Geek's Code Corner

Do you want some professionally printed cards for Rise of the Keyraken? Here is how to prepare the Print-and-Play assets from Fantasy Flight Games for printing through a service like PrinterStudio or Make Playing Cards (MPC). FFG has previously released Print-and-Play decks for KeyForge. The idea is that these PDFs can be printed with any home printer and with a bit of work cut into individual cards, pushed into a sleeve with an actual card and played. This is a very cool idea that allows potential players to check out the game before committing money. Though as printing 37 cards through PrinterStudio or MPC costs about the same as an actual KeyForge deck it doesn鈥檛 make much sense to go through a service to print those decks. For the KeyForge Adventures, Rise of the Keyraken being the first, this is different. This set of cards is unlike any normal KeyForge deck and is intended to allow up to three players to fight an ancient horror, the Keyraken, together. So there is no similar product in the store you can go out and buy, so if you don鈥檛 want to go full DIY, printing the cards through a service becomes interesting. Read more…

Is has been a few months since FFG announced KeyForge would be paused, or in their words going on hiatus. Though as decks are still being registered we can get a glimpse of the effect of this announcement on the game. In a previous post, a model was made that can be used to infer the impact of each set release on deck registrations as well as provide a realistic estimate of registrations lost due to COVID-19. By including another variable in the model, the number of weekly registrations after the announcement of FFG, the effects of this announcement can be evaluated. The code for this post is discussed in a previous post and the updated version along with fresh data can be found on GitHub. Drop in the number of weekly registrations Before the announcement, but well during the pandemic, there were between 5820 and 6470 decks being registered weekly. With new sets (Mass Mutation and Dark Tidings) being released pushing this number up for a few weeks after release. A substantial difference with the situation before the pandemic, where 14980 to 16750 decks were scanned every week. The model estimates the number of deck registered weekly has dropped Read more…

When I accidentally stumbled upon a presentation from Kurt Vonnegut on how stories have a shape I started thinking… “Would you be able to use natural language processing (NLP) to pick up these shapes based on sentiment analysis of the actual text?” So here I’ll show you the approach I came up with, and the application on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring. All code can be found in a Jupyter notebook in this repository. To understand what this post is about you should really have a look at this video. Sentiment analysis in Python Python has the Natural Language Toolkit which includes a very easy way to do sentiment analysis. Import the correct library, create a SentimentIntsenityAnalyzer() and apply it on a fragment of text. Done! Just look at the examples below how a few lines of code can pick up which fragments are positive, negative or neutral (reflected in the ‘pos’, ‘neg’, ‘neu’). Furthermore there is a compound score that is positive if the overall sentiment of the text is good and negative if it is bad, this is the metric we want to create the shape of the story. from nltk.sentiment.vader Read more…

Flesh and Blood has been gaining a lot of traction as a Trading Card Game, and I recently picked up two preconstructed decks to check out the game. It also would be great to add this new game to DeckLock as it seem interesting, and I’m pretty sure I’ll pick up some more cards sooner or later. For those unfamiliar with DeckLock, this is a framework build upon Pelican to generate an overview of decks you own across different games as a simple static website (check out the demo). This is covered in previous posts (part 1, part 2 and part 3) and currently supports Gwent, KeyForge and Magic: the Gathering. Given that Flesh and Blood is growing quickly (and I picked up a few precon decks myself) it seems an update is due to add support for this new game. On top off adding support for FaB, there were numerous small additions to the framework. As these don’t justify a post on their own I’ll highlight them at the end. Adding Flesh and Blood Similarly to Magic: the Gathering, Flesh and Blood is a TCG with physical cards, so adding decks will be done similarly. There aren’t too many Read more…

Despite being a huge proponent of using interactive plots when publishing data visualisations on the web, the plots on this blog are all static. Using Altair, Vega and a little library justcharts all pieces finally fell into place to start practicing what I’ve been preaching on this blog as well! The problem with static site generators and interactive charts Pandas, numpy, scikit-learn and seaborn are commonly used when playing around with data and have been used in all data-related posts on this blog before. However, while seaborn produces very nice images, with relatively little effort, there isn’t a straightforward way to add some interactivity to them. You could, once you have results you want to show, write additional code to export the data in a format compatible with a javascript charting library (like Chart.js). Apart from being extra work, this results into a second issue … How to include these in a blog generated using e.g. Jekyll? Markdown supports images, but adding charts usually requires specific html tags and a few custom lines of javascript, which should not be included in markdown files. How to solve this in a nutshell Altair, a Python package to create charts, solves the first Read more…