-+@ Mines of Moira @+-

Who knew what you can find in the mines? Hopefully not Balrog!



Wow, I haven't seen these cards for ages, literally. I haven't been playing for at least 2 years now. Wow, how time flies. I remember I used to play this every day. Oh well, things change with time.

I went in today to play a game on LotR Online and was surprised to see there were about half a dozen players there. A game was ongoing when I entered and I joined the second that was already setup.

I played a Fellowship block game, which for those with Nostalgia, is the best of the block. However, since I started with the Tower block (Helm's Deep is my favourite place in the whole story!), there wasn't much nostalgia for me to play with the Fellowship block. I chose my Hobbit - Wounding Orc deck, and played rather badly IMO. I guess I'm getting rusty with the game. My opponent I think is a former World champion and I was beaten when his Frodo got to site 9. I did manage to kill all his other companions though, but that was not enough for me to win. Oh well.

There's still about a year running for those who has online cards, although no more new sign-ups are allowed. I saw on the forums people pleading for accounts to play. Wow, I can't believe that there'll still be demand for it, but it was one of the top CCG of its time, thanks to the huge movie tie-in, and I think it's still immensely popular, eventhough there have been no new cards for 2 years now. Wow. 2 years...

It's good to know that some sites stay up and running, eventhough their owners no longer have the time and resources to maintain the site. I wonder though, what will happen after 2010. I think by then the demand for "dead" CCGs may become great again. Well, maybe I'll be able to play Wildstorms again!

-+@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.

-+@ Spear of Deceit @+-

Mostly because I'm showing cards from Treachery and Deceit



Yes, that's from Lord of the Rings and yes, that is the next expansion Treachery and Deceit which has been sent to the printers. This is barely a month after the release of Rise of Saruman earlier this month or something. I guess Decipher is finally putting out cards although it's a little too little too late. Still it's exciting that there are cards being released for the game. It'll do heaps to keep the game alive offline for a little while more.

And I still haven't got any RoS cards yet. Well, they are expensive at the moment and apparently there is a broken card in there as well that's not quite as easy to understand, but it enable Fruit Loops 3 easily. Poor Brad Fruitcake. I understand he's quit fulltime from Decipher as well or something like that. I wonder how that bodes for the game.

What I did get this week in the mail is a box of Bloodlines. That is the 3rd box I've got and I'm still missing a few rares. I updated my trading list at mahasamatman to list the cards that I'm still missing and to put a few of the rares that I got. My mailbox has been singing since with the offers to trade for those rares I picked up in Bloodlines. Urgh.

While I'm on mahasamatman, I finally got Sam, the guy who runs the site to reactivate the Wildstorm list, after Tomi encouraged me to do so by saying that he got Dark Eden revived. All I wanted from the list was to record which of the cards I needed rather than to use it to trade. Well, the list got revived but I have yet to actually do anything much to it. Hopefully, the list won't get deleted before I update it.

Since I'm on Tomi and trading, I was told that he's actually concluded a deal that would trade some of his cards for some other cards that would enable him to complete his Dune collection. I think that's cool. And he didn't even have to trade outside his own continent for the cards. Yeah, that's me in envy... he's in the 2nd smallest continent and I'm in the largest continent and he gets to complete his trade without going outside his continent. Sometimes life just doesn't give you a break.

Talking about breaks, Mark seems to be busy on GRfOS PBW after a long break. I think he may be making up for lost time. Ed is still busily getting the surprise game up to scratch, but I'm not allowed to say which one it is other than that it's one of the over 60 licensed games that he's got permission for. OK, I'll give out a clue... it has no tiles.

And since I'm on tiles, I got my shipment of Carcassonne loot today. 4 expansions and a 5th in last years Games Quarterly. I originally only wanted Traders and Builders for the cloth bag and the bucket of tiles, but when I went online to get it, I noticed the prices for River 2, Scout and King and Count were close to nothing that I picked them up as well. Granted, the latter 2 expansions doesn't really hold any fancy for me, but at least K&S gives a few extra tiles to play with. I have no idea what I'm going to do with the purple count though... maybe start a meeple version of Sesame Street.

And I just discovered this week too that my 6 months subscription to TtR has expired. That sucks. I wanna be able to create games, but oh well. I can still play though, and I got a game today. Didn't complete a ticket of 16 points at the last minute, didn't get the longest track, but still won by about 12 points, which was interesting. It was a cool game where people were blocking, not strategically, but to enable them to get to the destinations that they wanted. And everyone were building long snake-like routes - I missed out the longest route by one train, but there was a difference of like 3 trains between longest and shortest.

Snakes of course brings me to the last image in the series:



Pencils by Joe Araiza, colours by myself. I really like how this one turned out and it was really easy to colour as well. The background is cool-ish, but the slab of thing that it's sitting on... well, not so much. Anyways, I have even created a tutorial based on this image. The MND crazies were going ga-ga over the tutorial. Heh.

-+@ The Forgotten King @+-

which is what these cards show...



