-+@ Loyal Sacrifice @+-

The things I do for CCG Workshop...



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-+@ Deep Journey @+-

Deep is for Orothe, Journey is for Age's End



That's 3 of the 40 cards from Age's End. I like that holding up the sword drawing whcih seems rather well done. I wish I could colour that good. Then there's the gay Magneto, and of course my favourite creature and a different version of the card that drew me to the game. I'm a little bit sad about its passing of course, and these cards are of the "milk as much money from the players before we lose the license" category. The game is extremely overpowered now and after playing it for a few days with all the new cards I don't really enjoy it anymore. What a sad way to see such a great game end.

I've also been playing a lot of boardgames online - Ticket to Ride about half the time, although I don't seem to be able to win much these days. The other half of the time though is spent helping Ed test out Ajax on Ludoholic, now that Capitol and Urland has it as well. I think I'm on 2 Capitol games and a Urland game as well as a Monkeys game. Those games are moving slow as they are multiple player games, but I guess that's fine as that's how it's supposed to be.

I was supposed to work on my super secret game this week, in preparation for another bigger game later next month, but circumstances just haven't been coorperative and conductive for me to work on the game. Today I found out I used the wrong version in the last MND update - that's the one with the bug in the validate script which I corrected while I was away. So I had to fix it again - basically it's just a one line difference. And since I was updating MND, I might as well add in the next EF region for playtesting, which is what I did earlier today. So we're now done to 9 out of 13 and hopefully, the last 4 will be added before the end of July.

Things are also heating up (pun intended) as design for AoD begins with Cald by Myself and Frosty and Naroom by Daniel. I think there have been some rather good designs already, but I'm doing the Cowell thing to push the envelopes to make the set better (although not necessary more powerful) as this might be the last custom expansion for MND that will be totally in my control. Final Night, the next expansion, is RP-inspired, which means that quite a bit of the cards have to stay true to character.

While I was doing up the news for Naroom EF, I realised Ed never actually announced on the WGO that LMS has been moved to Ludo. I added that in quickly but it's probably old news by now. What I was suprised by was the fact that I can add WGO onto the Ludo engine as well. That seems cool... if there were more people on the Ludo engine that is. There were a total of 4 games played in May, but hopefully the only direction to go from there is up.

And what will be going up soon of course are the new Fastbreak cards that I just finished opening and sorting today. I started with 2 boxes of boosters, needing 15 cards, or 14 excluding a Promo - an uncommon, 5 foils and the rest being rares and only got 9 of them. I can't believe I need 5 more rares, but at least I got all the chase cards. Those will be going up onto the engine hopefully sometime this weekend.

And since I was messing about with boosters and starters, I thought it would be good to add in Sealed deck support for Fast Break as well. I have no idea how complicate it is, but Tomi seems to be doing it easily for his games (probably because he wrote the code and knows what he's doing) so I hope I can easily copy it. We shall see and I guess it shall be posted here on this blog whether I manage to do it or not.

And since I'm on coding - Aidan seems to be going crazy on that front, hammering Rage out into something super fantastic or that's what it seems. It's basic housekeeping, I think to get things up to date and he's poking into things that well, not too many people poke into. But that's good. Hopefully, the Rage players will reward him for it by playing more of the game.

There seemed to be some snafu on the VTES engine earlier this month. No, it's not Martin's fault, so don't go blaming him. It was server related though and to make a long story short, players were all give a 7 day game pass. Yippee! I've got to remember that and factor it into the numbers at the end of the month as well.

I think the Shadowfist tournament has ended, and hopefully there'll be winners announced soon. I still can't believe that gEngine is one of the official platforms for the Shadowfist league and the league can be played both online and offline. Good for Zev and his people. The other thing I noticed is that Julien, the SF lead is now in Budapest, Hungary instead of haute (whatever that means) France Island. I wonder what he's doing behind the Iron Curtain.

-+@ Vampire Blood @+-

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-+@Movie Star @+-

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

-+@ Future Coin @+-

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

-+@ 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!

-+@ Alcolyte @+-

describes the person who did these cards...



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

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

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

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

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

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