-+@ Brick @+-

That which makes things heavy.



Art Credits:
Mink by Beth Zyglowicz
Zeith by Beth Zyglowicz
Golizar by Mark Chmielewski

Three more magi for EF, I have been concentrating on the magi recently since I have to do major work on the rest of the other 7 cards. I did Golizar and 2 others yesterday and another 3 the day before that which means I have all but one magi for the expansion done. Considering that this is a 150 card expansion, as opposed to the usual 100 card expansion, there's quite a few more images that needs to be obtained for this. And the summary below:

Exodus Flight: Still collecting images, the status (for images) of each region are as follows:
Arderial: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics. COMPLETE
Bograth: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics. COMPLETE
Cald: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
Core: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
d'Resh: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
KT: 1 spell, 2 magi, 8 creatures, 1 relic. COMPLETE
Nar: 1 spell, 1 magi, 8 creatures, 1 relic. NEED 1 magi
Naroom: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics COMPLETE
Orothe: 1 spell, 2 magi, 8 creatures, 1 relic COMPLETE
Paradwyn: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics COMPLETE
Underneath: 1 spell, 2 magi, 2 creatures, 1 relic NEED 6 creatures/relic
Weave: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 2 relics Need 1 creature/relic
Universal: 2 spell, 1 creature, 3 relics COMPLETE

I have yet to update the webpage with all the magi, I suppose I can do that tomorrow or something, because I spent most of today working on the MND updates. The expansion though, is still on hiatus, but has 8 more images to go to get the images complete.

TG now has finalise text and if there are no more comments will be tournament legal starting May. Ditto with KQ promo. Hopefully, that will get more people interested in the tournaments. The KT cards for TW went up at the same time, as requested by Bobby as his "reward" for having the best deck in last month's competition, but I have still to finalise the Weave cards for TW. I'm not in a hurry to do so though, although, I should do it before the month is out. Also, Cure for All Seasons probably needs to be spoilt this month as well.

Those weren't the only things that got added online, a whole bunch of defects also got fixed, not to mention a couple of new things on the online game. One of the things I'm rather happy with is that there are now more colours for cards in the browser and deck manager so that I can afford to differentiate between the Custom cards and the Playtest Customs. The Japanese Promos and the Unreleased Cards also received new colours so that when deckbuilding, it's easier to see at a glance what is the status of a particular card.

Last month's tournament had 20 games played that counted, and another 7 more that didn't count. Which isn't too bad for a tournament. This month's tournament is Highlander format and it's interesting to see the type of things people are doing. There's already a significant number of games that has been played, which is normal since it is the beginning of the month. Hopefully more will be played.

Now that MND is done for the month, I should probably be looking at some other game for the rest of the month. I think focus should still be on YNDT and I'm wondering if it would be possible to do a mini-map for it. I think more of the cards can also be automated now that the engine is more powerful. It's definately time to look at it again anyways.

Tomi has been busy with his games, Doomtrooper got updates, and word is that he's making more custom cards. 108 cards is what he's looking at. I wonder where he's getting the images for all of them. Mythos and Tomb Raider have also had updates recently - he seems busy working on his games which is a good thing.

Logan has also been busy with LMS, new boards and tweaks and all sorts of good stuff. The rules page is being updated to a wiki version specifically for the engine and that is continuously being worked on as well. That is so cool, but I'm sure it's lots of hard work. I suppose MoA will begin after all this is completed.

Mark updated Aquarius earlier this month, and he's still busy working on CA and Attack to get them out in time for Origins. I hope he's doing OK on them at the moment. He's got all sorts of crazy but clever ways of tracking things and he's busily coding away.

Martin had Final Nights up on schedule and is to be praised. Thanks to a free month's worth of free pass that Ed gave out just before the month was up, the number of games played has skyrocket there. Games there are healthy... I wish the same could be said of the server.

Ed has been busy tracking down that server bug, but I think he finally managed to fix it today with Logan's input on various things here and there. Hopefully things will hold steady after this. The update/upgrade of Mille Bornes that Ed did a while back was a good thing as well... play went up for March on that particular game and it's probably due to his great work on that game.