What's this? Some religious CCG? Not really. Fractal is from the Israeli superpower group Unit Aleph while Sinbad is part of the Heaven's Fist Team. Both are from an unpopular run in the first volume of Stormwatch when it was written by Union's author and general WS editor. Mr. Majestic probably needs some introduction, eventhough he has crossed over into the Superman universe and has a few miniseries of his own. He was part of the WildCATs while the real team was away on Khera, then he got roped into Savant Guarde and I think he formed a group based around himself later on in the series. And the CCG? Wildstorms of course. The cards on the left and right are part of my Stormwatch expansion from the aforementioned unpopular run with the slew of characters. One of the more familiar characters introduced in that run is Swift, who survives in the Wildstorm universe of today.

The thing about the cards are the templates. They were horrible to produce due to the weird shapes, the weird background effects and the teleportation zzzzznnnnn effect around each character. I think I didn't do too badly, but I'm sure it can be done better, and today was only a first attempt at getting the templates right. I can still see where I used the clone stamp on the cards (urgh! that needs to be fixed) and the ice (cyan) shades on the Unit Aleph template needs to be toned down some. Hmm... some later time.

I haven't received any complaints about the Project Second Chance cards so far, so I take that as a good sign. I made a rather rude blog about why I think people won't use it, but in there there's also an appeal for people to embrace it because otherwise, it'd mark the end of MND custom cards as we know it on the engine. It remains to be seen if I'm successful. Somehow I doubt I will be, but I'm hoping my pessimism is misplaced.

Meanwhile, the votes are coming in for the images that are part of the polls I put up on the CCGW forums. There's no prize or anything, but I just wanna see what people think are good images and whether it'd be worth my salt to start paying those artists for artwork for future (aka AoD) custom expansions (because, if you have been keeping up with my blogs, I'm gonna be am short of MND artwork...). So far Eric Santana's Second Shadow and Jennifer Reed's Auriolis are both in the lead for Elder's Legacy and Shadowsfall Promo respectively by a respectable percentage. Tainted Glimpses meanwhile, which was supposed to have better images than either of those two is stuck without a clear winner in the polls. I have no idea how to interpret that. Anyways, the polls are at Elder's Legacy, Shadowsfall Promo and Tainted Glimpses.

I think I opened the Pandora's box by saying that drafts can be done on the engine if the PL implements it. I think it can be done, but it's going to be hairy to code for and it'll have to check for so many different things that it's not even gonna be funny. Hence the reason why they aren't done in the first place. Having said that PL-extraordinaire Tomi is probably considering doing some support if his forum post is any indication. I can't wait to see what he does.

Oh and then there's the issue of comprehension of the English language and WoW which I'm not even going to say too much because it'll just raise my blood pressure or something.

-+@ Playa @+-

which obviously is supposed to mean "Player"...



Three cards from the missing Gen 13 Classic Trading Card Set for WS CCG. They were the last of the CCG cards printed, even after BoW, and are some of the hardest to find. A new CCGW user, Travis Bickle, noticed that they were missing from the engine and kindly suggested that he scan them for the engine. I acquised and he did them relatively fast, so I had to reward him by coding them in the same day that I got the images. While I was doing that, I added the extra kibitz messages as well. I like the cards. They are cool... and new, even to me, a veteran WS player. There's an ad to go along with it... but I don't think it turned out that great, so I'm not posting it anywhere...

And it seems to be a WS fest as I'm still crazily photographing the remainder of the WSS2 cards. I figured out how not to use the flash, but instead have natural sunlight such that the end result looks better. Well, they do, but not buy too much. I still have to crop them and adjust them, and do the cardback, before the images are done. Then there's more work coding the cards since I have to make up the stats for them as well. I was hoping to get things done this weekend, but life happens as usual, and long story short, they will probably be done before the end of next month.

MND work has been going slowly as well, because I'm on hiatus... I had to post up the tournament and contest because it's the end of the month, in preparation for next month... but ever since people found out about the XP system on the engine, I've noticed that the tournaments and contests aren't too much in demand... too much work for too little reward I guess. Oh well. It's a good thing that next month's MND tournament would be the last one... maybe for this year.

And end of the month means I have to do a whole lot of things. I've already submitted the verbal report to Ed about the statistics for the month... yay! As for the plates post, Go Fish definately need an update for that soon, but I'm waiting for MoA and/or CA to go closed/open testing respectively before I update that. It's gonna be another big update.

Yeah, Mark is busy with CA, which will probably be his first game to go live this year. That's what he's saying and I think he's close too. I hijacked him today though, by posting defects for 3 of his games yesterday, when I was going through all the games, downloading all the latest gMLs. He's working on Aquarius as I'm writing this, having already fixed Nodwick earlier. I must confess I'm a bit guilty for sidetracking him off to his other games...

Logan has spent the last few days working on the MoA boards, after I've stiched them together. He's making the lines thicker and easier to read, and then he has to code them. A large part of it is done though which is good, but I'm sure there's still quite a bit more to do before it can go public. Logan is definately busy though.

Tomi has been doing little things on his games, adding in the latest stuff to Yahtzee, Doomtrooper and Mythos mostly, although I think I saw a Tomb Raider update as well there. I won't be surprised if these updates are taking up a lot more time than it seems... maintaining a game is a huge task.

