My cousin and I love the Terraforming Mars board game. But we'd often get overly excited and knock our pieces off of our boards, losing track of our progress. So I digitised it. It comes with a few cool features like resource conversions (e.g. converting plants to greenery), production phase, offline, mobile-friendly and keeps track of the history using the browser history itself. Sharing this here in case there are any other TM fans that could also find some use in this :)
Neat idea! However one issue with everyone using a digital tracker is that you can't then easily see what other player resource stockpiles and production levels are. Perhaps at the very top of the screen you could have a compact summary view that people can leave their screen at when not making adjustments, allowing other players to see the stats at a glance.
Thank you! Yes this had actually become a problem for us but it weirdly ended up adding an interesting new dynamic to the game. So much so that we'd actively try and hide our resources from each other and had to try to keep track of each other's resources in our heads (the irony in adding a digital calculator only to increase cognitive load is very real). But yeah, I can imagine not everyone would want to play like this and a compact summary could solve that issue. I shall see what I can do :)
I'd be very interested in exploring this idea! Do you know of any board games that it could work for? This also just gave me an idea to justify my board game budget to my wife as a R&D business expense so thank you ;)
Knocking the trackers off is a real issue, however, a great non-digital solution to that is the wooden laser-cut boards with physical notches for the cube slots - e.g. https://github.com/cophus/terraforming-mars-board and the many other options if you google or search etsy.
Please take user feedback with a grain of salt. Being able to navigate through board versions is a very useful feature. An alternative for the browser history API is not immediately obvious. Many other web apps work in this way.
Yeah fair enough. I actually found the massive navigation history annoying too, I'd just forgotten about it until now. I think I have a solution to replace the navigation history with local state so we should still be able to navigate between board versions, will see. Appreciate the feedback :)
Nice, there's also a Vassal Terraforming Mars module. Vassal provides a client-server shared board game state for lots of boardgame modules you can also make yourself. It's java based.
https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Terraforming_Mars
Very nice! This could easily be adapted to the Ares Expedition expansion/other game thing:
Remove production of titanium and steel, remove energy entirely. Players start at 5 TL and 0 production everywhere. They can also produce cards, maybe add a pop-up like "draw x cards now!" Whenever production happens?
I thought this was like that one Twilight Struggle companion digital board that was pretty much the physical board but digital (which allows you to play with just the cards) since this covers just the resources mat. Still neato though.
Are you on Android by any chance? if so, I think that would be Android's weird browser bar hiding behaviour when you get to the bottom of the page, or just something weird I overlooked. Could probs add some padding to avoid that which I shall do, thanks!
Yeah I've always found the browser bar hiding when you scroll to the bottom of a page a bit weird. But yeah you're right, it looks like a Chrome-only thing my bad.
Before going to expansions, I’d strongly suggest playing Ares Expedition, the card game. It keeps 90% of the feel of the board game but speeds the game up substantially and gives a lot more opportunity to make it through the deck.
