LOTR LCG Tracker

A touchscreen companion for The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game — a tablet app that walks the official turn sequence, tracks threat and quest progress, teaches where the action windows are, and keeps a timestamped log of the whole game.

Open it → lotrlcg.app · no install, no account, works offline once loaded.

It is a manual companion tracker, not a rules engine: you tap to adjust state, and it never blocks a retcon. What it brings is the structure — the official step order, what may be played when, the numbers the cards actually print, and a running record of what happened.

Pick a quest, see what you are walking into. Every scenario in the card pool, grouped by cycle, with the encounter sets it gathers, the cards it can put into play, per-stage quest points, and strategy notes written for that scenario and that stage.

Play a round with the rules at your elbow. Each step of the turn gets its own screen: what happens automatically, and — in purple, called out separately — the action windows, the only times an Action may be triggered. The phase timeline across the top shows the whole round at a glance, and every mark the round has reached is a tap-to-rewind target.

Look up a card without leaving the table. Any card in the scenario opens full size, with its printed text and a table of what it actually costs you.

Also in there: per-player threat and elimination levels, staging area tracking, engaged-enemy counts, location travel with its threat contribution, side quests, a guided quest-resolution flow, the Rules Reference sections behind each step, and a filterable game log you can rewind through or export.

Now: a design pass over every screen — layout, type scale, iconography, and cutting anything that says the same thing twice.

Next, roughly in order:

• Long-form scenario notes. The advice was written to fit a 240×240 screen, one clause per tip. A full-length version for the tablet is landing scenario by scenario (1 of 122 so far).
• Classified notes — pacing, what to do before you advance, what to watch for, what to avoid, player-count effects — instead of one undifferentiated list.
• Campaign mode tracking across a saga's scenarios.
• Deck lists alongside the quest, so the tracker knows what you brought.

Not planned: enforcing rules, playing the game for you, or anything that needs an account.

main is a preview channel. Merging a feature branch publishes the preview mirror and opens (or updates) a release-please release PR carrying the version bump and the changelog — it does not touch the live site. Production moves when that release PR is merged: that cuts the tagged GitHub Release, attaches the built site to it, and publishes to lotrlcg.app.

feature branch ──merge──▶ main ──▶ tests, build, preview mirror
                                └─▶ release PR (opened/updated, not deployed)

release PR ────merge──▶ tag + GitHub Release ──▶ lotrlcg.app

Commits use Conventional Commits (feat:, fix:, docs:, ci:, …) — that is what the changelog is built from, so the type and scope on a commit are load-bearing.

main is protected and squash-only: work lands through a PR whose title is the conventional commit, because that title becomes the squash commit subject and therefore the changelog entry. test and build have to pass. The release PR is squashed too — release-please recommends it, and finds a merged release by its label, not by the shape of the merge.

The project started as custom MicroPython firmware for the Pimoroni Presto (480×480 IPS touch, RP2350B), and that firmware is still here and still maintained — but it is no longer the primary target. The tablet client is.

A pixel-faithful web twin of the device build runs at lotrlcg.app/presto/ if you want to see what it looks like without buying hardware.

The device build, screen by screen (480×480 device pixels)

Boot & setup

Boot — pixelated Revised Core Set box art. Resume Game restores the saved game (round, phase, and save time shown); New Game starts over. New game — add up to 4 players, set each one's starting threat (the sum of their heroes' threat costs; default 25), tap a row to hand someone the first-player ribbon, then Start.

One-time setup phase

Before round 1 the HUD walks the rulebook's setup, focused on the part everyone gets wrong: the order of effects during quest setup — resolve stage 1A's Setup text in printed order (keywords on setup reveals do resolve), shuffle the encounter deck after any setup searches, then flip 1A → 1B.

The guided round

Every stage of the round is its own view; the button at the bottom is always the next thing to do. The header is the nav: tap R# <step> for the Game Log, the phase name for Game Phases, Set. for Settings. The step notation (1.R, 3.4, 6.E) matches the official turn-sequence chart.

Reference, reminders, settings

Game Phases — the full official turn sequence with the current step highlighted; purple squares mark player action windows. Game Log — everything that happened, tagged R<round>.<step>. Encounter Reminders — opt-in notifications for the effects everyone forgets (Archery, Battle/Siege, shadow-card discard, Time counters). Settings — save & quit, end game, and the 7-LED strip (phase colours, danger, torchlight, off).

Running it

pip install mpremote
mpremote connect <port> fs cp gamestate.py phases.py leds.py hardware.py main.py :
mpremote connect <port> fs mkdir :ui
mpremote connect <port> fs cp ui/*.py :ui/
mpremote connect <port> fs cp assets/boot_bg.png :
python3 tools/build_card_data.py && mpremote cp -r docs/data/ :/data/

main.py auto-runs on boot.

docs/             the web app (this is what deploys)
  index.html      the tablet client
  tablet/         its renderers, styles and data
  presto/         the Presto web twin
  js/             shared game logic + data client, ES-module port of the Python
gamestate.py      pure game logic (host-tested)
phases.py         official turn-sequence data
ui/               the firmware's screens, modals, icons, theme
tools/            data builders (card DB, icons, catalog pack, tips)
tests/            ~2600 host tests, incl. a layout linter over every screen

Three clients share one model. The tablet and the Presto twin are both ES modules over the same docs/js/; the firmware is the Python those were ported from, and tools/gen_web_data.py regenerates the shared data so the two cannot drift.

python3 -m pytest tests/        # the whole suite
python3 tools/build_card_data.py && python3 tools/build_catalog_pack.py
python3 -m http.server -d docs  # then open http://localhost:8000/

The card database is compiled from a pinned upstream TSV and is not committed; run the build once before serving. See CLAUDE.md for the data policy, the architecture notes, and the rules about never shipping an unverified claim about the game.

An unofficial fan project, not endorsed, supported by, or affiliated with Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. The Lord of the Rings, its characters and game iconography are trademarks of Middle-earth Enterprises, used under license by Fantasy Flight Games. Made for personal use at the table.