Martin just uploaded a VTES update yesterday, and I noticed that as I was downloading it. He's obviously keeping his attention on the game to keep everyone happy. The game is also the most played game on CCGW for the month of April, thanks in large part to the free game passes Ed has given out for the server problems. I hope there aren't too many complaints.

Ed has been busy trying to fix the server stability issue. He explained in techie talk what was wrong with it, which went all over my head. It seems to make things a lot better, but it still crashes the engine. Long story short - a new server is needed and I'm not sure if he has the moolah to afford it, especially not for the free games that is currently being supported. Hmm...

And that's it I guess. These days, there are only 6 PLs working on CCGW, or so it seems. Everyone else has other commitments, or is just feeling too left out and/or way behind the curve. Nevertheless though, a lot seems to be happening even with the existing 6. Perhaps that's all that's required - a handful of dedicated people churning out quality work instead of a lot of mediocre people wasting resources and producing nothing... ah, hobbits!

I did manage to get to Dan last night and we talked quite a bit. The real reason for talking to him though, was to get his permission to finish adapting Chess Wars for the engine, which he gladly gave. So that's my other game for the month of May besides WSS2, or that's the plan, at least. I've got to rev up the game to the latest technology, which will probably include things like automation, nice graphics and sounds. It would be good to get into that again.

-+@ Dessicate @+-

That's drying out for those who don't know what it means. Sort of like me and ideas.



As usual, artwork credit: Whyrl, Whyrl, Santana/Tate. That's 3 fan made artwork there. Whyrl is still busy doing stuff on her site which is where I found her. Her artwork has progressed quite a lot from the MND style. Eric is currently working with Holmberg on stuff, so that's all good and everything. These cards are slated for TW, but as that is still up in the air, it might not come to pass. And I know I'm sounding like a broken record, but I just want to be pragmatic and realistic, whatever that may entail. I haven't done much work on MND this weekend, but then again, can be evidenced from the images on the blogs for the last few days, I have been rather busy in that regards earlier in the week.

MND starts being a featured game today. What was supposed to be a one day thing ended up to be a week long thing. Oh well. I think players would be happy with it over the end of the month till the beginning of next month. Haven't seen any tournament games yet, and Mitch is still the only person who's qualified. This weekend seems slow though, but hopefully it'll change over Sunday evening server time.

I have been busy on engine stuff though. I closed out over half the BOT questions - as usual, a lot of them were frivilous and did not merit a reply. Some of them, however did require a reply and top among those were the token questions. Oh and there was a question asking BugLaden if he would marry them or something like that. I wanted to give a witty answer to that one but decided in the end to lump it with the other frivilous ones.

The major story for me today was that Portable Adventures was broken with the new build. I didn't even see that coming. I spent most of last night and early this morning (up till 4am! Yikes) and late morning and early afternoon fixing it. Oh while doing that I closed out some reported bugs as well. That game is a major headache for me. At least it's fixed now. I'm going to have to update it next month for at least 4 Encounters too. I'm not looking forward to that but something has to be done.

I've been getting tours over this time as well. I got Aidan (picks-at-flies) to teach me how to play Rage. Can't say I like it - it was boring at best. I'm sure there must be something that draws people to it, but whatever it is, I don't see it and thus it can't draw me in. Oh well. I also had Brian (bpd9383) teach me how to play Dark Eden. Now this I like. What's the difference? Close to none I guess. However the Doomtrooper style of play plus the Civilisation resource management seems to go well in my book. I really enjoyed the game I played with Brian. So maybe one of these days I'll have to build my own deck and play it. At least I'd have gotten further with it than with DoomTrooper.

The first of the ToJH tournaments was earlier today. Nobody showed up apparently. Oh well. Hopefully someone will show up for the evening one. If only 3 people show up, they will each win some silver tokens. Sounds fun. Ed was also asking me about the possibility about holding a sanctioned MND tournament. I told him to hold off until May because it'll need a lot of work to advertise it... and even then, there'll be no guarantee of success.

Tomi was working on AD today. Showed me earlier some of the screenshots and I must say it looks good. He's getting cliparts for the cards and modifying them. They look a bit cartoony, but nicer than having no images. He's not sure if the images are appropriate for the game, but they looked fine to me. I guess it's up to him if he wants to keep them or not.

Mark got a tutorial for GRfOS setup and ready. I haven't tried it yet, but from what little bits and pieces I've seen of it, it does look good. Well, I must say everyone is getting their games into shape and it's finally nice to see Mark get into the hang of things with GRfOS. He's got quite a bit of stuff on his plates though. Who knows, he might get things done before Origins afterall.

Played some LotR today... didn't do too well. One thing I discovered is that I can't play the game for too long since everything runs into a blurr after a while. Sometimes it is that boring. I'm using a Shadows Orc deck that isn't too great, but in casual play it's wrecking havoc on the alternate ring bearers. One reason to always use Frodo, I guess.

