Category: The Undefined Remainder

Geeky stuff. Internet, Games, Free Software, Sci-fi etc.

How to make custom markers for card games

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In ActionI’ve recently started teaching/playing Doomtown:Reloaded using some proxies I’ve printed out and one of the few things that are kinda annoying in the card pool, is that there’s a significant amount of card effects which one has to track manually because either the originating card was an action that was discarded, or because it’s an effect from a deed or spell which has to remain in its original location, and cannot be used to track the effect.

So for example, one of your dudes moves to Charlie’s Place and grabs +2 bullets, then a few plays later they’re hit by a noon Blood Curse, and after an amount of maneuvering later, you end up in a shootout. Now you have to remember that +2 bullets and that -1 bullet effects, plus any Sun In Yer Eyes and so on,that you may get in the shootout itself before calculating your bullet bonuses. And finally at the end of the turn you also have to remember that -1 influence from Blood Curse as well. Let’s just say that is can easily lead to mistakes…

Now, Doomtown:Reloaded will come with more than influence, control and ghost rock counters. It will also come with a bunch of double-sided generic counters which you can use to track other effects, such as the aforementioned ones (and generally shotoout effects are fairly easy to remember since they last so little), but you’d still have to remember that the green star is a blood curse, and the grey skull is an extra bullet etc. Still leaves room for mistakes.

A few weeks ago, I was at a Android:Netrunner game night, and one player had this cool little plastic tokens that he created to add custom markers, instead of using his own cards, such as parasite tokens on cards instead of his parasite card, or personal workshop tokens to remember which of his cards are still in the workshop, and so on. It was a really nifty idea but I thought that it was a wasted potential in Netrunner because it has very little things one needs to track manually ((This is actually one of my favourite designs. I find that the way they’re dealing with increasing or resident effects to be brilliant! Basically what they do in ANR is that almost any effect which stays at the table is always represented with a card, and any variable changes on top of that is represented with a marker upon the card which explains the effect itself. This way one can always understand the state of the game just by looking at the state of the cards on the table, even if they just tuned in to the game. )) other than the occasional Femme Fatale marker or Uroboros effect which are few and short enough not to cause any issues.

In Doomtown however, where noon-long effects are fairly common ((fortunately we got rid of card memory shenanigans)) these kind of tokens are a great idea. So using the information that it’s simple coin capsules (used by collectors mostly) I researched a bit online started preparing.

For my Coin Capsules, I went with the 20mm ones from Unicorn, which at 12 euro for a 100, means 0.12 cents each. Not bad for simple plastic. Their size is fitting for a 10cent euro coin, which I felt was sufficiently large to show the card art in the marker, without being so large that it obscures the card itself or leaves no space for other counters.

(Here I’m going to explain how I prepared everything from the start. If you just want to see how to simply print your own based on what I made, skip to the “Making your own custom markers” part.)

Once they arrived, I opened the card art and took a screenshot of the area I wanted to make into a marker, I passed that into GIMP, made a perfect circle selection of exactly the area I needed, then cut that into a new image (to remove the rest of the art), resized it to 60 px (which prints out to roughly 21mm) and finally created a white image in gimp at A4-paper size, and pasted the resized marker in there.

I repeated the procedure with 14 other cards ((of which blood curse was one I did two times with two different art sections, to keep track of the two different spell effects)) that I felt created resident effects often enough. This created a double row of markers 7-wide +1 marker on the side which I didn’t need so many of. Finally I copy-pasted that double row 4 more times, to get 4 of each marker in the same page and thus have enough to use on the rare occasions where I get to use multiple of that effect in the same turn (or if my opponent is running some at the same time)

I finally exported from GIMP in .pdf format which would make sure the images print out at exactly the dimensions I put in the paper.

Making your own custom markers

2014 - 1So if you want to make your own markers using the ones I’ve already prepared, first you need to get yourself some coin capsules. You can prolly buy them in any hobby story, or just use the same item I got on Amazon. Afterwards print out my A4 page with the markers and cut them.

Since you can create each marker double-sided, what I did is put two different markers per capsule’s side. I chose cards which are unlikely to be together at the same time in multiple numbers, so as to avoid having a situation where I needed 2 from one side and 3 of the other side.

My pairs were:

  • Blood Curse 1/ Blood Curse 2 (The two different effects of the spell)
  • War Paint / Unprepared (Value difference of 6 means unlikely to be in the same straight flush draw structure)
  • Sun in Yer Eyes / Stakes Just Rose (Same Value)
  • Pinned Down / Make the Smart Choice (Value difference of 5 means less chance to be in the same straight flush draw structure)
  • Bad Company / Hiding in the Shadows (Same Value)
  • Rumors / Charlie’s Place (Influence Reduction tends not to me used in the same decks which care about boosting their bullets)
  • Yan Li’s Tailoring / Morgan Research Institute (Spell/Gadget decks unlikely to run deeds at 3 value)
  • Kevin / Kevin (just double sided solo marker for Kevin’s Ability)

Feel free to make your own pairs if you think something is more appropriate.

