

Ed was actually rather busy last night his time, fixing up a number of webpage defects while adding more power to the PLs. We now get to see a list of ads linked to the engine and are allowed to delete them.

Eric is working hard on Cyberpunk, and that's a game that's not even in the bag yet. He's trying hard to get it up and running first to attract attention though so hopefully things will be good. It'll be his first game since 2003 when he last adapted Judge Dredd to the engine.

Christoph and Timmie between them have got the PC set #9 out for SWD a day after those cards were finalised. They are getting good at releasing cards. They seem to also keep the playing pool happy as there are still a large number of people who have purchased passes to play the game. I guess they must be on the way to making SWD the best adaptation online.

I had a look at Knight of the Zodiacs last night which seems to have good art. I doubt the game play is good since it seems to have disappeared off the face of the earh. Poor Bandai, they can't seem to hold onto a good game market. Talking about Bandai, Decipher has decided to terminate Megaman and .hack, probably due to poor sales. I wonder if those properties revert to Bandai. WARS is also "put on hiatus", whatever that means, so that leaves Decipher with STCCG and LotR. Coincindentally those are the 2 games that Decipher has online as well.

-+@ Great, now we know the ghost drives a truck @+-

Only because I did a YNDT update today.



Art Credits
Eerie Path: Bozyk
Curious Fird: Holmberg
Hot Stuff: Whyrl/Nov
These 3 are from TW. I'm queueing up the TW cards in such a way that I'm previewing them in the order that they were made, or about as close to that anyways. I made 3 more TW cards and put them into the queue so they should be revealed at some point in the future. That means TW has 54 cards done, with art that is. That's over the halfway point which is a good thing. The bad thing is that from this point onwards, it'll be tough going getting artwork for TW. Oh well.

Also did 3 magi for EF. Those are in the queue as well, so it might be a while before they get shown. I really do like all 3 magi though. Who are they? Well, I'm going to post one of them up somewhere... maybe.

I actually spent about 3 hours today adding automation into YNDT. The game suffered from being an old game. At the time it was adapted, it was probably one of the games that were at the forefront of the technology. That was almost two years ago. Now it's just a lowly old dog. I gave the old dog new tricks though. The automated setup that was done last month and the play direct to the board that was added today should cut down playing time some (but not thinking time). The actions aren't automated yet, and I'm sure Ed will ask me to automate them at some point. I'll get to them when I get the time I guess.

Talking about Ed, I haven't seen him for about 2 days now. I wonder what he's up to. Probably a surprise of some sort that will culminate in some good news for the Workshop? Maybe, but most probably not. I'll keep my eyes peeled for an announcement.

Mark told me today that Summer Camp needs one fix and then it should be ready for public release. So that's the first game to go public since I made my prediction that there'll be at least 3 more games going public before now and Origins. We'll just have to see which game will be the first to cross that line.

Apparently Alex had problems with his tours again. He always seems to find all these small things here and there, which is good, but some days, it drives people crazy. I'm glad I'm not coding Mythos, although I do pity Tomi. But then he probably enjoys it.

Martin is still pushing hard on Doomtown, with Pillar of Salt and a couple of random cards thrown in, with automated upkeep and stuff. Things looks exciting for the game and I can't wait to play it. There also seems to be a huge group of people playing it these days. Sorta a good sign for the game I guess.

The doomtrooper tournament is still going on and there seems to be a large number of people still playing. I have no idea how successful the games are, but at least the complaints about the game being buggy has ceased. Then again, those people who complained the loudest haven't been playing much these days.

Talking about tournaments, I have got a Sandwich Shop one coming up next weekend, I think. I better get ready for it soonish, I need to add a few deck building rules to make things interesting. Let's see what happens next week...

Other things to do next week would be Urland and Babylon 5 and if I feel up to it Hyborean Gates, unless I get the Firestorm images by then. I've also got a YNDT playtesting session for next week (made a new YNDT ad too) and I think once Urland gets the update, a playtesting session is in order for it as well. Busy, busy, busy...

-+@ Real? Aliens @+-

Not real... just HumAliens, check them out below.



Actions were the last 30 odd cards left to add to New Order and I spent most of the allocated hour today completing them. While doing the counting, I found that I was missing 2 PETs as well so I added them. Altogether, 33 cards were added today, the biggest addition for New Order in my take it slow policy. Sure the cards are all there, but the game needs now to get all the additional stuff needed for some of these cards to function better. It needs playtesting though which can be done now that all the cards are in the system.

