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.

Signed in and in a pod, the tracker offers to name the seats before you start. That is covered under naming the table; skipping it leaves the tracker exactly as described here.

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

Every seat splits in two, and the halves read from where you are sitting rather than from the top of the phone. A seat that looks wider than it is tall to you splits left and right, and your left takes life away. One that looks taller than wide splits top and bottom, and below the number takes it away.

That holds at every seat of every arrangement, so two people sitting on opposite sides of the phone make the same gesture for the same thing.

A tap moves one point. Hold either half to move by ten, which is what a Commander hit or a board wipe is. It pauses before the first repeat, so resting a thumb on a seat costs one point rather than ten, and the first repeat rounds up to ten rather than adding to the tap: a hold never leaves a stray point in the total. From there it steps ten at a time, so 40 to nothing is four beats.

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 top of a chip to add damage and the bottom to take it back. Chips turn with the seat, so top and bottom mean what they look like from where that player is sitting.

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 a damage chip: the top adds, the bottom takes away, as they look from that seat.

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.

Day and night

Day and night belongs to the game rather than to a seat, so it is not in the counter list. Open Game setup and set Day and night to Day or Night. A sun or a moon then sits beside the round counter on the rail, and tapping it changes which one it is for the whole table.

The tracker never changes it for you. It does not know which of your permanents are daybound, in the same way it does not decide that a seat at zero is out.

Set it back to Off when the game no longer needs it, and the control leaves the rail. Off is where every table starts.

Timers

Open Game setup and choose a Timer. Nothing is enforced: a timer reports, and the table decides what to do about it.

• Elapsed counts up from the first thing anybody did, and shows on the rail.
• Countdown is a round timer. Pick a length in minutes, and tap a length again to restart it. Past zero it keeps going and turns red, so a round that ran four minutes over says so instead of sitting at zero.
• Per player gives each seat its own clock, running only while that seat has the turn. The time shows under the player's name, and lights up on whoever is playing. Pass the turn on the rail and the clock passes with it.

Every timer is worked out from when things happened rather than counted down, so locking your phone, switching apps, or reloading the page changes none of them. Per-player time starts when the turn first moves, not when the table is dealt: a table that sits set up for an hour charges that hour 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 control on the rail passes the turn. The seat whose turn it is carries a ring of its own, which is what every press moves, and a seat that is out gets passed over.

A dealt table is nobody's turn. Nothing knows who goes first, so the first press hands the turn to the first seat rather than moving it on. Pick a player, under the dice, sets it too: whoever it picks takes the turn.

The number inside the control is the round, labelled RD. A round is a lap of the table, so a four-player game moves it once every four presses.

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

Naming the table

If you are signed in and in a pod, opening the tracker offers a short sheet over the dealt table: which pod, which format, and who is in each seat. Choose a pod member or a guest per seat, then their deck. Typing a name under Somebody new adds a guest to the pod and puts them in the next free chair, so next week they are one tap.

A seat with a deck takes that deck's commander as its art.

Choose Just play to skip it. Nothing is recorded, the table works exactly as it does signed out, and the sheet does not ask again until you start a new game. The sheet never appears at all if you are signed out or in no pods, so a pickup game with strangers is unaffected.

Naming the table writes the game, its seats and their decks to the pod, where every member can see it. What the game records is set out on the pods reference.

Playing somewhere with no signal

Every tap changes the table straight away and the game is saved to the phone as you play, so the tracker works the same with no connection as with one. Named games are sent to the pod in the background, and a game played without signal is sent when the phone gets one.

There is nothing to press. A small count near the top of the screen shows how many taps have not reached the pod yet, and it disappears when they all have. That count is the only thing this needs from you, and what it needs is nothing.

Closing the app or losing the tab does not lose the queue. Reopening picks it up and carries on sending, including for a game you have since moved on from.

One thing it does give up on. A tap saved against a game that has already finished, or one that has been deleted, is refused by the pod every time it is offered, so the phone stops offering it and the count goes down. Anything that failed only because the phone could not reach the pod keeps trying.

Share the table

A game logged to a pod can be tracked from several phones at once. Open the gear and choose Join a game to put this phone on a table somebody else started. See pods for what that looks like from the other side.

Nothing changes for a game you have not logged to a pod. The tracker stays what it was: one phone, no account, no connection needed.

Ending a game

Tap the flag on the centre rail, next to the gear, and say how it went. It is the gold one, and it stays greyed out until there is a game to end. The same thing is inside the gear as End it, for anybody who learned it there.

The seat still standing is offered as the winner. It is only an offer: concessions and table politics do not show up in life totals, so tap to change it. More than one winner is a draw, and no winner at all is a game everybody conceded. Where nobody is obviously the winner, nobody is pre-selected.

Placement comes from who went out when, with the seat that lasted longest placing highest. Reorder it with the arrows where that is not how it felt. A note is optional.

We packed it up unfinished records the game as abandoned instead, which is a different thing from a game that ended and is kept out of anything that counts results.

Finishing shows a summary: who won, how long it took, how each seat's life moved through the game, and how much commander damage each of them dealt. All of it comes from the game you just played, so it appears with no connection.

Once a game is finished it stops accepting changes. That is held in the database rather than in the screen.

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. This holds for the running game even when it is named: naming it sends the game to the pod, and the table you are looking at is still only on this phone.
• 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.