When putting the images in the capsule, you’ll notice that one side will not fit exactly, while the other will have space remaining. This is normal since the capsule needs some space to lock itself in place. To put the 21mm marker in the 20mm space, I simply used a 10cent coint to squeeze it in, and while I lost a little bit of circumference it’s not noticeable at all on the final marker. And the extra size on the larger size ensures the image is held into place on the capsule’s face, rather than just falling to the bottom.

This was my end result

Complete Look

I think the result is pretty neat, and in a mock setup I’ve done, the custom markers fit very comfortable among all the other cards and normal markers. Of course one has to have the art memorized to know what each custom marker does, but after a few plays that should be fairly easy. I do think a good improvement might be to include a small icon on each marker’s art that is like “+2 bullet”, or “-1 influence”,  or “turned into draw” etc. Maybe something for the future or someone better than me could arrange it and share the results with everyone (I can provide my GIMP sources on demand)

To cover all of Doomtown:Reloaded’s important resident effects I used only 29 capsules so far, so I’m left with 71 more. More than enough to re-use for other games, or for new Doomtown:Reloaded abilities as expansion come out.

The Propaganda of Civilization

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Errant Signal once again posted an excellent video about how a theoretically politically neutral game like Civilization, nevertheless provides and reinforces a political paradigm through its mechanics. Watch below the well-worthy video.

I couldn’t agree more about the message here. Even while being a huge Civ fan since the first game, it always bothered me how much “status-quo” politics a “neutral” game like civilization nevertheless managed to cram in its mechanics and presentation. From the simple fact that Anarchy has always been used as a synonymous to political chaos/vacuum, and never provided in any way, shape or form as part of the political evolution for your civilization, like Fascism or Democracy, to the fact that, as the video mentions, all civilizations start effectively as nation-states rather than city-states, or nomad tribes.

Some might claim that all those things are just an expedient game at making a video game, but isn’t it convenient that all those “shortcuts” manage to always promote a game in which a modern state is the end result before “world domination”?

Civilization is the perfect example of what “politically neutral” means in reality: The reinforcement of the status quo.

My guide on how to play classic Doomtown with a Reloaded meta.

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Now that a lot of the cards of Doomtown:Reloaded have been spoiled, I’m seeing a lot of people expressing an interest in teaching their friends how to play Doomtown by using the new rules but old cards, since those are what is available. Many simply prepare normal Doomtown decks, and simply stay within the rules of deck construction (no more than 4 cards of the same suit & value) as well as using the new casualties and avoiding card types which are not available, such as Events and Improvements.

While this goes a long way to approach the feel of the new game and see how the new rules play out, unfortunately the costs of deeds and dudes, as well as the availability of various spell effects can easily throw the delicate balance out of whack compared to what one will experience when playing Doomtown:Reloaded using only its own card pool. It is still quite easy to build degenerate decks using Doomtown:Reloaded rules that are boring or impossible to play against.

So, in this post, I wanted to provide my own personal home-rules on how to tweak your deck construction and costs in card in classic Doomtown, to get an experience that more closely approaches what you’ll find when playing Doomtown:Reloaded. This is all completely unofficial and merely approximation of what is available in DTR. I don’t guarantee perfect results, but I hope you’ll find it useful both when teaching new players or when you check things out as returining ones

Deck Construction

  • No more than 4 cards of the same suit and value
  • No events or improvements or cards which refer to the fear rating.
  • No more than 4 total production out of town among all your deeds. No more than 1 control point out of town among all your deeds.
  • All In-Town deeds should have control points (and optimally, abilities as well)
  • No more than 1 spell that reduces influence (i.e. you can put 4x Blood Curse in your deck, but not also 4x Babble On)
  • No more than 1 action that reduces Influence
  • No card effects which prevent movement to specific locations, or prevent targeting dudes, or prevent call-0uts.
  • No non-deed card effect which provides ghost rock without being a job or requiring your dude to be outside your home in some fashion (that means, no original Blackjacks outfit)
  • No card effect which provides Victory Points
  • No card effect which can ace or discard dudes without it requiring the dude causing it to be in the shootout, or in the same location. (that means, no Ezzie)
  • No card effects which destroy deeds or reduce control points in any way.