Anyways, that scratches off one thing off my list for this month. It's probably the easiest to scratch off anyways and was 7 more to go, and I'm not even sure I can handle some of them, but by the end of the week, hopefully, I can get MND finished.

Talking about MND, people are still beginning to sit up and notice the game, and 6 people have already signed up to the tournament. It's something people look forward to I guess, but this one might be the last one for a while. Next month, there will be a one-day Sealed Deck Shadowsfall Promo Release Tournament, and I'm not sure if I should hold the regular tournament as well. We'll have to see.

The bad news is that I think the custom card forums have a bandwidth limit. The good news is I've got Jim Wong, the owner of Insiider, to agree to moving the custom cards over to Insiider. Let's see what happens over the next 48 hours or so. If all goes well, Insiider might get back to its former glory, and then maybe even a bit more. That's one thing to see.

And after MND? Probably YNDT because it's the easiest, and I do want to get it ready before the tournament, if there is one. Urland also needs a few tweaks, which I seriously doubt I can squeeze into this week, but it depends on how this weekend is shaping up. And of course, Portable Adventures needs to get a bit more automation and a whole lot more playtesting to work out the kinks. Those three games are at the forefront of my current concerns at the moment. Hopefully, I can get the out the door soon.

And everyone else? Martin is upgrading Doomtown now, which is getting seriously played because it's featured this week. I can't wait to see what new tricks he's adding to it. I hear there'll be an upkeep thing... hopefully it gets interesting. Knowing Martin, it will.

Mark has been busy upgrading Sideshow and GRfOS, and people are really excited about it, excited to the point that they are submitting a whole load of defects. It should gear up to be interesting times for him as he races with the clock to get Summer Camp and Endeavor ready in time for Origins. Sounds fun.

Kev and Craig had a UC playtesting session earlier today. I think the interface is adequate. It could do with some final tweaks, and then it should be ready for release. How fast or how soon or how motivated Craig will be to do that, I have no idea. But it should still be interesting times anyways.

I just realised that Tony removed his custom fonts from WoT. It won't work for some reason, and I guess he's given up trying to debug it. It's a pity though. It would have been great if it works. I wonder if it works in VTES as well. I guess I'll just have to wait for it..

JC updated Rage and VS a couple of days ago. The interesting thing is that VS had the mulligan upgrade finally added. It's good. The bad thing is that he forgot to insert the checksums for the fonts, so they are downloading everytime the game is selected. Oh well, nobody's perfect, I guess.

The Doomtrooper tournament is in full swing and people are playing a bucketload of games. At the rate they are going, they'll probably run out of tokens before the week is out. It's all good though. Hopefully, they'll leave a couple for the tournaments or for the playtesting to get the tokens that they need for the tournament. We shall have to see I guess.

I checked out PEZ yesterday. Nice game, easy to play, although I doubt if anyone will actually play it if adapted to the engine. The cards are going to be very very hard to come by though since there are some ultra rares. It's only a 204 card set, but having said that, I doubt it'll be easy to get all the cards to adapt the game. Hmmm...

-+@ Omega @+-

Final letter of the greek alphabet, final cardname for the month. Grats to Martin for guessing that it's HumAliens...



Well, might as well let HumAliens go out with a bang this month. Those are three of the PET cards that got added to the engine today. That's 119 cards out of 155 cards added. 36 more cards to go. I think I should just get it over and done with tomorrow and finish all 36 cards. At least that's one less distraction. There's still quite a bit of work though, as some of the new cards adds in functionality that the game isn't capable of. I'll leave that for a rainy day I guess, or until such a time when Ed wants this game to be tourney ready.

I did the stats today, and I must say that it's surprising to see that eventhough the number of tokens were lowered from 15 to 5, the total number of games have not changed much. There were bigger swings near the beginning of the year than the difference between last month and this month. That's good news for CCGW I'm sure.

Also did a small update on MND in preparation for the big update coming soon. SP is going out of playtesting, and "Novelty format" needs to get added to the game. Quite a bit of work there, and I guess if I'm doing HumAliens tomorrow, this will probably be for the rest of the week. Hopefully, once I get this out, and get TG onto the engine, I can forget about MND for a while and concentrate on other things.

