The problem#

The board game Spirit Island has all of players playing more or less simultaneously, especially when acting on different parts of the map, but requires some bookkeeping to be kept among all of the players. For a normal game of at most four players, this isn't difficult, but the game has rules to allow combining multiple copies to a huge game. My friend group planned a 12-player game and we wanted to figure out how to best keep the game organized. (Unfortunately, we planned this game for April 2020 and it did not happen for obvious reasons.)

The solution#

I developed a web app called fear-tracker (source), so called because the main shared information to keep track of is how much fear each player generates in order to keep track of the correct total generated by all players. It supports entering the fear generated per-spirit and the data is synchronized among any number of devices, so there does not have to be an exact correspondence between players and client devices. It also keeps track of what the current phase is as all of the players have to agree on some synchronization points for when new information is revealed by drawing cards.

The details#

Recent Spirit Island news#

Unfortunately, the publisher of Spirit Island, Greater Than Games, recently announced they were having financial troubles and while for now Spirit Island is still available for sale, the future of the game is unclear. Of course, even if the company goes out of business, as a very popular game, it is likely to remain relatively easy to acquire used copies.

Board game helpers#

Notably, this is a board game helper to be used along with a physical copy of the game. There is an official digital version of the game, which is quite good, but the official rules only go up to 6 players (which is planned for the digital version which is currently limited to 4 players). And playing a digital board game is a different experience from a physical game anyway.

For many people, part of the benefit of board games is that they do not involve screen time, so a digital helper app is counter to that purpose. For that and other reasons, the experience design of playing a board game with a helper app should be focused on the board game part as much as possible.

Other helpers#

There are a lot of official and unofficial helpers with varying levels of involvement in the game:

• Letter Jam has an official helper phone app that makes setting up the game easier, but is entirely optional.
• The Search for Planet X has an official phone/web app that avoids the need for a human to know the secret information.
• Mansions of Madness: Second Edition similarly uses an app to replace the role played by a human game master in the first edition.
• X-haven Assistant is an unofficial app for Gloomhaven/Frosthaven which replaces a lot of the bookkeeping that the game is designed to handle via tokens and cards in a way that's less fiddly and allows everyone to view it on their own screen or a large shared screen since it's difficult to arrange everything to be visible to everyone.

Design#

While I wrote it before I had heard of X-haven Assistant, fear-tracker is the same kind of helper app: it's an unofficial add-on intended to replace some game components for information shared among all of the players. Since it's about showing public information, the information can be put up on a large shared screen to reduce individuals looking at their own devices. fear-tracker does a lot less than X-haven Assistant, keeping track of just the current turn/phase and the count of fear (essentially Spirit Island's victory points), with some details recorded mainly to make it easier to make sure the fear has been tallied correctly.

What it tracks#

When playing Spirit Island, normally fear is tracked by moving tokens from one pile to another. In practice, games I've played, usually the person who is generating the fear is speaking through what they're doing and someone else physically moves the tokens when they mention generating fear for some reason. In fear-tracker, instead of counting fear, each player can have any number of rows (to organize by different actions) which each have a count of direct fear, and towns and cities destroyed by the action. Then the numbers the player would be reading off while taking their actions can be entered directly into the app (either by them or by someone else hitting the buttons for them).

The other detail the app handles is synchronizing turns: in Sprit Island, each player acts simultaneously during each phase and the game advances to the next phase once everyone is done. The app has a checkbox for each player to mark when they are done with the current phase and does not allow advancing until every player has been marked as ready. This does add some extra distraction that even when not generating fear, players have to touch the app every phase to mark themselves as done, but for a large game that's likely to be less disruptive than trying to constantly ask everyone if they're ready.

Use in practice#

As mentioned above, the 12-player game I originally wrote this for never happened, so I have never actually played a game of Sprit Island large enough that a helper like this seemed appropriate. If you do find it it useful, let me know!

Technical details#

The actual implementation is fairly simple. It's a Django app that's basically a series of web forms that send their values to the server when they're modified and notify all of the other clients of changes immediately. I previously wrote a post on using long polling to keep the clients informed of updates.

Alternative component design#

As the information is simple, before I created the app, my friends organizing the game suggested we could probably track the information just by using a large whiteboard visible to all of the players. This has the upside of not involving any screens. But it has the downside of requiring a lot more moving around to coordinate. Also, it loses the benefit of the app making it easy to enter every source of fear separately and summing them for you, making it clearer that the bookkeeping is actually being done correctly.