pbem.brainiac.comWELCOME TO THE NEW PBEM EMPORIUM

Click to see whois linked to the Emporium Visiting? Please take a second and put your pin on the guest map. I love visitors. WELCOME TO THE PLAY BY EMAIL EMPORIUM Walt O’Hara, Webmeister Home Dead Links Grognards Consimworld Boardgame Wiki Opponents Wanted Walt’s Blog Welcome to the Emporium. Since 1998, Dedicated to fostering the play of boardgames via the Web and Email | The Basics | Tutorials | Main Site Resource Menu Cyberboard CB Availability CB Files Portal CB Open Documentation Warzone C Hobsala Aide De Camp 2.0 ADC2 Distro Site VMAP VIRMIN ACTS Vassal (Java) Warplanner WargameRoom (Java) Wargame Processor Thoth WARS JASM Aide De Card the QUB GameTurn JV MAP Otopia Hank Burkhalter SMS Assist | Scenarios Defunct Utilities? Tools Gimp ZPaint CCG Maker Online Resource s(General) Boardgame Geek Gaming Dumpster Ken Tidwell’s Site The Dutch Portal GamePile Rick Heli Grognards Luding Lutz’s Game Pages Games Journal The Game Report Globetrotter Spielbox Online Boone’s Game Page CyberGamers Other Technology Chat: ICQ / IRC / AIM / SKYPE Richards PBeM Server PBeM Portal Forums Online Cyberboard Design Cyberboard Player Cyberboard (Consimwrld) ADC2 (Consimwrld) Virtual Game Club VGC Design Autorealm Discussion Opponents Online AHIKS PBeM Page Online Utilities (Related) Web RPG.com OpenRPG RPG Toolkit RPG Host The DungeonMaker Helpful RSS Feeds Cyberboard (YahooGroup) Vassal (YahooGroup) VWC (YahooGroup) ’); document.write(’ ’); document.write(’ ’); document.write(’ ’); // End HideUpdates May 2006 I recently discovered CCG Maker. It’s not a pbem tool, more like a design tool. It will assist you in creating beautiful Magic style cards for games. I added a link in the ’Tools’ Menu. Todd Zircher (remember him from the V_MAP days?) has created a PBM-ish "Virtual Miniatures" Space called VIRMIN (catchy!). It’s not really PBeM but it does sort of relate to gaming online. I don’t think anyone has done any work on a PBeM aide for BORDERLANDS (Eon). Well, I have just finished a CB gamebox for it. It is located HERE (the zip has much useful information in PDF format to assist you in getting started). Here’s a little something: I made a tiny Cyberboard Gamebox called DIPCHOOSER. It will randomly draw flags out of a "hat" to create the player order for PBeM Diplomacy games. I’m not sure that Cyberboard is the best way to conduct Diplomacy games any more (I would give that to JDip or some other judge program), but DIPCHOOSER is still useful because it creates a nice graphic of the period flags coming out in random order. Download it here . Tristan Koehler , the fellow who built the first (licensed) OGRE Cyberboard gamebox, has outdone himself. His new OGRE ON MARS gamebox is outstanding a visual treat ( see a picture ). If you wish to download OGRE ON MARS, visit Tristan’s OGRE Page . Beware, many popups. The OGRE on Mars idea, is based (partially) on my old (circa 2000) OGRELuna Variant.. yay! I hope I can convince Tristan to make a Lunar landscape some day, as I recently rediscovered the special counters that Cisco Serrett drew for the Lunar variant. Tristan’s OGRE page, by the by, has much good supporting documentation for OGRE via PBeM and just PBeM in general. Courtesy of the Javascript RSS Box viewer , I have added Message Feed Pages added for CYBERBOARD ML, VASSAL and VIRTUAL WARGAME CLUB Yahoogroups. This can be a useful feature if your network doesn’t allow acccess to Yahoo. See the Menu, bottom left. I will continue to add to these as I discover new relevant feeds. April 2006 The CSW Chat room hosted Dale Larson for a discussion of the next stage (version 4.0) of his popular PBeM utility Cyberboard. The Transcript is here . The Cyberboard Open Documentation Project has resurfaced, this time using a wikki engine. Please contribute! February 2006 The Virtual Wargamers Club has stood up a website , a Yahoogroup , and a wiki . Their first "virtual Convention" was a success. Another one is in the works for July. December 2005 The Cyberboard Design Olympics concluded. See the winning gameboxes HERE . Congratulations to the winners! September 2005 Correction on the previous entry: "The 3.0 release has a few nasties in it that I’d rather not have propagate."Dale Larson The current (3.1) version is at THIS LINK August 2005 The Final Version 3.0 of CyberBoard is now available at: CyberBoard Version 3.0 ( It’s about a 1.3 MB download) IMPORTANT! The final version upgrades your files so they will no longer load into the V3 Betas or V2.0 software. The software has no time limits. Feature-wise (and bug-wise) it is essentially the same software as Beta 7 but has much the internal debug code and the time limits removed. I feel the software is stable enough to go gold even though some nuisance bugs still need to be dealt with. - CyberBoard 3.0 new features: A revamped user interface including: Dockable trays and markers . - Tabs that allow direct selection of open windows. - New XP menu style with icons. - Customizable tool bars. - Assignable hot keys for menu items. - Compatible with new WinXP user interface. 65536 color (aka 16 bit color) support. Along with the new UI framework, this was a large chunk of the work for this release. Greatly improved color palette window: The first 3 x 8 area from the left are standard colors along with a grey scale The next 6 x 8 area are the custom colors that can be set in a variety of ways. The box to the right of the 6 x 8 area is the current color mix created by changing the bottom Hue picker and the Saturation/Value picker on the far right. The 48 custom colors are saved with the gamebox file. You can double-click on a custom color to adjust it using a color setting dialog. The message history window is now stand-alone and can be docked. Message history text is now color coded. Playing boards can be rotated by 180 degrees during play. Playback functionality is greatly improved: The default hot key assignments have been changed: F2 - previous move F3 - next move F4 - next history entry F5 - close history playback F6 - toggle automatic playback The spacebar can be used to do "Next Move"s instead of F3. You can hit the "Next Move" command before the current move is totally played back. With this you can blast through moves if you don’t want to see the animated playback. You can turn on an option that causes the "Next Move" command to automatically load the next history record when at the end of the current history record. You can turn on an option called "Automatic Playback (F6)". When you hit the "Next Move" command CyberBoard takes over and steps moves all the way to the end without you having to hit any keys. You hit the next move command again to abort the playback. New game files by default render locked objects underneath other non-locked pieces and markers. For backward compatibility reasons upgraded games render locked objects in their current postions in the drawing order. This option can be changed in the board properties dialog. All three zoom levels are available in the player program. March 2005 As you might have noticed. There’s some other folks out there doing a far superior job to my own humble efforts in archiving cyberboard gameboxes. I have resources, but no time. Therefore, I encourage you to visit LIMEY YANK GAMES when you get a chance. These guys are religious about it. The big news is the CYBERBOARD DESIGN OLYMPICS, being run by Andy and Fritz of Limey Yank fame. Click on the logo to go to the discussion board and enter! . Game Turn (an open source PBEM toolsuite) shows some promise. I’ve been following the development of this on CSW but haven’t really played around with it enough to feel very comfortable using it. HEXWAR.COM is a play for pay site set up by Decision games. Very nice interface. A bit pricey for me (personally) but I love what they are doing. Try out their Napoleon at Waterloo game, it’s free. Bruce Wigdor has also set up the WARGAMEROOM pay for play site using a java based engine of his own...