Cost/Upkeep tweaking

  • 2 Ghost Rock blanket discount for all in-town deeds. This means that Pony Express would cost 3.
  • No deed has upkeep. Any deed with upkeep now has 0 production instead.
  • All dudes with 2 or more influence have at least 1 upkeep. (I.e. a dude with 2 inf, 0 bullets which costs 4 and had 0 upkeep, now costs 4 and has 1 upkeep.)
  • All dudes with 2 or more stud bullet or 3 or more draw bullet, have at least 1 upkeep.
  • Any dude who has a combined stud bullets and influence of 4 or more, requires at least 2 upkeep if they don’t already.
  • All spells cost 1 Ghost Rock to bring into play
  • All deeds with abilities provide their ability to their controller always. Never just the owner.

All other Doomtown:Reloaded rules apply. This means, no extra card for most influence at Nightfall, new casualty rules etc.

Let me know how your experience with decks made and played under these home rules feel.

 

 

Epic Pythonista

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A random google search pointed me to this, which is kinda cute 🙂

Divided by Zer0 is an epic Pythonista (one of the 4% most active Python users) who spends a lot of time commenting on issues between pushes. Divided is a fulltime hacker who works best in the morning (around 11 am).

Brütal Legend: Another nice game marred by rampart sexism.

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Brütal LegendWarning: Some minor spoilers included

So I just finished my play through of Brütal Legend which I got from the latest HIB and I must say, even though I went in with reduced expectations due to how much internet anger there was about the RTS parts of the game, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Yes the RTS parts are clunky as fuck, since they are built for console controls in mind, and the general gameplay is nothing particularly groundbreaking, but I loved the theme and I especially loved the music.

It’s not that often that I get a game that includes some of my favourite songs as the themes to its greatest moments 🙂

The non-RTS gameplay was as good as can be expected, albeit lower than I would have liked on the musical part. It’s unfortunate that they couldn’t (or they decided not to?) implement the guitar/music playing more into the gameplay mechanics, as it would have been far more interesting to see some kind of hybrid mix of mechanics similar to Guitar Hero implemented more thoroughly. As it is, it just ended up with mediocre driving, mediocre hack & slash and bad RTS.

But that’s OK, I can forgive a lot of these because of how much I just enjoyed driving around and enjoying the world, talking to its characters and generally seeing how they visualized the various Rock/Metal types into the setting. I really liked how your first enemy were the Glam Rock types while the second major enemy were the Emo/Goth Crowd. I.e. The classic cousins of the Metal Scene. Pity we didn’t see some rockabilies as well, the original enemies of Classic Rock.

The storyline was also quite nice, with interesting scenarios, lots of explosions and a fairly interesting twist. It wasn’t the greatest story ever told, but it made for a few enjoyable musical afternoons.

Exploring the world for the panoramas
Exploring the world for the panoramas

However what I just can’t digest was just how sexist ((Not to mention whitewashed. Zero People of Color)) the game was. While the game had some dynamic women as side characters, they were portrayed in the best way designed to give a boner to the young male metal audience. Slim figures with thin arms (even when wielding a polearm double as big as themselves, or being able to carry their own body weight in a single arm for long lengths of time) and even slimmer waists; Always sporting sexy-looking clothes and eventually reaching to the absurd via the introduction of the “Amazon-like” clan, who wear only enough strings and ribbons to make them look as desirable as possible.

Now I know the game is stylized and before you start telling me how all men have huge muscles or are dumb meatheads and so on, just remember that males actually had variations. You had handsome males (like the ridiculous Aryan “king” who fortunately has the good decency to die in the middle of the story), ruggedly handsome males (the protagonist), ugly males, tall males, short males, fat males, buffed males, lanky makes, disfigured males, monstrous males and so on. On the other hand, females had one mode only: Nymph ((Oh there were two enemy females that didn’t fit this archetype: One tall daemon enemy that was monstrous but trying to be sexy nevertheless, and one fully clothed white-bride-like undead thing. The only fully clothed females in the game iirc.)).

In other words, as usual, beastly males were there to serve as male power fantasies and expectations, while females, even theoretically strong females, were not allowed to escape the “…but desirable” contextual prison. They could be strong characters as long as they remained in the patriarchal paradigm of how a woman should look like.

The story suffered accordingly, although thankfully it didn’t plaster all the stupid tropes straight. It did Damsel In Distress the romantic interest in the end, but at least it wasn’t blatant about it. Still nothing particularly progressive there, only just less traditionally backwards than usual. I guess I can count my blessings that I didn’t have to suffer the atrocious Manowar song “Woman be my slave” which I hate with the heat of a thousand suns.

So if we really struggle to ignore all this ((And I am perfectly aware how difficult that can be for those not basking in my straight-male privilege.)) then one can enjoy the game and indulge oneself in the heavy metal world that the minds of Take-Two have conceived. And at least on that end, they did a damn good job.

