The problem#

I had been playing a lot of the social-deduction game The Resistance (and the version with more roles The Resistance: Avalon) and running into the problem that many players had trouble remembering exactly what had happened in previous rounds. Between the fact that there can be several votes throughout a game of the The Resistance and the game can sometimes take up to an hour, it can be hard to remember how the votes went a couple rounds back, especially for teams that were rejected.

The solution#

I created a web app implementation of The Resistance: Avalon (source) using Django.

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#

Dice in shell#

Today I was borrowing a board game from the lending library at Emerald City Comicon and it was missing its dice. We could have gotten some physical dice somewhere, but instead we decided to use the materials we had on hand. The people I was playing with agreed that we did not want to drain our phone batteries by using a dice app on our phones, but I had a laptop with me. So I wrote a dice app for the shell:

while true
do
    reset
    seq 1 6 | shuf -n1
    seq 1 6 | shuf -n1
    read
done

This rolls two six-sided dice every time you hit enter and clears the screen before showing the result using reset.