Yes, the monthly report was written yesterday. 8 games to work on next month. Looks big. I have no idea what I'll work on after these two games. Most probably a combination of Hyborean Gates, Urland and YNDT. People turned up to play Urland today, but I really wasn't that interested in testing the game since I know everything works fine - I haven't modified the game in anyway since the last playtest. I really should put some time into it though. I hate having this huge sword of Damocles over my head with such a large number of games to update and to get up to scratch.

I updated the plates post a bit today, added in a few tidbits here and there and upped my prediction for Origins. Well, that's just a prediction, I'm practically plucking numbers out of the air for the prediction. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong... and that the numbers will be greater than what I've predicted.

Everyone else has been rather busy. Tomi and Logan were doing upates to Yahtzee and Kismet respectively to get them ready for the new engine and to close out a few other things. It was interesting. Mark said to me today that Summer Camp should be public before Origins and since Endeavor is being played in Origins, he hopes to get it done on the engine before Origins too. Somehow I doubt that will be the case, although he has 2 more months to get everything finished.

I tried out Ultimate Combat today too. Not too bad for a freshman attempt, but I'm sure things can be improved. The cards look ugly, but then again, all cards from that era had an ugly design I guess. I wonder how Gray is coming along with GE. I hope he's progressing some...

Yesterday I downloaded some rather good GI Joe scans. Too bad it's a WotC game, but I had a nice time looking at the images. I wonder if I can find the same for the TMNT card scans? Most probably not. Anachronism has been the rage everywhere I'm going - the talk about all the cards being easily available (as opposed to it being in booster form) means that the collectible part is gone, but the customisable deck part of the game is still there, so people are going wild about that. There are some balance issues though, but not too bad. Apparently one of MND's ex Card designer had worked on it as well. Interesting, I guess.

-+@ Cannon @+-

Hopefully not a loose one...



Art credits:
Kellus by Goodman, background by Holmberg
Cloak of Protection by Werner/Gillette
Puddle Arboll by Holmberg/Sato/Nov

I don't like the end result with Kellus... I had to change the skin colour to blue and I think I didn't do as good a job as I would have liked. Oh well. The cloak is interesting I guess, but rather bland. Liriel's Cape was the forerunner of that cloak. And it's probably ironic that I converted fiery Arbolit to the Puddle Arboll. It definately rings true for the FT "It's an unfortunate half breed" to some extent. Also corrected the images for Darunia and Darunia's Twist as well as Uloron.

With the cloak done, and with the large number of defects raised for MND since Bograth and Paradwyn was added, I thought it'd be good to do an update of the game on the engine, so that was a couple of hours worth of work. No coding change this time around though... nothing small left to add and all the big stuff could cause game instability, not to mention a million lines worth of code to check for all the exceptions, so I passed on those. So as of today, TG has 11 regions and 78 cards up on the engine. Only Nar and d'Resh to go... and with the 2 Nar images above, it means I only need 3 more Nar images and 4 more d'Resh images to finish the set. Hooray!

I've also started work on getting TW organised some and have got the first 4 regions named out on the Custom Card forums - Cald, Naroom, Orothe and Underneath. That's 4 × 6 or 24 cards out of the 100 card set, so hopefully that will draw some interest. Mitch has offered to do Orothe and Nar and I think Frank wants to do something, although he hasn't said what exactly. We'll have to see what happens. I'm doing Paradwyn and Cald, of course, and probably all 6 Arderial cards since I really don't want Arderial to be broken. We shall have to see there.

The tournament is winding down, I guess. It happens whenever Mitch qualifies and everyone else just can't be bothered to catch up to him. Oh well, let's see what happens. Hopefully someone else qualifies this month and gives him a run for his money. Kevex just joined up today bringing the total number of players to 8. I think this is the most that there is since the tournament started, and because of the way things are setup, it got a lot more games played as well.

Also updated the posts on the forums advertising TG, but have yet to make that announcement in Insiider... or even on GPN. I should at some point I guess. Also, wrote about image making over at MND at gEngine blog. It's a must read for people who want ideas about how to make art for cards I guess. So now I have 5 expansions in progress for MND - SP will come out of playtesting at the end of the month, and then it's going to be crazy as I update the engine and the website for the cards. TG is currently in playtesting and hopefully all the cards will be up by the end of May. KQ has the fourth competition next month and should see the cards being added to the engine in June. Hopefully, by June, the cardlist for TW will be finalised. And of course EF, although is in progress, really has no hurry to be added anywhere. They are just nice pictures at the moment.