I just checked my list of stuff to do for this month and I'm still 3 short - B5 needs bold text, Hyborean Gates needs images and spoilers and HumAliens needs second order. The latter 2 are going to get bumped to next month. Hopefully, I can finish B5 sometime in the remainder of this month. The plus side is that two of the optionals have been closed out effectively, so I guess that makes up for something or other. I don't really know at this point in time.

So no new games this month, just 3 new PLs. Hopefully they'll inject something of a sense of fun into adapting games for the engine again. I was just pondering about WS again and how it's like left on the wayside. I really have to find some time to pull it by the straps up to somewhere where it gets played and stuff. Hmm... sounds like a plan. Definately not this month though, and I doubt I'll have time next month, since I'm working on Portable Adventures encounters and HumAliens New Order. I think those 2 should get priority because they are licensed games and I best get them out of the way so that I don't have a sword of Damocles hanging over my head. Then I can move on to do things I would enjoy. Sounds like a plan anyways, but all plans go awry and nothing is written in stone yet, or signed in blood or what have you not.

-+@ Ebony Mirror @+-

Sometimes we all need a mirror to look at ourselves...

Art credits: Werner/Gillette, Szankovics, Werner/Gillette. These are probable TW cards. I think I've got to start saying which sets these cards are from since there are a few that are in the works. I think these 3 cards fit the War theme rather well, and as the comments on the Custom Card forums show, people are expecting new mechanics from these. I have no idea though what shape these cards will eventually become, but it promises to be interesting.

Not much happening for MND today. It's a bit quiet this weekend, presumably people are taking advantage of the long weekend or something. No tournament games, although some people did show up in the MND room, particularly one who said he only showed up because he got an email from Bug. And I'm starting the story from the end - Bug sent all users an email with quite a lot of info on it to advertise about the new build and stuff. Hopefully we'll get a few more players returning over the next few weeks.

I did the Core cards for eXodus today. The big surprise is that the quality of the art for Core is much better than say Cald or Bograth. All the cards can be seen at either the Custom Card Forums, Insiider or MND at gEngine blog, as usual. I think Exodus Flight is definately going to go ahead then based on the quality on the Core cards. Whyrl and Angetiger's stuff is nice and Blitz's artwork gets better as I proceed down the region list. Cards that will definately be used for Exodus Flight that have been done so far - Orbit, Lunar Aversion, Conder, Kiradan, Lava Lasp, Acid Morgg, Sergen, Spiny Beeb and Shadow Chain. I'd like to use Rayalon Scholar, Toxic Mushroom and Coal Mask as well, but FlameRaven is rather protective of her art stuff. We'll have to see. Of course, those cards can't go in as they are now, some of them would probably need renames, and all of them would need to have the text reworded properly and balanced for the card games (instead of balancing them for RP, which is what they were written for).

I updated Wildstorms today. Found something odd with it though. Hopefully it's fixed. The game really needs linked dice and attachments, but the former is icky to do properly unless I'm prepared for it and the latter is very much icky - I'll wait for the next build and do it next month.

Also updated the plates post today, but that's neither here nor there. The Go Fish update yesterday served its purpose rather well. Now that we have new stuff from the new Engine, I thought I'd update the look of the images in the plates post as well. Nothing revolutionary or anything there tough.

The Rage moot attracted quite a number of players today. Not as high as I've seen it go though, but still it's good enough that someone is playing a dead game. Rage players have also begun putting out feelers to the other games - I've seen them playing Doomtown, Mythos, MND and ToJH.

Talking about ToJH, Tomi has been working on it to close out all the bugs that Ed has been discovering in his tours. The ToJH tours are really popular though, probably because of the time that they are held, but also because of the upcoming tournament and the 20 silvers top prize. 20 doesn't seem to be too much, but when you consider that it's 4 months worth of free tokens, suddenly it takes a whole new meaning. I definately hope that more than 3 people show up to play the game though.

Kev has been doing amazing font things for Galactic Empires in preparation to coding the game. I'm sure between him and Gray, they'll probably knock out a good version of the game. I wonder what sort of level they will make it to, I doubt that the "no-frills" approach will be used here.

Tony is still working away at WoT, using a font file that Kev developed and stuff. That game is still steadily getting improvements. I wonder if he's added attachments yet. That's a huge big chunk of scripts that's required for that, and not all of it is working as well... which makes me wish for the next version of the engine. Was suppose to be yesterday, then today, but nothing happened, so maybe it'll be tomorrow. Who knows what will happen?

Martin was busy working on those attachment scripts and getting VTES ready for the big beta release. I'm sure people will be wowed when they see what else he's done for that game. Talking about Martin, I've yet to try out Doomtown with the new upkeep counter. I wonder also if Martin has put in any other changes, like increasing the bullets to 9 studs and stuff. Also, I still think there should be faction tokens in that game. I'll have to ask for them at some point, maybe after he's reasonably happy with the completion of VTES.

Apparently Bug is going to be holding tournaments every Sunday. ToJH is this weekend and HotS is in 2 weeks time. I wonder if he's going to do PAd next Sunday. We'll have to see. I haven't even fixed the bugs there yet. Maybe I should bump that up and give it some priority soon. And I just realised that for the whole of next week MND is free. I better ask the MND players to use up their copper tokens by today otherwise it'd be a waste.

