New Beginnings

I'm not sure how to say this but I'm tired of writing about Magic: the Gathering.  Yes it is the world's greatest game but after 4 years and more than 100,000 words I felt like I've said everything that I wanted to say.  In fact, I've written about every topic twice and even three times.

My real passion is programming and I haven't programmed in awhile.  For more than 2 years Forge has progressed without my help and I'm the type of guy the likes being a "code monkey".  Staring at code is actually fun for me so I've decided to work on a new videogame, the Pirates of the Spanish Main.  I bought my first pack two weeks ago and I fell in love with the cute, little ships. 

Pirates of the Spanish Main was created by the company Wizkids and the game was sold in stores from 2004 to 2008.  Pirates of the Spanish Main had 13 expansions and a total of almost 2,000 cards.  An online version was created by Sony but it was shutdown two months ago.  (Probably needed more users but who really knows.  It's hard to attract new users without new expansions.)

Let me briefly outline how the game is played.  For a two player game, each player creates a fleet of ships, crew, and treasure and tries to win by collecting more than half the treasure or destroying all of your opponent's ships.  This is a miniatures game where distance is important.  A ship's movement and cannon range is specified using the short and long side of the card.  S + L means that a ship can move "short" then "long" and  3L means that a cannon can fire "long" and you must roll higher than a 3 in order to get a hit.  (I presume using the card for measurements was easier than requiring players to use rulers.) 

I plan to "computerize" Pirates of the Spanish Main and allow you to play against the computer.  (Maybe you could play against other players at a later time.  Networking programming is very hard although I've read good things about Groovy, which compiles into Java bytecode, and actors.)

--Here is a link to the Wikipedia article on Pirates of the Spanish Main, also called "Pirates Constructible Strategy Game"

--Forge isn't going away, I will still post new versions each month.

--Come back Wednesday for more news about the changes, matey.

As always, thanks for reading,

mtgrares

p.s.  

And Forge 2 doesn't exist so you are not missing out on anything.  Fixing some of Forge's problems is a great idea but a complete rewrite is utterly insane because of the amount of time it would take.