Doomtown on OCTGN

So my updated on the Doomtown engine for OCTGN continue at a rapid pace. I mentioned it before shortly but I thought I’d make a proper post about my progress with this and how to go around playing it.

EDIT @ 29/06/2011 : Updated the links as I’ve moved the maintenance into a new forum. If any of the links were broken for you, try again now.

EDIT @ 08/02/2012 : Changed the OCTGN download link to point to the new client in octgn.info.

EDIT @ 17/02/2012: Changed the Definition and Markers download links to point to the github repository.

Ok to put it at the basics, in order to play any card game on OCTGN, you need 3 things. The OCTGN client, the game definition, and the card sets you’re going to use. This is because OCTGN cannot be distributed with any games.

So in order for to get ready to play Doomtown you need to

1. Install the OCTGN client from here (Windows only I’m afraid )
2. Grab the latest Doomtown game definition from here and save it in a folder you’ll find it again easily, such as D:OCTGNDoomtown
3. Download all the sets in this folder as well as the Markers & Tokens set from github as well.
4. Open OCTGN and login with a Google account¹
5. Go to the games Games tab.
6. Use the “Install Game” button and select the .o8g  file to install the game definition first.
7. Then click on the Doomtown game that appeared and click the button to install sets. Select all the sets you downloaded (You can select multiple at the same time) and press OK.
8. Press the Deck Editor button and create or import a Deck. I suggest again you save it in the same place you downloaded your Doomtown files (e.g. D:OCTGNDoomtownDecks). For a quick start, you can grab some of the True Doomtown decks.
9. (Optional) In case you’re a new player, grab the rulebook from here
10. You’re good to go and find a game to play.

Not especially tricky as you can see. The trickiest is finding someone to play with. You can try subscribing to the Doomtown Facebook Group and see if anyone is available for a game. You can also create a game and hope that someone is online to join it since anyone who has Doomtown installed will see open game lobbies. There is also a client with a lobby available, which should make it easier to setup a game, but it tends to lag behind official releases and there’s not a lot of people looking for Doomtown games there anyway. Most play Magic: The Gathering instead. Forget that, don’t get the client with the lobby as it lags so far behind now, that the game will be unplayable due to missing features Forget the above. The current client now includes a lobby as well as a few other matchmaking improvements.

However I guarantee that if you like card or tabletop games, you will find this one a blast. In the recent weeks I’ve spent a lot of effort in automating away most of the more tedious stuff one has to do when playing card games online, such as modifying counters and typing each action that they do in the chat. I’ve literally spent the latter half of my vacation (while staying home sick) to code some pretty nifty stuff to use the powers that playing on a PC gives us in order to make the game easier to play.

For example, the game will let you know if you cannot play a unique card, because someone else has it in play (or it’s dead). It will automatically calculate your poker hand rank, taking into account jokers and what kind of poker you play. It will update your various totals (influence, control) as you play and lose cards and you can even force it to recalculate all your totals in case you lose track. It will pay your upkeep and receive your production at the start of the turn, and refresh your cards and hand at the end of the turn. It will even remember if you permanently modified a card before and add the same modifications in case that card leaves and comes back into play later on.

There’s still a lot of automation I’d like to implement soon and I keep thinking more as I work on it so I end up adding new features practically daily. You can follow the development in the forum if you so wish and I would really appreciate any feedback such as suggestions or problems you’re having.

 

1. The authentication goes encrypted straight to google,so no worries [↩]

---