Play was down for Doomtrooper though, despite (or was it because of) a tournament and although the tournament is still going on this month, there's even less games being played. I wonder why. On an unrelated note, Thomas has decided to call it quits as a PL due to other things happening in his life, and if he reads this, know that I wish him well.

I've been playing a lot of Auto Assault lately, mostly to just kill time. It gets boring after a while and the lack of all cards to build decks is probably what I don't like about it. The other thing that I don't like is that the deckbuilding rules are still non-existant which is a drag (no pun intended). Still, it's a good game to kill time... if I can find players to play with.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for Stargate and BattleStar Galactica CCGs to be released. The latter is supposed to be released next month, but I wonder if it'll be delayed in time for the cons. Perhaps I'll find out during Origins.

Oh, and last month's titles were all from Portable Adventures. It's a new month, so titles are from a new CCG. I'm getting into a stage where I can't remember which CCG I've quoted from, so I think this might be a repeat, but maybe not.

-+@ It's Time to Party @+-

Yay! Paaaaaaarty!



Three different cards, Yukk's Feed the Dog, Hamlet's Ending cardback and YNDT's Skyscraper. It's a change though, but it's also apt for what I have been doing today. I spent quite a bit of time today, adding the YNDT and Hamlet infomation to the CCGW wiki. Why those 2? Well, because together with Yukk, they are the 3 Interactivities Ink games that I've adapted for CCGW.

The story actually began yesterday though, when Tomi asked for a slightly different format to the game box for Mythos. I played around with Doom's box and at the end of the day, Tomi was happy with the modifications I made. So that got applied to Doom and to Mythos as well. I see he has done Dark Ages after thatwith Dark Eden being blank. Of course, a change to the format means I had to go back to each and every page to add the necessary stuff. Not a lot of pages at the moment, but that will grow soon enough... at least I hope.

MND was the other page that I created yesterday and it was just a quick cut and copy from wikipedia for that though. Not too much infomation yet, but since these are easier to edit than webpages, hopefully, they'll get polished up to a good enough standard.

Talking about MND, I actually had a look at the tournament results today. It seems that some people are reporting their results on the forums, but not on the engine and vice versa, which means that there are now two different records of the tournament. It almost seems as if it's two tournaments running concurrently. Ack, I hope I don't have to clean up as well. Transition periods are tough though.

I actually did some game coding yesterday - can't mention the game here yet. Was going to do some Hyborian Gates, but realised that I didn't have the files here. Grrr... oh well.

Ed is still trying to figure out what's causing massive lag on the server. I thought it was an error in the collections script, but it turned out not to be so. Maybe it's just something random or maybe it's a hacker. Who knows? It's interesting though, because the lag can oft times disappear and then reappear for no reason. Perhaps the physical server is just being cranky?

And everyone else? I really have no idea though. It's the beginning of the year and there's a million things to be done. It's also a new year to make resolutions to complete a game you said you'll code 2 years ago. Perhaps that's why Aaron's been hanging out around the engine these days? Who knows... I have' also seen Craig online though, although he hasn't hung out on the engine for a while now. I guess he's gone on to other things.

-+@ Inspired @+-

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I have so far:

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

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

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

Stats:
Melee
Ranged/Magic
Agility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-+@ Town Judge @+-

and Jury?



Art Credits:
Entrap by Shreve
White Gauntlets by Werner/Holmberg
Rayalon Fiend by Werner/Gardner

There's a mix of sets in today's cards. The Rayalon Fiend is an art redo for Tainted Glimpses. Entrap and White Gauntlets are for Twilight War. The story behind the new Rayalon Fiend goes something like this... I first templated Austin Gardner's image onto an RP card (Mud Mantle, IIRC). It was horrible. I gave him tips about colouring and stuff. He took those tips and practised and practised - he learnt shading and stuff. Half a year later some of the stuff he was producing for the RP cards were amazing - check out Howitzer Weebo. I asked him if he was interested in colouring over a Holmberg or Werner for the custom cards and he accepted. The result is the new Rayalon Fiend.

The other 2 cards aren't anything interesting to write about. Aglow is a card I did a few weeks back based on the image by Ryan Shreve on the official site. White Gauntlets is just a crop of the Velouria image. It's a bit blurry too, I think. Well, for the time being it's good enough, until I can get a better image. So that's one card done, 14 more to go for TW. Hopefully the rest of the images will be a breeze...