Right, I think it's time for a quick game of LotR. I feel like smashing things up with some Besiegers.

-+@ Snowball @+-

Heh, not the object, but the verb usuage of it which means that things grow large from something small, just like my CCGW work and responsibilities. Oh well.



Well, did the Gaean scans today. They aren't too bad. I still have Hyborian, Orisis, Power Surge and Vortex Tactics to go. That's a lot of cards as the latter 2 are the events and the combat modifiers respectively. Well, 10 more days to scan 4 regions. I think I can make it. Martin asked me for the online rules today... that would need to be scanned as well.

Martin and I talked about a lot of things today. I learnt about arrays, for one, and I finally know how to use them. I also found out about VTES and beta testing... but I'll let Martin and Ed announce those themselves. I'm not going to steal their thunder by announcing their stuff here. Martin has also scanned all 2200+ VTES cards for the engine. I am amazed that he did that. I guess VTES is now the CCG with the most card on the engine. I've gotta update that list one of these days.

Talking about lists, I updated a number of the, one of them being the Board Game Geek list that I maintain for CCGW games. I also submitted in an entry for Le Tournoi for there since I would need it to get my list there up to date. Hopefully it'll be added soon.

I updated my list on BGG because Nate pointed me to the Final Twilight for sale page there. We were trying to figure out where he could advertise the set release today and BGG was one of the places. He's also placed announcements on the CCGW forums and I've put in a corresponding announcement onto the WGO fo the engine. It was fun. I also got to be in a chat with 2/3 of Neo - the other third being Mike or HeffX, who hails from the border town of Eschede (I passed by there on my way to Germany almost 10 years ago). It was weird sitting in their business meeting.

Talking about business, I found out today that Interactivities Ink is going out of business. Yes, you heard me right, as in they aren't going to be a company anymore. I guess they aren't making too much money from their cards and books. Oh well, I wonder what this means for their 3 games on the engine though. I hope they won't be yanked anytime soon.

I was also talking with Tomi earlier, while we were browsing through BGG... apparently he found out from there that Titan has been republished by FFG - perhaps under a license from AH? I have no idea. He's trying to get the game back onto the engine though, I hope he succeeds.

Talking about FFG, I was going to try out AGoT, the online version today. Didn't get to download the client though. Blegh. Just isn't my day I guess. Toon is supposedly interested in adapting this game for the engine. I hope we do get permission to do it. The other game that would be good to get permission to do from FFG would be Call of Cthulhu (of which I'm sure either Martin or Logan would be more than pleased to adapt it).

And while I'm on the getting permission business, Justin (Cait Sith) was nagging me to talk to the product manager of AEG's Warlord, who, or so Justin implies, is pushing Warlords onto some online platform on the forums. Well, I'm not that interested in an AEG game, but everything hinges on Ed's talks with Zinser and I have no idea where things are at there.

Oh a few minor things happened today, the engine went on a fritz while Timmie was trying to update SWD, and apparently him and Christoph are gunning all out to make the game the best online version adaption of SWD. Well, here's my best wishes to them in that endeavour.

Before I forget, I played some LotR today, but didn't win. It's hard these days to win I guess - everyone has such tuned decks... and by tuned I mean boring. I don't know why but there are only a few decks online that gets played. I do miss the unique combos that MND has been spawning online lately.

And yes, I did play a game of MND today... with a newly built Qwade/Qwelling deck. It wasn't very good, but I had fun playing that decktype for the first time. My poor opponent wasn't too happy that he lost, but I did give him tips on improving his deck... I have no idea if he was even listening though.

I played one game of gToons today - it was a good one really. I faced an atypical animal deck, based around Booboo and Taz, still, but it had animals like the orange scooby dee and the yellow monster thing that adds 1 for each animal (which grew quite big as both of us were playing animals). I got a colour win (and a points win as well) in the end, with Dexter's parents and the robot. Of course, the fact that I cancelled his Scooby with my Pup to gain Dee's double bonus was probably cursed by my opponent.

[BTW, all posts relating to nipa-Martin can now be found at this post.]

And as to nipa-Martin, two things have caused me to realise something that distinguishes them, and thus, I have to refine my theory. The first is nipa and Martin both confounding me by doing things the other person would do... well, that is to be expected, after all there are only so many different ways to code. The second is a post by Timmie about a certain problem that is central to nipa-Martin (more on this below). Hence based on these two facts, here's how the new nipa-Martin Theory is defined.

nipa tends to solve problems in the game design when adapting the game. This involves a complicated use of everything at his disposal - menus, cards, other objects, etc. to achieve whatever he intends to do to adapt the game specific mechanics onto the engine.

Martin tends to solve the same problems with scripting and code when adapting the game. This often involves lenghty scripts, lots of loops, arrays and calls to other scripts which makes the script look very much more like computer garbage than a language.

Of course, nipa uses complicated scripts as well... and Martin is also known for using the design of a game to his advantage. Hence the original premise that they are diametrically opposed to each other no longer holds true and this is probably the most radical change in the theory. Due to this, Tomi has been revised to n10M9 and Martin is at n8M10. I'm still keeping the scale of 0 to 10 though, with 0 being least and 10 being most.

