http://hallofbeorn.com

DNS is still being updated (it can take up to 24 hours in some cases), so those who cannot hit this address can always use

http://50.19.233.173/

in the mean time.

This is a little side-project that I have been working on for a while now. Before it went down, I had issues with the speed of lotrlcg.com, as well as with the fact that their entire URL scheme changed recently, which caused all of the links on my blog to break. As a bear, and developer of magical software, I decided to scratch this particular itch and fix the problem myself. I own the hallofbeorn.com domain and the site is hosted on Amazon EC2, so there should be little problem with downtime. Also, I make this pledge right now to NEVER change the URL scheme of this site. This means that http://50.19.233.173/Cards/Details/51223bd0-ffd1-11df-a976-0801200c9001

will always point to Core Set Aragorn. In any case, I haven't added The Morgul Vale yet, and there are still some cards with missing text and/or flavor text, but this is a good start. Give it a look (and be patient if HallOfBeorn.com is not yet available - DNS is out of my hands) and let me know what you think!

Thanks, Beorn. That's a nice database; simple and effective. I'll most likely find myself mindlessly scrolling through the cards while at work now!

Great stuff, thanks for filling the void so quickly!

I have a feature request though: one of the most common features I found myself using on lotrlcg.com was the option to filter by player cards (or encounter cards) only. This was one of the reasons I favoured it over cardgamedb. Currently with your site it looks like you can only choose specific card types, i.e. hero, ally, attachment, event etc.

I found this feature was particularly useful when researching things like which expansions to buy (or recommend to others), or for helping determine which cards are available when helping others build decks from their collections (when they don't own all the expansions).

Great stuff, thanks for filling the void so quickly!

I have a feature request though: one of the most common features I found myself using on lotrlcg.com was the option to filter by player cards (or encounter cards) only. This was one of the reasons I favoured it over cardgamedb. Currently with your site it looks like you can only choose specific card types, i.e. hero, ally, attachment, event etc.

I found this feature was particularly useful when researching things like which expansions to buy (or recommend to others), or for helping determine which cards are available when helping others build decks from their collections (when they don't own all the expansions).

No problem, I will have player card and encounter card added as types for filtering in the next update (later tonight).

The latest update to HallOfBeorn.com is live, including filters for "Player" (Hero, Ally, Attachment, Event) and "Encounter" (Enemy, Location, Treachery, Objective) card types. Enjoy!

Wow, that was quick! Obviously bears do not muck around when it comes to software development.

This is an excellent search engine. Loads better than lotrlcg, in my opinion, though I was grateful for it over the years. But thank you for this!!!

Thanks, Beorn!

If I could vote for one addition to the site, I would like to be able to search by cycle. Especially lately with all the monosphere cards in Against the Shadow, I often find myself wanting to look at all the cards from a cycle. Also, some of my friends only have one or two cycles, so it helps with deckbuilding for them.

I just pushed the latest update, which includes the following features:

1. Icons instead of text for Willpower, Attack, Defense, Hit Points and Threat. These stats along with the card set are now included in the search results as well as the details page.
2. Card Set filters now include Cycle filters (Shadows of Mirkwood, Dwarrowdelf and Against the Shadow)
3. Icons instead of text for the four main spheres (I couldn't find suitable icons for Baggins or Fellowship spheres)

This addresses some specific requests, as well as improving the overall readability of the site. My goal is to make HallOfBeorn.com the best Lord of the Rings LCG search engine out there and I appreciate the constructive feedback!

Your ambitions have certainly paid off. The site is looking and working great. Congratulations on your efforts.

Great database and sorting system! I may go to this one instead of Cargamedb from now on. Thank you!

It is awesome, but you said you appreciate constructive feedback sooo, how about function RANDOM CARD, that takes you to random card...

random curiosity from a DBA - your blog on the site says you store the card data in memory, rather than a database. Where do you load the card data from initially / how do you load new sets into memory?

Hey CaffeineAddict, because of the complexity of the metadata around cards, I am actually storing them as instances of a Card class (i.e. in code).

I processed through the XML that is available from OCTGN to grab all of the metadata (I had to clean it up a bit, but without that this would have taken forever). Then I wrote a translator to turn that metadata into code. The repository of all available sets is just an in-memory array of Card instances that is searched and sorted directly. This makes the site very fast, it also gives me the ability to add any kind of search feature I want, in code. Even searches that might be really difficult to write in a set-based language like SQL are trivial against an in-memory store. The only reason this works (on a micro-instance of AWS no less) is because the overall size of the card pool is still relatively small (a little over a thousand cards). If the card set consisted of millions of cards, a traditional relational database would be the only way to go. As it is, if I want to add the ability for saving decks, or other user-generated features (comments, ratings, etc.) I will need to go that route. For now, everything is read only and gets cached when the web server starts.

Thanks for the suggestion, Scroll Lock. I will look into a simple way to add a Random card feature. It will probably be an Easter Egg (e.g. type "random" into the search field), because I don't want to clutter up the user interface with too many options.

Hi Beorn

Thank you so much for putting this up so fast and integrating all the features. I myself also like to look up e.g. what player cards were in a given AP, so I am really happy you added these search filters

Great work, now I will visit your website even more

cheers

Alain

I love the site. Well done.

Have you thought about adding a sort feature where you can display in alpha order or numeric order?

Loving the new site, nice work Mr. Bear.