I had been busy over the past few days templating the remaining of the eXodus cards, and getting the beginnings of templating the Dreamstorm cards. These are RP cards and thus, aren't compatible with the CCG, but it's good practice templating cards anyways. The RP players seem to appreciate it. The cards can be seen at the usual place, including the MND at CCGW blog.

I've been playing some LotR - just card flopping mainly when I have time to kill. Nothing interesting going on there, at least not for me. WA have upgraded the client to show the German players and there seem to be a lot of them when I get on. Seems interesting.

The engine has been quiet as well - nothing much is happening over summer... well, nothing on the surface anyways. Martin has been busy with the new automation of VTES - I'm going to guess that's going to take up the majority of his time. Mark has been quietly working on Monster Rancher. His progress are up on the forums.

I took a few minutes earlier to upgrade YNDT and MND on the engine. YNDT had an automation added to tighten the rules and prevent cheating. MND had text revised and I posted up a preview of the next Double Jeopardy card on the engine itself.

Talking about Double Jeopardy, the contest finished a few days back and I named the winner today. There was some small excitement among the players - I guess that's a good sign. Still, there aren't that many players anymore though.

The end of the month is almost coming up... time to prepare for all the other things that usually happen then. I've got a playtest session next Friday too... hopefully I remember that...

-+@ Little Baby Godling @+-

That is such a sweet title.



Art Credits:
Ring of Power: Zyglowicz
Osatch Balm: Ransom, backgrounds by Holmberg, shadow by Nov
Shadow Chain: Gardner, effects and background by Nov

I finally finished the 2nd batch of images for eXodus, two of them are up there. Ring of Power is the average FR image while Osatch Balm is typical of Blitz. Yet, both of them looks interestingly OK (Ha!) and I'm going to include them in Exodus Flight. I think I'll take a break before I start Dreamstorm, although, technically speaking, I've already done up two Dreamstorm cards. Well, it'll be a good breather to do something else, like actually code a game, for example.

Yeah, coding. YNDT should be somewhere there together with PAD... and of course, I could do with some Hyborean Gates and B5 as well. But I haven't been in that sort of groove lately so it hasn't got done up much. I should really try and get myself psyched up about it. The question is, which one to do first... hmm...

What has everyone else been doing? Not much. It's summer, and it's time to spend life outdoors and such, which would explain why close to nothing is being done. OK, I lie. Quite a bit is happening, but I'm too lazy to summarise them here. I'll just mention two very briefly.

Martin is working on the new version of VTES already. He's really going for it. That's so amazing. I wish I had his stamina and drive when it comes to coding. Then again, I've had more than 20 games under my belt so...

Christoph just added another virtual set to SWD on the engine. Those SWCCGPC people sure don't let up with the new cards. Well, some of them should also try to look for new images and stuff. I'm sure with all the movies out there, there must be someone who has access to a DVD version of it who can take screen captures or something.

I've gone into cardflopping mode in LotR - just playing around with my usual decks in a braindead sort of way. It passes the time somewhat, I guess. Saw a rather interesting hobbit deck with wizards today (it's rather standard though). Perhaps I should test try it... or maybe not...

-+@ Total Eclipse @+-

It seems that's what MND is doing lately to my CCGW life...



Art Credits:
Sproutnik by Allen
Bog Stone Staff by Werner/Holmberg/Nov
Jungle Staff by Werner/Gillette/Holmberg

Sproutnik is the second all David Allen artwork for MND (the first was Tainted Peaks in TG) which I did a few days back and I think it looks good, albeit a bit out of place. Oh well. I did 4 relics today for TW, 2 for Bograth and 2 for Paradwyn. 2 of those are shown above. That means I'm up to 82 cards with Paradwyn complete and 4 more regions (Bograth, Universal, Nar and d'Resh) and 18 images left to go. I think I can finish up Bograth the next time I pick this up, meaning after that, all that's left would be Nar, d'Resh and Universal. Wow, that's fast. I didn't expect it to go that fast nor wanted it to go first, but since I was in the mood, I might as well strike while the iron is hot or some weird metaphor like that.