Ed though is still outside the nipa-Martin theory. Whatever he wants to do, he can always add in new methods to do it. He calls that the golden rule - according to him it's like having access to all the gold. Well, he's welcome to Fort Knox, I guess, but the rest of us have to grovel and beg like paupers or learn to make do with what we have. He's in a league of his own for the purposes of nipa-Martin though.

Logan posted a problem in the scripting forum. Now, I can't reveal the exact conversation, but I can say that Tomi and Martin both suggested solutions. It was interesting to see that Logan went for Tomi's suggestion first, although it didn't work. Hence I'll have to revise that to Ricochet n8M8.

Timmie posted something that needed a solution as well, and it was telling that Ed suggested adding something new for it, Martin suggested a complicated coding change and Tim himself was thinking along the lines of a huge code change. So TimalakofBorg n1M4. I suggested a solution that Tomi and myself had developed/brainstormed for Fastbreak and variations of which was subsequent used in Titan and Babylon 5. Hopefully that would increase Timmie's n number by a few.

So the new revised list:

Ghosts
BugLaden nxMx
nipa n10M9
Ricochet n8M8
Martin n8M10
Novelty n8M7
kdevine n4M8
toon n3M7
ShadowJump n3M6
kapa n2M1

PLs
Bruce the Goose n1M6
Jammer Jun n2M4
TimalakofBorg n1M4
Izibaar n0M3
Rainbow n1M2
stormcloak n0M2
10tacle n0M0
wumpus n0M0
amarriner n0M0
kiloecho n0M0
[Note: The last 4 haven't got any games adapted yet on their own, hence the zeroes.]

Former PLs with games adapted
jackalope n1M7
mechaman n2M5
hiro_antagonist n1M5
sillywiz n2M4
jaycurl n2M3
Valorian n2M2
JudgeWhyMe n1M3
j235 n2M1
Point Infinity n1M2
superryoga n1M0

That should be everyone I think. This new comprehensive lists has forced me to consider a few of the former PLs and I think some of them deserves a description.

Nick (superryoga) was surprisingly very adept with solving problems the nipa way - he knew what was required for his game and stuff. However, the thing that let him down is that he had no amplitute for the coding and scripting, hence the overall failure of his project.

Shane (Point) and Yannick (Judge) both had games out, but from what I remember they were basically "no-frills", and of course back then with all the handicap on the engine, "no-frills" isn't anything to write home about. They did nothing special with the game objects as well.

Jason (jaycurl) and Monty (sillywiz) did some interesting things in their games with scripts and objects respectively. The jaycurl attack script in Wildstorm has since being incorporated into games such as DoomTrooper and Babylon 5 and ShadowRun. Monty's use dice to draw black lines was a scource of inspiration for game layout and design and the basic concept is now used in games as diverse as Portable Adventures and Bowling.

James (mechaman) was the person who adapted Buffy, of course, but besides Buffy, he's scripts has appeared in Shadowfist and HumAliens as well. Specifically, it's a unique dice script that ensures that they display correctly whatever the view.

-+@ Air Horn @+-

Last day of the month... titles of the month have been from the Fast Break CCG, if you haven't already guessed it. And Air Horn is for Arderial, of which I finished the templates today, together with d'Resh and Universal.



So, that's all 50 cards templated. Hooray. The are all available on the custom card website. Next up, I'll probably look at the guardian images and get those posted, template Shadowsfall Promo to enable that they can be playtested with the images and incorporate the first of the updates to the TG cardlist.

It has been a busy day on CCG Workshop today. There's of course, the end of month report, which is posted just before this a few hours back. There's the statistics stuff which is used for the featured games which got posted about an hour back. And of course, that's in between helping players and PLs as they try to get certain things done. While I'm on the topic of that, I finally figured out that it was the Ad blocker in Norton Internet Security that was preventing the engine from functioning and posted that in the forums.

Three games were updated today, and I'll name them sequentially. A player mentioned to Tomi that Wildstorm was missing a few cards. Turn out to be more than 200 cards as they either had the wrong or missing tags. I had to batch rename and replace to get everything kosher and then upload everything to the server, all under 10 minutes. Well, I aim to please.

Go Fish had Tomi's Duel of Ages cardback added, and since I fudge things a bit, the new cardback will be the default one, which will also be the one in game and the one that will show up on his plate. I haven't had time to get a screenshot of that yet... and besides, I'm still waiting for Sideshow's cardback.

AvP(vT) got its second scenario today, and boy, adding a deck to a game isn't as easy as one would think. It's a good thing I've done it so often these days that I know what exactly has to be done. It's on the engine and it's public. Whether people will play the "no frills" "low tech" version remains to be seen. The good news is that the 30 days numbers are almost past the 100 games mark.

I played lots of gToons today, if only because I was bored. Discovered quite a few combos that might come in handy and I think I have a better idea for a deck, so I'm gonna build that for the new year. Hopefully, I can beat the sub 1000 ranking sometime next year as well.

