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Return to Dark Tower is a really cool app-driven board game that comes with a physical tower that you connect via Bluetooth to an iPad. The tower lights up, makes sounds, and spins internally to shoot little skulls you place into it over the outlying map.

As much as I love it, there are a ton of cards in the game so you can easily forget what abilities you have available to you or miss crucial triggers at key phases in the game. You can also take most actions in any order so it’s easy to forget what you’ve done in the current turn, especially if you’re playing solo. To that end, I built myself a very niche app to keep track of all of the cards I had and all of the moves I’d made. It’s called Return to Dark Tower Assistant and is optimised for use in an iPad Slide Over panel so you can use it on top of the app you use to run the game:

There’s a very slim chance that any of you reading this have a copy of this board game and even if you do it’s likely a small minority that would find utility in this app. That said, I think it demonstrates what I’ve said for over a decade about making apps for yourself; build things for yourself on the off-chance that somebody else finds it as useful as you do. I spent far too much time matching the colours to the player boards, getting the fonts just right, and doing things like perfectly embedding the right icons for warrior and spirit tokens but I did that because I want it to look good when I’m playing. It will likely only get single-digit downloads, but it’s an app I’m proud of.

The assistant is available now on the App Store. You can also read more about it on my Dodo Apps website.