I managed to hunt down quite a few more images today, including 2 from Rich Werner and one from Whyrl. I was actually after a Bograth magi - found one that might work, but it'll probably need some work. I'm already thinking about drawing the 2 Universal images - an anchor and a harp. It's going to be a pain to draw, but once that's done, the colouring should go a bit faster, hopefully. Haven't even started looking at the Nar and d'Resh images yet, other than the fact that I need a magi for Nar. I'll leave those for later, since they are either going to be recoloured existing cards, or brand new drawings.

All TW cards are, of course, visible at the Custom Card site, and that site is getting more and more hits according to the counter. I hope that's a good sign. Hopefully, people are making their own custom cards and stuff or playing with the custom cards that I'm making.

Today is another quiet day. Pretorianstalker showed up for my YNDT tour on Friday, but there just weren't enough people to play the game - I had wanted to test it with at least 3 players. He's also trying to get the Doomtrooper league going, but I think he's busy battling the summer blues as well as people are going away on holiday and stuff. I wonder how that league is going.

A new month means new tokens and quite a few people have logged on to play. Star Wars still takes the cake I guess, since Christoph has been advertising it almost everywhere - on Decktech, on the PC forum and probably on the German sites as well. It's good to see players there I guess. Well, that's a good sign anyways. Apparently there has been quite a bit of update on the game as well.

I still haven't seen any cool Origins report yet. The only person who posted anything was Logan who mentioned that LARP chess is back this year. No news about the lockup or any madvogon stories. That's a pity though.

I got bored earlier and I did a search for gEngine with CCG. This blog returned like 5 results out of the top 20 or something like that. That's interesting, well, not really, but if 10 people were to blog about CCGW, then it could really spread quite a bit of buzz here and there.

I also bought my online Middle Earth Expanded Draft packs today. Some of those cards are nasty, but nice. Elf, Rohan and Gondor will probably take advantage of those cards once they rotate into standard. The images are nice, most of them are WETA produced and not movie based. I wonder if this is part of the "squeeze more out of the game before we go bust" strategy. Hmm...

-+@ Left for Dead @+-

Well, I'm not dead yet. Really. And I'm going to be a bit more "chatty" in today's blog because, I'm tired of technical writing.



3 cardbacks? Yup, I got a pack each of X-Men, Raw Deal (Base Set) and Star Wars (Decipher) - Death Star II expansion two weekends ago. Got them for cheap from the markdown bin as well. I have no idea how to play any of these games, and the only one that is on the engine is Star Wars, although I wonder how long will it last on there since even Decipher it seems have stopped supporting it. Hopefully for a long time more to go.

I haven't really been doing anything interesting for CCGW - sure, there's the usual forum maintenance, the BOT question clearing, some FPN and WGO updates, but otherwise life is quiet.

Unlike Tomi, who's been busily updating his games - almost half of his games got an update over the last weekend alone - both the Doomtroopers, Kult and Yahtzee. Even Reversi got a quick update over the weekend to move it forward to the new engine. As always I am grateful for the work he does, particularly that on Reversi.

Martin has also been a busy ghost as well, updating VTES within 24 hours of the complaints. It seems to be a full time job there, and I'm glad that I'm not doing it, because I simply don't have the time or the patience for that sort of thing. Still, Martin is the best person for the job and he's doing a great job supporting the game. I think Ed should just plop down some money and hire Martin on a semi-permanent basis just to handle VTES.

Mark has also been busy. There was Sideshow, then Summer Camp and now Endeavor has been made public on the engine all in time for Origins. Not only is the engine the main draw, but there's also a demo event of Endeavor at Origins too. Whew. Talk about dedication. That's the type of busyness that I can symphatise with.

Kev is still trying his hardest to get Monkeys out before Origins. I hope he meets his deadline. I know the frustration he's probably facing as he tries to hurries up, yet with all the "improvements" in the engine, it seems that for every step one gets closer to the goal, the engine takes 2 steps - eep! Well, the black queen said it best in Through the looking Glass, the sequel to Alice in Wonderland - if you want to get anywhere you'll have to run twice as fast.

Well, running fast isn't something JC has to worry about ever since he got his Mille Bornes public on the engine. I've yet to play that game - too many things to do, too little time, but from what I can see, he's got a custom expansion up there in record time as well. To quote Inspector Gadget - "Yowzers!"