Well, Happy New Year 2005 everyone, and may all your wishes come true in the new year.

-+@ Good Rhythm @+-

Today has been a rather busy day CCG Workshop wise. It's almost good to be back into the thick of things.

I updated the BOT with a number of new answers. There are still lots of weird questions being asked, like how to bake a cake, but otherwise everything's good. Nobody is using the BOT much, but when they do, it's more likely about VTES these days and I just wish it'd be out and over with ASAP really.

I uploaded the B5 foolball/influence image to the wrong directory yesterday, which resulted in a diaplay defect, although I'm glad the engine is stable enough these days to handle that without batting an eyelid (if it had eyes and eyelid). Had to upload it today to make sure things go better and I'm gonna PM Bruce to tell him that I've updated the Vorlon cards on the engine as well.

I also fixed and uploaded a new version of WS to fix a compatibility issue with the new build of the engine. I wonder why that isn't in there in the first place, but since the engine never required it, I guess it didn't matter until now. Anyways, it's in so hopefully things will be OK. I need to check the new version of the engine with other compatibility issues as well.

For the eagle eyed out there, I've updated sidebar links to include gToon on Cartoon Network. I didn't play today, but my rank has gone to under 3000, out of 800,000. The total number of players was 140,000 last weekend, and before anyone thinks there's been a huge influx of players, it probably isn't that. Signup is free and you get free stuff including your chance to win an ultra rare slam, so any clever person would be doing multiple signups until they get a slam. It's abusing the system I believe, yet I would fault Orbit for making it that way. Urgh. I wish I had the time to do that but I don't, so I'll have to suffer.

Was suppose to update MND with the new background and the Elder's Legacy Promo today, but real life is gonna intervene. I might do it later tonight if I have the time. I'm going to revert to a nice lighted green background for Weave and it'll probably include the weave portrait that I've been using to make all my custom Weave cards. I'll see how much time I have.

LotR Online is gearing up for league play. They've got special incentive for leagues including league only "expandable" cards. I don't really understand how those will work, but if you get enough points and the right cards, you can have a super duper card for league. Sounds interesting I guess. I'll have to see what's happening.

Development wise things seem quiet around CCG Workshop. It figures that when I finally start coding games, other people will be doing other things. nipa is waiting for Duel of Ages to be sent to him and Martin is busy on getting VTES ready for beta/public though. Bruce seems to be busy with tweaking Rage, but otherwise things are quiet. There hasn't been anything to be excited about for a long time now, I guess.

-+@ Bound to its Fate @+-

There seems to be quite a number of people looking for Wildstorms Cards here. Sorry, I haven't started my Stormwatch custom expansion, but it'll be here sometime next year. At the moment I'm working on the custom MND cards for the custom set titled Tainted Glimpses, and some of the cards are posted below. If anyone wants to play either Wildstorms or MND, please click on the CCG Workshop links on the right for more details.

Well, first up, as promised, the 6 cards I did yesterday after the blog.




Artist credits left to right, top to bottom: Novelty, Werner, Holmberg, Werner, Katura and Holmberg/Werner. One of the most useful piece of artwork I've got is the Weave one. That has spawned all 3 of the 4 Weave custom cards in EL - Weave Path, Savannah Hyrenand Weave Homestead... as well as Weave bulb above and Tainted Blades below... and has provided the backgrounds for Wawek (EL) and Halla (TG, above). I don't think I can use it for anymore full art cards, but I'm sure I can use some of it for background art somewhere.

In case anyone is wondering about Cwm, it's going to be a poison creature. Now a cwm (as I understand it) is basically a lava tube - it's a geological term of some sort. Naming a flying creature that might seem a bit bizzare, but hey, every custom set done by me has to have some funny name with an actual meaning - that's how the cards Chimera, Charybdis Wellisk and Warrada, Simulacrum all got their names in EL.




And here are the last 6 of the Taint spells, Tainted Leaves was retouched today, Tainted Peaks was done yesterday. Artists, as usual left to right, top to bottom: Holmberg, Holmberg, Werner, Werner, Allan and Werner. Actually, the piece of Orothe art is probably the second most used art for cards - art was used for Algae Band and Aquatic Warlum in EL and Tainted Tide above. The image used for Tainted Peaks isn't actually a MND thing from 2i, but then again, neither is this custom card set. That image is obtained from one of his "Elemental" series of images which has been exhibited in art galleries in the midwest. Of course, it's also been published ... not as an artwork, but as part of MND's background on gEngine (as it was then) in page issue 68 of Scrye, February 2004. I guess it needs to be immortalised as a custom card now.

I haven't done any (new) cards today, but I might do some later. I'm keen to push past the 34 card mark - i.e. to have a third of the set ready to be adapted to the engine. Art though would be the hard part, but that's always the case.

