Life tracker

The life tracker is one phone in the middle of a table. It holds life totals, commander damage, poison, commander tax and the monarchy for up to six players, and it enforces none of it. Twenty-one commander damage is flagged, not applied. The players are the rules engine.

Open it from Life Tracker in the sidebar, or from Start a game on your decks page. It needs no account and no connection.

Set up the table

1. Open the tracker. It deals four seats at 40 life.
2. Tap the gear on the centre rail to change anything.
3. Pick a player count from 1 to 6.
4. Pick an arrangement. Most counts offer two, drawn as small diagrams of where the seats go.
5. Pick a starting total: 20, 25, 30, 40 or 60.

Changing the starting total begins a new game, because changing it part way through means starting over anyway. Changing the player count does not: seats that survive the change keep their life, their damage and their counters.

Which way people sit

Across faces the far row over the top of the phone. Sides turns each numeral a quarter over, for players sitting to the left and right.

One arrangement sets its own: the four-player option with a seat at each end and two down the middle already faces every seat out from its own edge, so the control greys out.

Change a life total

Tap the upper half of a seat to add and the lower half to subtract. That is the same everywhere regardless of which way the seat faces, because you reach for the half of the tile nearest you.

Hold either half to repeat. It pauses before the first repeat, then speeds up, so resting a thumb costs one point and a deliberate hold takes someone from 40 to 12 in one gesture.

A burst of taps shows one figure. Six quick taps float a -6 for about a second before the total settles. Underneath, the tracker records six separate changes, so undo walks back one tap at a time.

Life goes below zero and stays there. A seat at or below zero offers Out?, and an eliminated seat dims and offers Back in. Nothing is ever removed from the table, because players climb out of negative life more often than they lose from it.

Commander damage

Every seat carries one chip per opponent. Tap the upper half of a chip to add damage and the lower half to take it back.

Adding commander damage also takes that life. One tap does both, because one swing at the table is one thing that happened. Correcting a chip downward returns exactly the damage that landed, so dropping a mis-tapped 3 by 5 gives back 3.

At 21 from a single commander, the chip and the seat are flagged. Nothing else happens.

If a seat commands a partner pair, open its editor and turn on Two commanders. Every other seat then tracks two totals against it, kept apart: each commander needs its own 21, so 14 from one and 12 from the other is not lethal.

Counters and the monarchy

Tap the + beside a seat's name to open its counter list. Add poison, energy, experience, commander tax, or a named counter of your own. Each one is then a pip you adjust the same way as everything else: upper half up, lower half down.

A counter appears only while it is in play. A seat with no poison shows no poison pip, and a pip that reaches zero leaves the list. That is deliberate, so a tile shows what is happening rather than a row of zeroes.

Ten poison flags the seat, the same way 21 commander damage does.

The same list claims Monarch and Initiative. At most one seat holds each, so claiming the monarchy takes it from whoever had it, and undo hands it back to them rather than to nobody.

Name a seat and give it art

Tap a seat's name to open its editor. Set a name, a deck label, an accent colour, and a background.

Search any card by name to use its art. The tracker takes the illustration on its own, which keeps the life total clear of the printed mana cost and type line.

Drag one seat's name chip onto another seat to swap who is sitting where. Only the people move: life, damage and counters belong to the chair.

Dice, coins and who goes first

The centre rail carries two more controls, and both open the same sheet. Inside it, Pick a player chooses a first player from the seats still in the game, and the dice run from d4 to d100 with a count, alongside a coin.

Rolls stay out of the game log, so undo ignores them.

Turns and undo

The ringed number on the rail is the round. Tap it to pass the turn, which moves to the next living seat and raises the round when it comes back around.

The arrow beside it undoes the last change, one at a time, all the way back to the start of the game.

What survives a reload

The game does. Life, commander damage, counters, the monarchy and your whole undo history are saved on the device as you play, and reloading the page puts you back at the same table.

Two things to know:

• The save lives in the browser on that one phone. It does not follow you to another device, and opening the tracker somewhere else gives you a fresh table.
• Starting a new game clears the save immediately. There is no way back to the game you reset.

The screen is also kept awake while a game is in progress, on browsers that allow it, and leaving the page mid-game asks you to confirm.