Little tricks to keep track of everything in Codex

[ARMed_PIrate]

Some quotes from the First Impressions thread, to help with draw piles:

@zhavier

One of the suggestions I make to my group is to turn the discard pile sideways to prevent thinking it is the deck.

@Fry

Here is my pro-tip to help remember whether you’ve teched or not: place the cards you tech in sideways on your discard pile.

@FrozenStorm

I’d almost reverse those two: keep the discard landscape, put teched cards on top portrait

@andrewgr

Oh, also, the suggestion of turning the discard pile sideways and putting the tech cards on top perpendicularly helped me a lot.

[GRAG]

Yeah, “sideways discard pile” seems to be a really popular convention. It’s even in the starter rulebook in one of the diagrams : O

[prunetracy]

I’ve started putting my teched cards next to my discard pile, with the gold for my next turn on top of them. So then I simply put them into my discard pile when I collect my gold at the start of my turn. I’ll often put 3-4 cards there and choose 2 depending on what my opponent does during their turn.

Once I got in the habit of placing my gold there, I just naturally think about teching when I collect it.

[Alextfish]

I printed out one of these for each player. It incorporates “discard pile sideways” and a slightly separate slot for teched cards.

[Raiddinn]

I mostly play on Tabletopia.

I put the cards to be teched in off the mat just to the side of the discard pile and I put those blue chips on top of the discard pile when I know I need to tech. I put blue chips also on the workers and on tech buildings I know I need to build or any card that I think I might forget.

With heros, I usually put damage counters on them after they die while they are in the command zone. When a hero dies it gets 2 damage counters. When my turn starts, I remove one. I can only summon if it has no damage counters. It works OK since there is no other reason to have damage counters on heros that aren’t in play. It’s pretty easy to know what they are for.

If I was playing physical cards, I would do basically the same stuff and just use dice for levels. I have played D&D in the past, so I have a lot of dice with other than 6 sides.

[Archon]

My playgroup heavily favors the use of dice vs tokens.

We have large piles of dice. So I will bring a bag of 20 red d6, 20 blue, and 20 green. Red dice track damage on units and heros.

However, for some reason we all collectively decided that buildings get a die set at the max HP that counts down as the building takes damage (opposite of how we track on units and heroes). So at the start of the game everyone starts with 4d6 set to 5’s on their base.

Blue dice for +1/+1 counters on units and heroes. Blue dice also to track current gold count.

Green dice for effects like time runes.

We enjoy the visual effect of the dice though, it could be a hassle at a tournament (unless you had convenient storage.)

I have not tested the sideways discard… but I always rotate my tech-cards 45 or 90 degrees clockwise feom the discard pile’s orientation, then straighten them as part of upkeep to lock in my choices.

[desiderata]

I like the sideways tech card thing, but I think all the dice would be just too much for me. I use d6s for the Tech Buildings, and a d20 for the Base, d8/d6 for the Hero levels, but that’s it for dice. The money changes too frequently to make it worth fiddling with a die so often. And the damage counters don’t stay long enough (in my games, anyway) to warrant having a die on each unit/hero.

I don’t play in tournaments, but if I did, I would be confused with your setup. But, I think if it works for your group locally, then there’s certainly nothing wrong with it.

Edit: This was in reply to Archon’s recent post.