Well, just in case people start thinking MND is my life, it's not. I had the 2nd Urland playtesting session today and 3 people showed up. Unlike the last time, the game is fully playable this time around and we did play a 4 hour game. People enjoyed the game though, which was good and they said they'll be back next week to play. Someone should be around to guide them to play, I guess, but since I'm not here next weekend, it won't be me. No bugs found in the playtesting session, but quite a few upgrades required. And I still haven't have had an exact idea how to do auto scoring, but hotspots is a good hint about where to go from there.

Other news, nipa seems to be working on Access Denied for the tournament later today. Hopefully, he'll get all the kinks ironed out before the tournament. Ed though has been busy holding tours for AD. Hopefully he'll be on time this week for the tournament as well. Logan seems to be having a sweet time tweaking SR to his liking... and the players are coming in droves as well. That's a good sign in my book. Mark has got Summer Camp going last I saw and I suspect he's going to put in quite a lot of the new features. Poor Kev is playing catch up on Monkeys. As I suspect, he didn't get it ready by today, but since he still has a day and a bit before the week is out, maybe he can meet that deadline...hopefully. He's also looking into changes to Capitol as well I think. Martin has gone on holiday, which he really deserves after working so hard on VTES. Knowing him, though, he'd be missing his tweaking on his games... still ME has grown leaps and bounds since he last updated it.

And the non-ghost PLs? Pretty much very quiet. Robert had some activitiy on the forums, after Doug asked for things, but I have no idea if he'll even have the time to code them in. We'll have to see. Tim have been asking a few more questions, but I haven't seen a Star Wars update yet. Maybe he's trying to get his head around things. Craig has been quiet for a few days now, and Tony has been quiet for a long while as well. I have no idea if that's a good sign or a bad sign. Aaron is missing in action again. Oh well, I think it might be a year or two before Sim City even gets started, if at all by him.

-+@ Neanderthal @+-

Well, you'll have to go a bit further back than that for the game I updated. But first:



Artist, from left to right: Gray, Whyrl and Gillette/Shreve/Goodman. These are for the may probably happen TW, but somehow I doubt it will be soon. We'll have to see what happens. Maybe by then, the game will be so dead that TW won't be needed anyways. Who knows?

Yesterday, I added the TG Weave and KT cards onto the engine. I think they were rather well received. Maybe it's just because the cards are new... maybe people are just happy to be seeing new cards? I have no idea. Also added a few other minor gameplay things into the game to make things go a little bit faster in play. They won't be used much though, but when they get used, I'm sure the people who uses them would appreciate it.

Seven people have signed up for the tournament. If one more person signs up, the tournament automatically begins. It's a pity that people didn't sign up in time to take advantage of the fact that MND was featured. Oh well. Some people are rearing to start that tournament. We'll have to see what happens there as well, but hopefully, it'll start soon.

Tomi has been busy with Kult lately. An update has been posted. He's going through his games like a hot knife through butter. I wish I could do that too. I wonder what he'll be working on next. Hopefully he'll be enthused enough to finish DoA. Or maybe even Heresy. Who knows?

I saw Kev with Monkeys earlier. I wonder does that mean he's working on it. Would be interesting to see though because according to him, it's "almost finished". Logan has also been busy. He wrote a long treatise about coding stuff and posted it. It's amazing how much work he puts into his games as well. Lots of hard working people this weekend I'm sure.

Ed is still busy working on the VTES client. I'm alreading seeing the fruits of some of his work there on the website and it's beginning to look interesting. Hopefully he'll finish it soon and the VTES players will get happy playing there. I wonder if there'll be a huge influx of players again though. Most probably. I'll leave it to Martin to handle them this time around. Should be easier this time too I guess, it's going to have its own dedicated server.

Kari gave me a belated birthday gift today. 5 booster packs of Mount Doom from LotRO. It's a nice gesture and no, he told me I don't want to know how many booster boxes he bought. I did play a couple of games with new and even suckier decks than usual. Moral of the story - stick with what I know, not whatever cool stuff I want to play with.

And before I forget, I upgraded Urland today to work with the new build. Pretty much the same issues as with Portable Adventures, but unlike Portable Adventures, this time I know what I'm doing. The same fixes, the same series of scripts and voila, game was updated. Wrote a few lines of new scripts as well to handle Urland's mechanics. Not too shabby, I'd think, but Urland can now be so much with all the cool stuff in the engine.