Even Nate is gearing up for the big summer Con season. There's this new Community Service for Final Twilight and an entire rules update due (which has my name in the opening credits, so thank you Nate). He buzzed me a few days ago to warn (if that's the right word) me that the new expansion will be ready in July. Eep! The details are already available on the website. Time for me to get busy too.

So what have I been doing? Well, I've been like the hare in the parable of The tortoise and the hare, I've been napping while the tortoises are going slow and steady. But blegh, if they wanna win the race, I'll cheer them on, I'm not trying to win races, I'm just here to adapt games.

I've got a YNDT playtest up in about half an hour - I actually fixed most of the defects from the last playtest 2 weeks ago today and I hope it holds water with all the extra oomph that I've put into it. Give me another 6 hours or so and I'll probably close the noose and fully automate the entire game. Yes, the engine has gone that far. When I first started working on YNDT, nothing was possible except the very basics. Now I find that everything is possible, if I can only imagine the code for it. It's too bad nobody is playing it much though, I even updated the rules today to fix all the typos and stuff in there.

And there's always a MND section. No, I haven't done anything yet. Today is the last day for the signup of the tournament and I doubt I'm going to get the "quorum" required for the tournament, so I'm going to let it pass. It's a pity though. I've yet to find the time to actually get Twilight War into shape, let alone work on Double Jeopardy, and there have been people (OK, one person, and his name is Doug) asking about DJ already. Oh well, like everything, they'll just have to wait until I have more time. It's nice though to know that there are people actually waiting for my custom cards.

The end of the month is coming up soon and the madness for that time period will certainly consume me. Let me be the first to predict that even with the 100 players, VTES, being completely free at this closed beta phase will take the top spot of being the most played game. Not only that, I'm sure it'll also be the game with the most defects reported this month, since the players are going crazy there. That might be a good thing for Origins too.

As for my own goals... well... I'll doubt I'll meet any of them, which means I'll have to push everything back to July and delay everything for a month. Whee, that should be fun... not.

-+@ Path Not Taken @+-

which is a rather cool title...



Art Credits:
Fukal & Mori: Whyrl/Strom
Stuff Twins: Whyrl/Strom
The Shapers: Whyrl/Strom
Double Jeopardy... now you know why it's named such. Dual magi all of them, and dual-region as well. I hope I'm not opening up a can of worms here with these, but Alison Strom's artwork is just too good to waste by cropping them badly into 2 separate magi. Well, the first of these will probably go up in July as a competition. Probably, not definately. I have no idea where I'm going there. Made these cards a few days ago. I liked them, but they took quite a bit out of me. There are 3 more to go...

Mitch posted in the MND at CCGW blog. That is a good thing. The game is dying down for summer. Not too many has signed up for the tournament yet. It's still early days though. Also, I've got to put up the KQ Promos onto the engine for playtest soon. I hope people will enjoy seeing the cards they designed up on the engine.

I actually held a YNDT playtest and garnered a dozen defects. That was crazy. Things are broken again. Lots of things to fix. Hopefully I can get everything fixed up properly again to make the game playable. The people who played the game seemed to like it. Of course, the tokens I was giving away was a bonus to them as well.

Finally did the statistics for last month, and since summer is approaching, the numbers are on their annual downward spiral. Nothing much to do there... which is why hopefully VTES will reverse the downward trend. I totally forgot about the custom cards in SR and was told (off?) by Ed and Logan about that so I had to revise it slightly. Otherwise, that's like the second or third time in 17 months that I've been corrected I think.

The BOT has been quiet, I cleared out a couple of questions a few days ago, but I suspect someone else has been clearing off those questions as well. I'm also axing down the WGO and FPN to get them to something a little more reasonable after the glut of stuff that was announced last month. Things are slowly disappearing, which is always a little bit sad, but it makes the respective sections a lot more readable without having to scroll.

Ed has been busy trying to get the next build of the engine out. Make that engines. That's the normal engine and the White Wolf engine. I wonder how many of my games will be broken by the new engine. I hope there's none, but I'm sure some of the things that are introduced, or an existing method that's tightened, will probably find a flaw in my programming. Yes, my programming sucks.

Kev told me he still hasn't finished monkeys yet. I understand that it's a huge undertaking, but I'm sure that when he finishes it, it'll be really interesting. Can't wait to play that game, especially if there's a whole horde of people playing it.

