The Pod Companion

Commander life counter

One phone flat in the middle of the table, two to six players, each life total facing its player. Commander damage per opponent, poison, undo, and the screen stays on. When the game ends, one tap saves it to your game log.

Start a game

No account needed. Names come at the end, if you want them.

Players
Starting life

Tap the left half of a zone to lose life, the right half to gain it; hold to go faster. Tap a name to set the player and their commander (the art fills the zone). Cmdr opens that player’s commander damage; the dots open poison and other counters. The game clock waits for Start game in the bar (or the first life change), so choosing commanders and taking mulligans is not counted. Works offline once loaded.

How the counter works at the table

  1. Pick the player count and starting life and press Start. The table fills the screen; on a phone, lay it flat and each zone faces the person sitting there. Two players face each other across the short edge, three to six sit along the long edges.
  2. Tap to change life. The left half of a zone loses a point, the right half gains one, and holding either side repeats and speeds up. Quick taps settle into a single change after about a second, which is what Undo reverses.
  3. Cmdr opens that player’s commander damage — one row per opponent, because the 21 rule counts each commander separately. By default that damage also comes off their life total; the menu can switch that off.
  4. The dots hold poison, energy and experience, a way to set an exact life total, the monarch and initiative markers, the player’s name and commander, a way to move the turn marker, and Mark out for a concession. A counter only shows on the zone once it is non-zero. The menu has a coin, a d6, a d20, and a pick-who-goes-first roll.
  5. Next turn is optional. Use it and the counter learns who went first and how many turns the game ran, both of which land in the log; skip it and nothing else changes.
  6. End game asks for placements, names and commanders. Signed in, Log game saves the game to your log from that screen, and Edit in full logger opens it on the log page instead. Signed out, Log this game opens your game log with all of it filled in, and nothing is saved to your account until you sign in and press Log game there. Afterwards the game’s page in your log draws the life totals as they went, minute by minute.

Commander damage and the 21 rule

A player who has been dealt 21 or more combat damage by a single commander over the course of the game loses, regardless of their life total. The rule is per commander: 15 damage from one commander and 15 from another is 30 damage taken and nobody is out, which is why a total-only tracker gets this wrong and why every zone here keeps a separate cell for each opponent. Commander damage is still ordinary combat damage as well, so by default a point of commander damage also removes a point of life. If your table prefers to track the two separately, the game menu turns that off.

At 21 the counter asks whether the player is out rather than deciding for you. Tables rewind, miscount, and run cards like Platinum Angel; a prompt costs one tap and a wrong automatic elimination costs an argument. The same is true at 10 poison and at zero life.

Why it saves the game to your log

Every life counter can count. What this one adds is what happens after the last player goes out: the placements it watched, the final life totals, who went first and how long the game ran go to your game log. Signed in, one press of Log game on the Game over screen saves it; signed out, they arrive as a pre-filled form, and you sign in and press Log game there. Either way the game counts toward your win rates, your pod’s standings and your decks’ stats. That is the part a paper scorepad or a phone app with no log can never do.

The counter itself never requires an account. If you are not signed in when the game ends, the finished game waits on the device, and the log page picks it up the next time you sign in there. Nothing is uploaded automatically and nothing is uploaded at all until you confirm the form.

Refresh-proof, offline, and awake

The game is written to the device every time a change settles, so a refresh, a closed tab or a phone that locked reopens the same game with its undo history. After your first visit the page itself is stored on the device too, so it opens with no signal at all — which is the state of most game stores. On a phone you can add it to your home screen and it opens like an app, full screen, with no browser bar eating the table. Once loaded, the counter needs no connection; only the optional commander lookup talks to the network, and it simply does nothing when there is none. The counter also asks the browser to keep the screen awake while a game is live and asks again every time you come back to the tab, because the browser silently drops that request whenever the tab is hidden. Where a browser cannot keep the screen on at all, the menu says so rather than pretending.

Related guides & tools

FAQ

How does commander damage work with the 21 rule?

A player who has been dealt 21 or more combat damage by the same commander over the course of the game loses. It is tracked per commander, not in total: 15 from one commander and 15 from another is 30 damage and nobody has lost. The counter keeps one cell per opponent for each player, and by default that damage also comes off their life total, because commander damage is ordinary combat damage as well. Reaching 21 raises a prompt rather than removing the player, since tables rewind, miscount, and run cards that change the rule.

Can this life counter track poison and other counters?

Yes. Each player has poison, energy and experience counters behind the menu on their zone, and a counter only appears on the zone once it is non-zero, so a table that never sees poison never sees a poison field. Ten poison raises the same kind of prompt as commander damage: it asks whether the player is out, and a person answers.

What happens if I refresh the page or my phone locks during a game?

The game is saved on the device every time a life total or counter settles, so an accidental refresh, a closed tab or a phone that locked itself reopens exactly where the game was, with undo history intact. The counter also asks the browser to keep the screen awake while a game is live, and asks again whenever you return to the tab, which is where most web life counters quietly fail.

Do I need an account to use the Commander life counter?

No. The counter works without an account, without a sign-in and without a network connection once the page has loaded. An account only matters at the end of the game. Signed in, the Log game button on the Game over screen saves the finished game to your log, so it counts toward your win rates and your decks' stats. Signed out, Log this game opens your game log with the players, placements and final life totals already filled in, and the game waits on the device until you sign in.

Does the Commander life counter work offline?

Yes, after the first visit. The page and everything it needs are stored on the device, so it opens with no signal, which is worth knowing before a game night at a shop with thick walls. On a phone you can also add it to your home screen from the browser menu and it launches full screen like an app. The only thing that needs a connection is looking up a commander by name, and the counter simply carries on without it.

How do I undo a mis-tap on a life total?

Press Undo in the bar at the bottom. A burst of quick taps on one player settles as a single change after about a second, so undoing it reverses the whole burst, not one point of it. Undo also reverses commander damage, counters, marking a player out and advancing the turn, and it keeps working after a refresh because the history is saved with the game.