Also added one game to the forums as a new forum. That place is building up way too much now. Still, it's nice to see the entire list of cardbacks there.

-+@ Way @+-

As long as it's not "No Way!", I'm happy.



Yup, I did a HumAliens update today. X-PETs was the theme of todays update and that's 3 of them there. I also downloaded all the rest of the cards from the site so about 6 more updates - Robots, Action, Team Actions, Ethics, Pets and Equipment and New Order would be finished. I'll give it a 10 days to 2 weeks for it to be finished.

Just a treat for Ed, who's been hunting for my personal blog (I don't have one, honest!). I got one of these for my b'day:

which is cool. It has glows in the dark bits and has a pull back engine. I have been busy bricking up a few other things over the course of today - it's great fun too.

Kari asked me for a game of LotR so I decided to play with my really really bad Hobbit deck. Well, I won, only because it was a bad matchup. He was playing archery elves against my enduring Naz and didn't have his burdenating Orcs against my Birthday Present Hobbits. Game wasn't really challenging, I just made my way slowly to Site 9 for the win. Oh well. I hear he's trying out a Corsairs deck now. Now that is scary. There are only a few fellowships that can deal with that - Gandalf or Elves mainly - so he'll probably win the next time we play. Or not. We'll have to see.

Tomi was busy working on Kult, but then he realised he didn't have a Doomtrooper deck for a game he has later today. So I suggested a Beginner's Cybertronic just in jest and he was probably horrified. Well, I've never gone beyond that so I have no idea what's good with Doomtrooper. Oh well.

Logan finished his Shadowrun stuff last night, after a long night, so I'm going to guess an update is due soon if it's not already out. I'm surprised at the speed he accomplished what he did - less than one week. I would probably have taken 2 to 3 months at my current ongoing speed. Oh well.

There's a new version of Star Wars... weird... I guess Timmie has been busy incorporating all the goodies he's been wishing to have so that Star Wars can be the best platform to play on the engine. It's been busy too. It has about the same amount of games as Babylon5 for the last 30 days which is nothing to scoff at. Babylon 5 though, surprisingly stands at over a hundred games in the past 30 days as well. I haven't even pushed that game at all anywhere, but according to traffic on the yahoogroups and the CCGW B5 forums, it's mainly due to people discovering the engine and then going on to test out the game interface and stuff. I'm glad that the engine is a whole lot stable now. I've probably mentioned it to everyone who's been making a comment to that effect, but I'll mention it again - I played a 2 hour B5 game the other day and it didn't crash. That's a 2-hour 3-player game with no exceptions on my side, all in one go. Gotta love that.

Someone brought up adapting AEG's Warlords on CCGW. I told them that we are still waiting for AEG's reply and they would probably have a quicker answer pestering AEG for it. A post was made on The Temple of Lore where people expressed their interest in playing the game with a pay per play (and not a pay per booster) concept. Well, it's ultimately up to AEG.

MND-wise, one person signed up to the tournament today, bringing up the total to 6. I made a rules change this month so that the tournament automatically kicks off when 8 people have signed up, so that means 2 more and the tourney is a go. I know FlipChef is interested, but he is too lazy to register for the forums. Nothing I can do there.

What has drawn traffic is KQ#3: Tony. I'm seeing some good entries being posted for that competition, which is in direct contrast to KQ#2: Slumber. I think it's going to be hard to pick a winner this month, but it'll be fun to see the entries. Also, it's good to note that the collective card-design capabilities of the MND players are slowly but surely improving thanks to these Keeper's Questions. Maybe I should start a Novelty's Questions next.

I also announced that SP Playtesting will close at the end of the month, and SP will get finalised next month. I'm also planning a few other things there that I'll be announcing next month, so things might get ... interesting, next month. Due to that, I had to create a TG Playtesting Rewards program... and all the announcements had to be made everywhere. Totally chaotic but fun at the same time.

The Urland playtesting session will be on in about 90 minutes time. I've got to review the rules before the game. The game is a bit "long in the tooth" as well, which is sad. Hopefully, the playtesting session will show where things needs to improve... time has been penciled in next week for the update. I just hope that the game works in the current engine.

I also want to get a MND update in by today - TG Weave + updates to Romura and errata to Amara, Beauty.

Otherwise it's a quiet day.