Talking about playing, Billy turned up on the engine yesterday and we tried to get a B5 game going, but it was a no go since there wasn't enough players. It is a surprise to see him though, he seems less "vinegar"-ish than he was when I last talked to him on the engine. I guess living with David has probably smoothened him out or something.

Tomi is still busy fixing up his two major games - Doomtrooper gets quite a number of small bugfixes due to the large number of games played by the Europeans. They are getting a second win since they have discovered my playtesting sessions where I give out tokens. I also gave out tokens for the tournament participants and the eventual winner. So those people should be awash with tokens this month.

Mythos meanwhile has been played to death by Alex as he attempts to get the repointed adventures accepted. Those makes for a more balanced game, I suppose, but I haven't touched Mythos for a long, long while now. Apparently, Logan and Alex are going to meet-up at Origins to play Mythos. I think I'm getting jealous of that.

The Rage tournament is still going on. Only 2 games so far, and HC O'Neill has been in both. It's sad though that not many people are participating in the tournament. I did all the advertising on the CCGW site where I can, but I guess that isn't enough. Anyways, we'll see what happens there at the end of the tournament.

I've been playing quite a bit of LotR these days, only because everyone is comfortable with the cards now. About 6 more weeks till the next set appears... maybe the next time I blog, I should preview some of those cards. Anyways, I'm still catching people offguard with the stupid commons and uncommons, and I haven't been using a standard run of the mill deck for a long time now.

-+@ The Big Top @+-

with the emphasis on the big.



Art Credits:
Jodst by urm... someone and colours by Scott
Nejza by Zastrow, background by Holmberg
Brynn by Zastrow
More TW cards, 3 magi this time. Jodst stands for Justin (not Zastrow) Orothe Darius Stephan and Tom, the members of the Magi Project and the region that they were going to start off with. Well, the Magi Project survives, if only in TW. The other 2 cards are by Justin. Nejza has his initials in the name, but you'll have to guess who the other people are. Brynn was named by Justin himself.

I actually sorted out the cards for TW today as well. KT is now complete with 8 cards, but half of those doesn't yet have images. I'll have to create them from scratch. Weave needs 5 more cards. Also ballooned up the d'Resh and Nar cards in TW - I think Nar needs 2 more and d'Resh 3 more. None of them have images though, I just browsed the unused ideas leftover from TG and incorporated them into the set. Artwise, it'll probably be photoshopped images from the old cards. Oh well. I'll have to do those over the next few days since I'm fresh out of TW images for the blog.

Today was a crazy day. I almost forgot I had 2 playtest on the engine. The Quartet playtest was good - found a few bugs, but they weren't showstoppers. Finished the game though and that's good. The funny thing is that there seems to be some sort of data drop for the 2 Europeans in my game. Oh well.

The YNDT playtest was a non-starter though. Not only did it report the wrong size for me, but it also did a weird number with the code. I can either rewrite everything again or get Ed to fix his code. I'm hoping for the latter. This affects not just YNDT but every game that uses those method to determine screensize, which is most of my games. *insert big sigh* Hence the title of today's blog. (BTW, it's day 20 and Martin hasn't guessed the CCG yet. He'll probably tell me it wasn't sold in France.)

Ultimate Combat went public today. Which means I had to do a large number of stuff - like move forums, check that the rules are there, ensure the game page is ready, etc. I edited the page slighty... well, more like formatted it rather, and updated the master plates post here on my harddrive as well. It'll go up at the end of the month onto the plates page.

Otherwise things are quiet. Mark is doing heavy duty coding of Endeavor to get it ready in 6 weeks time. Martin is finishing off Doomtown and is moving onto VTES. I must say I'm pleased with the Doomtown adaptation although I hope there's nothing broken with it. I wonder if Logan will surprise us with Sheboygan again, the same way he surprised us with Black Box. Who knows?

-+@ 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...

-+@ Energy Sphere @+-

Well, if you see one, it's probably mine, coz I feel sorta drained.



Heh, well, I don't live in either of those. Those are just the cards in YNDT, which I updated today somewhat. I see so many possibilities with the game, there's so much to do with so little time. Yes, this isn't on my "ToDo" list for the month, or even the optional list. It's just the bonus something for this month, to simplify gameplay and to enable tours and tournaments to be held on the engine for it. This will make things a bit more easier to play.

