I've scrolled through their twitter account and they advertice the game as "a TCG and board game combination" - that sounds reeeeeally cool!

Looking for art for the weekly card design competition, I stumbled upon an upcoming CCG: Rise of the Overlords. The art I'm refering to has been posted 4 years ago, but the devs are showcasing new cards on twitter every now and then so the game should still be alive.

The information the homepage provides are interesting enough to warrant a thread imho:

- the goal of the game is it to destroy the enemy overlord. In contrast to HS, overlords are taking part in the battle, they're basically super strong minions.

- the battlefield isn't merely interactive, but actually part of the game. There's one with a stream of lava across the board. If a minion falls into it, it gets damaged badly or even destroyed. Other battlefields have holes minions can fall through.

- there's no mana but actions per turn. Those can be used to play cards, move units or attack - this reminded me of Legends of Andor, a cooperative tabletop game.

This might be worth keeping an eye on!

I only ever play Arena when rotation hits and I can grab a free run. I guess that explains why I'm so abysmally bad at this mode. This time I seem to have done something right, though: I've picked Demon Hunter + Mage and have gone 5-0 already. Robes of Protection and Bonechewer Vanguard (especially if combined with Immolation Aura and/or the Mage hero power) are my MVPs. Vulpera Scoundrel is a great addition, too and already won me a game by providing a Pyroblast. Even if I should lose the next 3 games, this has been an awesome run!

Okay, please bear in mind that I really like your expansion overall. Here's what caught my eye:

Aleatoric Platform is OP, Adventure Forest might be problematic, too.

Crafting Materials probably wouldn't work with wordy spells and multiple Choose Ones.

Headshot's wording is a bit weird. Is it possible to target damaged characters that happen to 4 Health or do they have to have 4 Health by default?

The Hunter set is too spell heavy for my taste (only 2 minions!) and there's too much AOE, even if some of it is conditional or random.

I'm not sure how Skip the Tutorial is meant to work. How can I avoid drawing a card at the start of my turn? 

Dungeon Loot needs to say "Legendary minion" or at least "card". 

Twenty Player Raid, Save the World! and Adventurer Lynessa would be broken in Wild Odd Paladin.

Could you explain how Portalist Gla'dos is supposed to work? Will it be damaged the usual way when it's alone on the board or already occupies the leftmost space?

Lights Out might be too dangerous, there was a reason why Conceal got HoF'ed.

Tomb Diving looks scary as well.

Making Taunt the key mechanism for Shaman feels a bit off.

Auto-Attack cards shouldn't be part of constructed, so AI Assailant is a big no for me.

I'd align the effects of Deadlined Debugger and Disgruntled Developer - either put the hand size reduction first or second.

What is Sorcery Mentor meant to do? Does it change your hero power or just the skin and the emotes?

Wow, what a great idea! While I'm not happy with all the cards, it's a really really cool expansion theme with the ultimate watermark. So much great art! Well done!

If the art in the teaser is the one we'll get, I might actually use it instead of the 1.000 wins portrait. That's how bad the latter is. 

Wow, this theme sounds quite cool, but I've never struggled to find good art that much before. With all the Vulperas already around and the stage time Tortollans have gotten via Turtle Mage, I decided to go with the Furbolgs. I found the Polar version especially handsome and managed to dig up some art in a dark corner which hopefully qualifies. So here goes:

Pretty straight forward. Ursa are elite Furbolgs that are strong enough to battle Dragons, therefore the stats. "Enrage" was a key Warrior mechanic in KotfT and I figured it fits the art - you really shouldn't provoke a Polar Furbolg. 

I'm still trying my best to #makehunterwinawcdc, but it was very hard to come up with something this week. I decided to design what Abominable Bowman should have been in the first place. 

Not very happy with either of them, so feedback is very appreciated.

Here are my thoughts on your cards:

Nirast

RealJC1234TheToonist

Este

KingKuba

Wailor

FieselFitz

Arkasaur

Valor1204

BloodMefist

Inconspicousaurus

DavnanKillder

KANSAS

grumpymonk

Pokeniner

Cg8889

linkblade

Demon

Congrats to Sinth! 

I do actually think that KANSAS is right and art carries you farther than it could be expected.

Is it Ironbark Protector?

Edit: That would be too obvious, my guess is Ironwood Golem.

Quote From Demonxz95

Fellow finalist here.

The problem I had with Fresh Apple is the fact that it uses art that's already used by another collectible card in the game (in the same expansion too, no less): Witchwood Apple.

Considering this and the fact that Carrot Muncher uses the classic watermark and has a spelling error ("health" should be capitalized), I'm even more surprised about some rather promising cards not showing up in the finals. The transparency report will be very interesting this week. Maybe we can draw some conclussions from this.