Card Gaming while Female

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The totality of female presence in the Star Wars films. Fortunately there's a few more women in the card game. But only a few.
The totality of female presence in the Star Wars films. Her card is a built-in damsel in distress…

A new article on cardgamedb.com appeared which is an interview of an experienced tournament-focused woman who plays the Star Wars LCG. It is a very interesting article, which refreshingly gives enough focus onto the gender-shortcoming of the SW card game.  It poses some very good questions on why FFG decided to go exclusively with male pronouns when referring to the human players, and also tells of some personal experiences of treatment of women in male-dominated card game tournament environments.

To be depressingly honest, none of that is surprising in the least. The geek culture is still profoundly misogynistic and even though some progress has been made, we still have a long way to go. In the article itself, male commenters really jumped in to posit that referring to all players as “male-by-default” is the best available options because…historic convenience I guess? It’s the same kind of lazy excuse people make for movies where there’s barely any women around (Incidentally, that very much includes the Star Wars films)  because it’s “more realistic this way”.

Fortunately I got to see the resulting retort.

To bring up fallacy, there are three that we can discuss specifically. The first is the informal fallacy termed the false dilemma, in which a set of options are presented as being collectively exhaustive, when there is at least one other option. As other games have shown, with a little bit of linguistic finesse, the gender issue can be remedied.

But, even granting that those four options were collectively exhaustive, choosing based on previous structure and historical custom presses toward the fallacy of precedent, essentially asserting that nothing should happen for the first time.

Lastly, primarily for fun, is the fallacy fallacy, in which one assumes that, because an argument is fallacious, its conclusion is not true. For example:

P1: Socrates is a man
P2: Socrates is mortal
C1: The sum of the deviation scores about the mean for a given distribution of values will always equal zero

A non sequitur (i.e., the conclusion does not follow from the premises), yet a true and valid conclusion. :)

Just because you find that something was born of fallacy does not render it untrue de ipso facto.

Using a male set of pronouns does indeed have its roots in patriarchal societal structures; this is the reason that we have not traditionally used the female forms as the all encompassing versions. But, language evolves, conventions die, and that type of language is obviously becoming archaic rather quickly. Furthermore, it isn’t about finding the “valid” choice, it is about finding the more inclusive, progressive, and considerate choice, which was not done in the case of the Star Wars LCG. Someone decided to use exclusively male wording for this game, which I think the interviewee found surprising, given her background in Pokemon, MTG, and AGoT, which have all made efforts to avoid that.

Unfortunately that didn’t stop them. so while a very interesting article, it was somewhat soured by the male commenters not missing an opportunity to come and remind us that the patriatchical status quo is really the best.

On a sidenote: Personally I’m quite partial to “they” since it’s small, it fits most situations and you can easily work around the rest. This is also the pronoun I’m predominantly using my OCTGN plugins where humanly possible. It just works without too much hassle and nicely encompasses genderqueer people just as well.

I is sad. Dr. Steel retired.

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Dr. Steel (album)

I was wondering why I haven’t heard almost anything new coming from Dr. Steel ever since I learned about him 2 years ago or so, and now I found out he’s gone into retirement ever since 2012 🙁

 

Nobody seems to know exactly why, but a facebook posts attributes it to personal reasons and possible a rabid fan experience or two. Sure, the kind of image Dr. Steel created could possibly attract some unstable people, but to get so bad as to force him to retire as his persona was taking off? Wow! Things must have gotten really out of hand to make him give up 12 years of efforts like that >_<

 

That was a very sad turn of events 🙁

 

Related articles

Intense Debate comments deactivated

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Image representing IntenseDebate as depicted i...

I’ve been using intense debate for the longest time, being a very active proponent of their comment system, hell, even getting a gift T-shirt for my efforts; but now I find myself having to disable the comment system and go back to the default wordpress comments.

 

The reason for this is that for some reason their comment system has somehow been compromised by spammers, and blatantly obvious spam comments are coming in constantly, and that is even though they are supposed to be going through Akismet which is excellent at catching this kind of stuff.

 

I didn’t take this decision lightly, I contacted support who initially thought comments were coming through the internal comments, but once I pointed to evidence that it is coming through ID, they said they were going to “look into it” and that I should fight spammer with IP bans, which is a ridiculous idea.

 

In fact, another reason why I’m ditching ID is that they have completely dropped the community ball. I have no idea what is up, but I got all excited when they got acquired by Automattic, and was expecting to see ID comments start to get rolled out in WordPress.com and stuff which would have been awesome. Instead the ID people literally fell of the map. Their active blog pretty much died, making 1 post in a year, their support either doesn’t reply, or gives worthless suggestions like IP bans on spammers. And most importantly, their development all but stopped. I haven’t seen any improvements in ID every since the automattic acquisition and that’s just sad.

 

I was content to stick with ID anyway since it’s better than my theme’s built-in ones, but now that it has also become quite a lot of work to scrub my comments every few days, enough is enough!

 

Perhaps it’s time to look into Disqus whose developers seem to be actually interested in improving and making useful.