The other game I worked on today, rather unsuccessfully, was Elemental. This is also not on my list, but I thought it's about time I tweaked it somewhat to see what recent goodies I can put into it. Well, as it turns out, not much, so I guess, I'll just have to wait until the engine improves significantly to get it down.

MND-wise, the tournament is still going on strong as people are still signing up. People are going berserk playing tournament games, although I haven't observed that many recently. It should be good though and I know some of the players are getting tokens to play in the tournament. Good times and all.

I really haven't had the time to work on new cards - I really should get Jile Snacks (got part of the image, just need to do the rest), Nightbloom Cloak (got the image, just need to edit it some) and the Frostbite Ickle (got the 2 images I'll need to make the picture). Hopefully, I'll get some time tomorrow. Hopefully, I'll get some eXodus cards under my belt tomorrow as well. We'll have to see. And just because it needs some advertising: MND at gEngine blog had an update yesterday for some really cool artwork. Be there or be ... elsewhere?

Martin is still busily working on VTES I know... it's hopefully coming out soon and he'll be less cranky. Who knows why he's cranky. French guys are always cryptic - polite, but cryptic. Which means no DoomTown update for a while... although HotS might be getting an update very soon for the upcoming tournament.

Yes, tournament. Ed has been giving tours every night for a while now. He's really trying to make these tournaments a success. I wish him all the best with this one. He was room hopping broadcasting his tour today, although I think at the end of the day, only one person turned up. Well, one is better than none in my book. Access Denied is next I think, and that might prod (or is that jolt?) Tomi into action... or maybe not. I haven't played Access Denied for a while.

Kev has been working very hard with Monkeys, I think he knows Origins is coming soon. I think he's on the home stretch. I know I've been saying that for ages, but the home stretch is always the longest stretch. It's like it's in time-lapse slow-mo action there, so that we don't miss all the good parts. He's also busy on GE though, and I wonder how that is going. Haven't seen anything from Gray for a while... but that doesn't mean they aren't doing anything.

Talking about new PLs, Craig IM'ed me to ask me about schemas while I was at the busiest phase at work. Urgh. I wasn't able to help him much... schemas aren't my strong point... and for that matter, neither is coding, or anything else that's involved with adapting a game on the engine. I just plagarise what other people have done I suppose... other people including myself, of course!

Have been also busy playing some LotR. I'm bored with the new cards already, bored with all the same old tricks with those cards. One decktype I'd really like to play is ninja gollum, but I don't have the cards for that. Oh well.

-+@ Product Endorsement @+-

Merry Christmas. I haven't posted pictures for a while so here's one of one of my favourite cards in Elder's Legacy:

Snowflake Crystals is one of the 4 Nar cards in Elder's Legacy and is the relic card of the set. It is one of the few counter relics, like Evu's Jellybeans and Chaos Sphere, but unlike either, it sits around after all the counters are used up. This is to enable cards that discard relics - and there is at least one in Nar to be able to make use of this card once its main usefulness is gone. Tainted Glimpses will add more functionality to this card. This is the first version of the card with text, done up for the upcoming Custom card website.

Since I'm on the topic of MND, the main forum for it - Insiider - has been hacked into and is showing some rather disturbing pictures of "terrorists". Urgh.

And sticking to the MND theme, I played 2 games of MND with Mikey Angel today with 2 different Paradwyn beatdown/dreamwarp decks. Won both games, but only because his deck needs a lot of tweaking. I guess it's my first MND game in ages.

While playing the game though, Brash, my LotR O friend from Canada asked me to play LotR with him. Had to turn him down, but I did tell him about gEngine. I think we've got one new happy player... and one who doesn't seem to want to play VTES! (On a side note, there were more MND players on the engine at one point than VTES players!) Here he is bubbling about it to me on AIM.

Locke Scythe: I actually am pretty happy about this
Locke Scythe: lol
Locke Scythe: like a excited child on christmas

Well, it is Christmas and all. He'll be playing Buffy I guess. It's always nice to tell someone about the engine and they get excited about it.