I'm not very happy with this week's results. None of my favorites made it - where are Friendly Barkeep and Slice and Dice? Neither did we manage to get a Hunter card to the finals once more. Sigh. Anyway, good luck to the finalists!

Man, I actually checked all the "scarlet" cards but dismissed them because I misunderstood Dermostatic's last message. So I did mention Jaffa the city and the hint at scarlet first but failed to make the connection. Yeah, teamwork!

A color that fits fever and letter is scarlet (scarlet fever is a sickness and The Scarlet Letter is a famous book). Sounds fitting since there's the Scarlet Crusade in WoW. 

Now I'm almost completely ignorant of WoW lore but Google also told me that there's a Scarlet Monastery. One of its former leaders was High Inquisitor Whitemane. I know that's a bit far fetched but I don't know what a "scarlet mayor" could be otherwise. Any WoW experts around? 

Thanks a lot! I've added the Ender's Shadow and the First Law series to my wish list for the time being. So much to read, so little time.

I cannot stress enough how great hpmor is - just try the first chapter, it's free and only two clicks away ;-) 

So... an urban Jaffa might be a mayor? That would be Mayor Noggenfogger, but Dermostatic said those two refer to the second word in the card's name. I think we need another hint.

Thanks, that sounds very interesting. Closed has become a hard criterion for me. What are your favorites?

Hey guys and gals, I figured it might be cool to talk about our favorite books, recommend each other hidden gems and keep up to date with promising releases.

For starters, I'd like to let you know that I'm rooting for Science Fiction and Fantasy (big surprise) and everything in between since I've been given the Lord of the Rings as a present on my 10th birthday. Here are some of the titles I'd like to recommend to anyone with a similar taste:

Dan Simmons: The Hyperion Cantos (4 books)
My favorite Sci-Fi books. Don't be fooled by the first book, it's  primarily a set up for the main story which takes place in books 2-4. There's space craft, there's AI, there's an epic love story and if you feel rather sceptic about religion, this is a great book for you.

Eliezer Yudkowsky a.k.a Less Wrong: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Yes, this is a fan fiction. But please hear me out: This is probably the best book I've ever read. The basic question of the book is what Harry Potter would have acted like if he was a (very) intelligent, grown up, modern person. At times it's hillarious, all of it is exciting, and last but not least: it's free. You can read or download the book at www.hpmor.com - I actually went to the lenghts of taking this to a copy shop and having it bound for 80 € because it is so, so great.

David Mack - Dark Arts series (currently 3 books)
This is another series about magicians, but with an interesting twist to the usual pattern: the magicians are yoking demons to perform magic for them. The storys of the first and the second book are taking place during the Second Wolrd War with magic users on both sides. It's way darker than HP in all kind of ways. A good example is the yoking of demons which is mentally exhausting to the point that all major magic users are addicted to alcohol, cocaine or other drugs because they'd lose their mind otherwise.

Terry Goodkind - The Sword of Truth series (main plot ends after book 11)
One of my favorite fantasy series, The Sword of Truth is a great story about ethics and morale, set in a world full of magic and magical creatures. It has its lengths but never lost its relevance for me, since it colorfully describes what happens if narrowminded, intolerant people gain the upper hand with the help of a very powerful leader. This is adult material as well - there's quite some cruelty and while the sex scenes themselves are scarce and not detailed at all, the teasing which leads to them certainly isn't.
[In my personal opinion, you should start with "Wizard's first rule" and most importantly stop after "Confessor". All the other sequels were just an attempt to milk the cow to death.]

I have chosen to showcase those 4 because my other favorites are rather well known and don't need to be promoted very much imho. Among them are the "Foundation" series by Asimov, the "Ender" series by Orson Scott Card, "The Forever War" by Haldeman and "The Parafaith War" by Modesitt Jr.

High places on my next to read list are taken by "To sleep in a sea of stars" by Paolini and "The Name of the Wind" by Rothfuss (if he ever manages to finish book 3 of the series). I am entertaining the thought to try Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series for a third (or fourth?) time. I've never managed to get past book 4 because he's all about character development and I prefer faster plots.

What are your favorites? Is there anything you'd like to advertice in particular? Something you're looking forward to? Please tell!

KANSAS

BloodMefist

bananenparty

bigcums

This is really tough. Lets try to pick it apart.

Letter - could be a that archaic form of e-mails that usually contains bills or other bad news; or: a part of the alphabet

fever - first associations are sick(ness) and hot

Jaffa - I actually had to google this. It's a former city in Israel, being part of Tel-Aviv today. There are also Jaffa-oranges and -cakes.

Urban - first associations are city, town. But there were also no less than 8 popes of that name.

It might not be important, but I noticed that Letter, Jaffa and Urban are written with capital letters while fever isn't. 

Heed these words to pull back the curtain - immediate association is One Night in Karazhan

So far I haven't been able to put the pieces together. Maybe we should all go back to giving reasons for our guesses so we can work it out together?