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.