MND wasn't the only game I played on the engine today. I actually got someone (aka Ryan) to teach me how to play AvP. I'm rather surprised though at how interesting the game is, the only downer is that there are so many little details that one has to refer to outside of the cards. Besides that though, I can see where the Precedence influence shone through and I was very surprised to see the VS combat mechanics in there, although one should not be too surprised by that since the Precedence card designers were also the ones behind VS. Nevertheless, I just can't play a game and not tinker with it. Since this is a game I can tinker with... I added a few things, most of them trivial - setup now plays all the starting cards instead of drawing it to hand... and the counters and markers and dice are all available on setup now. There was a request to bump up the total number of players per game to 4, so I did that which probably earned me some goodwill from the AvP players. Some people are just so easy to please! The other major thing I did was to add a begin turn script that automated unrotating all cards and playing all locations. A few other minor tweaks made it into there, nothing major for this "light" game. I did think about doing automating phases similar to B5 (because face it, Precedence has this love for complicated phases as is apparent in the 3 games I've played so far - B5, WoT and AvP) - but since this game is "light" (think budget airlines and $1 stores), I'll leave it for sometime in future when it gets upgraded into the "normal" category of games.

Since we are talking about B5, I saw 2 players playing it today. They were using rather simple decks but were using the interface like pros, so I didn't intrude on their game. It's nice to see the game being played, even if it's only a 2-player game. I don't think they crashed, which was a good thing. There's so much more I want to do for that game, if only I have the time.

Ed and Kari have been portable adventuring the last few days. I'm glad that they enjoy the game. A complicated CCG gets tiresome sometimes with deckbuilding, card collecting and all that sort of jazz. Portable Adventures takes the shortcut on all that and provides an easy to digest pack, sort of like lunchables, but with all the favours and taste and it actually fills one up.

And we haven't had a licensed game announcement for a while. I think one of my games is going to be announced next but that might change. Meanwhile, with the launch of VTES I wonder if we'd be getting a 2nd White Wolf game to be licensed. I wonder if WW actually owns the rights to gToons. Probably not. The other WW game on the engine - Rage, which is unlicensed - has seen some play over the last week or so, which is welcomed.

And Rage brings me to JC and Le Tournoi. Apparently it's ready for beta, but I don't think Ed has opened it yet. Oh well. It's actually much better than Checkers was when that went beta, so kudos goes to JC for getting it to that stage. It'd be nice to see another boardgame on the engine, not to mention the first original boardgame there.

And as for Bowling... I was going to work on it today, but well, I ended up playing games instead. I think it's something that will only be done next year, unless I somehow find the time between now and the end of the year, which I doubt.

I was just thinking earlier that I'm gonna have to move Yukk, YNDT and Hamlet all to "Now Playing" status soon... probably next week sometime. YNDT still needs that move truck script, but otherwise all 3 of those games are as done as I'd like them to be. Elemental could still use the tidal wave lock and move script... which is a bit more complicated, and I don't think the engine is capable of handling it yet.

Talking about Elemental, vaporator - that's his handle, I have no idea what his real name is, although I do know he's from Italy - told me today he'd like to add AI to Elemental. That's great... or not. I don't want to go around and pick up the pieces after him if he wrecks Elemental. I did suggest to him that he should start with one of his own games... probably something like Chess or Backgammon. He seemed more happy with that idea. After that talk with hom though, I got the impression that all he wants to get out of this is some money, which means he needs to get his hands on a licensed game. Well, tough, he'd need to have done a game and maintained it for 6 months first before he can get his hand on a licensed game as per the rules that Ed laid down. Seriously though, I don't think anyone who codes games for CCG Workshop for money would be doing a favour to the game. Sure it might give them incentive to do things fast so that they get money, but after that, they can let their games rot and still get paid. I hope that doesn't come to pass.

And talking about money, I was surprised to see on the VTES forum someone suggesting that 15 free games is way too generous. I would have fallen off my chair when I saw that... if I was sitting on one. Well, maybe over the next few months it'd get reduced. Who knows? I did however give out Scrooge tips concerning tokens and how to save on them. Ghost of Christmas past, present and future, eat your heart out.

Well, time to get ready for the end of the month stuff. 2 games made public for starters, with the possibility of a third would mean I have quite a bit of work ahead of me.

And let me wish you and yours a very blessed Christmas, full of the joy of life, the love from friends and family and the peace in the assurance that hope is never far from the taking.