And on a totally unrelated note, I think I'm coming into my own on LotR O. Some kid (OK, he's not technically a kid) actually gave me a Rare card for free, not because I'm "Novelty from CCG Workshop", but because I'm "Novelty, the guy on LotR O". What's even cooler is that I have got my first groupie... or stalker, or whatever you want to call it. Some guy with the handle of TripleJ has been observing all my games, though I have no idea why. I asked him about it but he avoided my question. I guess the idea of playing top level decks with a bunch of common and starter deck characters must really seem like a good allure to some, perhaps people like TripleJ. Who knows. Yes, I realied that I have avoided decks with rare characters (or even uncommon ones) for some weird reason. I have been picking up the commons and starters and have been wielding them to be a force to reckon with. Sorta cool actually. Built a Non-solo Smeagol deck today for the first time and wiped out a Ninja Gollum deck. That was cool, but only because that's the worse decktype against Smeagol. I'll have to try getting that deck paired up with Uruks +1, Morcs, Burdenating Naz and swarms.

I previously thought that there were only 2 ways to win in LotR - run to 9 or kill your opponent. I just realise that there is a third way - it has been there for quite some time, and I've seen the decktype, but never really thought about it as a different "way to win" until today when I built the decktype. It's overwhelming the ringbearer - a lot more difficult if it's Frodo, but the advantage of overwhelmnig with burdens is that Sam can't take over the ring. There seems to be 2 decktypes - the more popular Nazghul burdenating decks, wich uses Enduring Wraiths and the Witch King from Shadows, and what I built today, a new Orc shadows side whose focus is to add burdens to overwhelm the ring-bearer, but could also swarm and do beatdown depending on the draw. The burdenating part of the deck is the sneaky part as I found out today. I had a huge Beastly out and my opponent had his focus on it, so he didn't pay attention to the tiny stealthy burdenating orc who added a burden during regroup and won me the game. Rather cool. I shall have to think how I can make it more... efficient.

And whenever I start talking about Timmy, it seems things happen with him. He appeared in the chatroom today asking me how to convert excel to text. Well, the process I use to produce the result that could be used in the gML isn't that complex, but sadly, I wasn't around to answer his questions, so nope, no Hoth for anyone today. Oh well.

Ah, I hear my A Game of Thrones starter calling me for a game....

-+@ Stars in Alignment @+-

Nope, no Wildstorms update for those who was expecting one, things just didn't line up for me to do them. I know I was supposed to do it and I even though about how it could be done, but when the push turned to shove, the tough gets going...

I did update the AvP rules so that they now link to the correct scenarios... and as Ravage pointed out, a location deck would be required for most other scenarios except for contact. I guess contact is what people will be forced to play for a while then since I don't really have plans to add in a location deck, but I guess that will be added sooner or later... hopefully sooner... and hopefully by someone else.

I also prodded Martin about VTES not having any development infomation made public for 2 months so hopefully he'll post a screenshot or something. People don't realise that it takes ages to adapt a game, particularly a full version for a licensed game. Sure, one can do a "no frills" version like AvP in a day or two, but as the players are finding out, such a version isn't "fun" to play at all as it'd probably be missing huge gaps like AvP currently, but hey, AvP's still playable.

Have I mentioned that Logan has been busy on LMS and Crypt? A lot. More than usual. That's considering that he's got real life and things are "going South" for him, literally as well as figurately. He's also got an important date coming up - I posted a card manip on the forums which he enjoyed. Heh.

Besides Martin and Logan and (sorta) myself, I don't think anyone else is actively coding games. Thomas seemed to be stuck on Frank's Zoo, although with a bit of help he could get it finished real soon. Tomi still hasn't got his internet connection setup yet and Kev as usual hasn't got much motivation to code his games these days. Tim seems more interested in selling his LotR cards rather than workin on Hoth, the next SW set, which seems to be a pity, since there was demand for the game about a month back when ANH came out and he didn't follow it up. Oh well. So we're practically stuck with 3 game coders (if you count myself and T & S has half each) and we still produce as many games as we have been doing when there were at least triple that amount of game coders... which I guess is surprisingly. Hopefully, Tomi and JC will come back to the coding fold soon.

Oh, I haven't mentioned why I didn't work on WS today... that's because I was sorting out my stacks of unsorted cards. There's Sim City, which I finished opening yesterday, then there's a while stack of X-Men cards, Hyborian Gates, which I just dump into a box (but I'm still waiting to get a good card box, so they are sitting in a pile at the moment), the custom MND cards (and I had to get ready the package to send to Stephan), the commons and uncommons from Mount Doom (while I sorted out the cards to trade with some german guy). That took up most of my coding time today. Well, another day won't hurt WS too much I suppose. And given the fact that I'm more likely to break it than add something new...

I'm almost LotR'ed out. Played a short game and won because I raced to 9 and killed off all my hobbits. Hobbit sacrifice works, although I'm more reluctant to do it. I've got to learn how to play ruthless sacrifice like I do with MND Cald. Anyways, let's show some Shadow cards just to fill up the space and make this post pretty...


Aragorn was the one released today along with 3 other cards and there are people talking on the Decipher forum about his picture, how big his chin is, how fat he looks, etc. I should be glad it's not Legolas and I don't visit a Legolas forum. 13 more days to go for the online release of Shadows... and counting.

Well, it's raining here so I have no idea if the stars are in alignment... but at least I know the cards I just posted are in alignment.