Month: August 2016

Enlarge / A hand in Mystic Vale. In the upper left sit the advancements for purchase, sorted by strength (most powerful in the top row, weakest in bottom row) along with the always-available Fertile Soil cards. To the right are the vale cards, purchased not with mana but with nature symbols. At the bottom is my deck of cards. In this hand, I have stopped after revealing three spoil symbols (the red trees). I add up the symbols on all cards except the "on deck card" atop my pile and find that I have 6 mana (blue orbs), 4 victory points (blue shields), and two green plus one yellow symbols. (credit: Nate Anderson)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com—and let us know what you think.

The land has fallen under a blight, and the only way for the four Druid clans to gain power from Gaia and restore balance to the Valley of Life is through the time-honored ritual of... adding up blue mana spheres on the cards before you and spending them to buy more cards with more mana spheres. And, sometimes, victory points.

Look—don't ask too many questions about the theme. Mystic Vale is a game about healing the land in the same way that Splendor is a game about crafting diamond rings for the nobility. Both titles are essentially pure efficiency engines; build up a pool of resources that will allow you to buy more expensive resources faster than anyone else at the table and you win. There are no extraneous mechanics here to distract from the dopamine drip-drip-drip of steadily increasing card combos, and Mystic Vale has learned the key lesson of these kinds of games: don't overstay your welcome.

(credit: Wikipedia)

On Thursday, a federal jury in Seattle found Roman Seleznev guilty of stealing millions of credit card numbers and selling them online to other fraudsters. Seleznev, 32, is the son of Russian Parliament member Valery Seleznev.

Seleznev, who occasionally went by the moniker “Track2” online (a reference to one of the information strips on the back of a magnetic stripe card"), had been hacking into restaurant and retail Point of Sale (PoS) systems since at least October 2009 and continued until October 2013.

According to a 2014 indictment (PDF) from the Department of Justice, Seleznev and potentially others who are unknown to the investigators “developed and used automated techniques, such as port scanning, to identify computers and computer systems that were connected to the Internet [and] were dedicated to or involved with credit processing by retail businesses.”

Ars Technica tests the Tobii EyeX while playing Deus Ex. Video edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

During Ars' review playthrough of the latest adventure in the Deus Ex series, I spied a curious option tucked into its Windows menus: "Tobii eye-tracking." None of Square Enix's press materials mentioned such a thing, which seemed strange for a series that revolves around human augmentation and sci-fi upgrades. Eye-tracking in an FPS? Sounds like some futuristic stealth-spy stuff!

The word "Tobii" perked up my coworkers' ears, as they'd tested simple prototypes of the eye-tracking doodad at various Consumer Electronics Shows. Deus Ex presented a great opportunity to test the add-on's full potential, and Tobii was kind enough to send loaner hardware. We wanted to find out: Just what does an eye-tracking sensor do for computer users—how does it translate the gaze of your eyes to real-world computer use—and does it work well enough to earn a $140 price tag?

Enlarge / Yup, this is a thing that's happening in the year 2016... (credit: guacasaurs_mex / Instagram)

I know a surprising number of people who desperately want to play Pokémon Go, but their phones are too old to run the game reliably. For those people, a cheap, used Dreamcast with a portable Visual Memory Unit might be the cheapest way to simulate the Pokémon Go experience until their next upgrade cycle. That's because of Pokémon Go VMU, a cheeky homebrew project from a VMU coder going by the handle guacasaurus_mex.

True, the Dreamcast's underpowered memory-card-with-a-screen-and-buttons doesn't feature the GPS antenna and augmented reality camera that help make Pokémon Go possible on smartphones. Still, guacasaurus_rex promises a randomly generated map grid to navigate on the 48x32 pixel monochrome LCD screen. There will even be a little timing-based mini-game for catching the little monsters in Pokéballs to fill in for those little touchscreen swipes.

The VMU "port" isn't planned for release until next year, though, because "it's going to take forever to draw all those damn Pokémon." Hopefully Pokémon Go will still be a relevant gaming phenomenon by then, eh?

(credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Attorneys representing Matthew Keys have filed their formal appeal to the 9th Circuit. Keys is the California journalist who was convicted of hacking-related crimes in 2015.

As Keys told Ars before he was sentenced, the appeal largely focuses on the argument that the government “constructively amended” the second count that he was charged with: 18 U.S. Code § 1030 (a) (5) (A). That law declares a crime has been committed if someone “knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and, as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer.”

During closing arguments at trial, one of Keys’ lawyers, Jay Leiderman, said that Keys’ December 2010 defacement of one Los Angeles Times article lasted only 40 minutes and therefore caused no damage.